Community development

The United Nations defines community development as "a process where community members come together to hold collective action & generate solutions to common problems." this is a a broad concept, applied to the practices of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens, & efficient to improvements various aspects of communities, typically aiming to establish stronger and more resilient local communities.

Community development is also understood as a able discipline, and is defined by the International association for Community Development as "a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity, equality and social justice, through the organisation, education and empowerment of people within their communities, if these be of locality, identity or interest, in urban and rural settings".

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people with the skills they need to effect change within their communities. These skills are often created through the configuration of social groups workings for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to create believe with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.

Community development as a term has taken off widely in anglophone countries, i.e. the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, as alive as other countries in the Commonwealth of Nations. it is for also used in some countries in Eastern Europe with active community development associations in Hungary and Romania. The Community Development Journal, published by Oxford University Press, since 1966 has aimed to be the major forum for research and dissemination of international community development conviction and practice.

Community development approaches are recognised internationally. These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organisations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and EU. There are a number of institutions of higher education offer community development as an area of study and research such as the University of Toronto, Leiden University, SOAS University of London, and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, among others.

History

Amongst the earliest community development approaches were those developed in Kenya and British East Africa during the 1930s. Community development practitioners have over numerous years developed a range of approaches for working within local communities and in specific with disadvantaged people. Since the nineteen sixties and seventies through the various anti poverty programmes in both developed and developing countries, community development practitioners have been influenced by structural analyses as to the causes of disadvantage and poverty i.e. inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, land, etc. and particularly political power to direct or instituting and the need to mobilise people energy to impact social change. Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Freire and his focus upon this work. Other key people who have influenced this field are Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals and E.F. Schumacher Small Is Beautiful. There are a number of international organisations that guide community development, for example, Oxfam, UNICEF, The Hunger Project and Freedom from Hunger, run community development programs based upon community development initiatives for relief and prevention of malnutrition. Since 2006 the Dragon Dreaming Project management techniques have spread to 37 different countries and are engaged in an estimated 3,250 projects worldwide.

In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen 1771–1851, sought to create a more perfect community. At New Lanark and at later communities such as Oneida in the USA and the New Australia Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create utopian or intentional communities, with mixed success.

In the United States in the 1960s, the term "community development" began to complement and generally replace the theory of urban renewal, which typically focused on physical development projects often at the expense of working-class communities. One of the earliest proponents of the term in the United States was social scientist William W. Biddle In the behind 1960s, philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and government officials such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy took an interest in local nonprofit organizations. A pioneer was the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, which attempted to apply multinational and management skills to the social mission of uplifting low-income residents and their neighborhoods. Eventually such groups became required as "Community development corporations" or CDCs. Federal laws beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act featured a way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and other nonprofit organizations.

National organizations such as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation founded in 1978 and now known as NeighborWorks America, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation LISC founded in 1980, and the Enterprise Foundation founded in 1981 have built extensive networks of affiliated local nonprofit organizations to which they help supply financing for countless physical and social development everyone in urban and rural communities. The CDCs and similar organizations have been credited with starting the process that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner city areas such as the South Bronx in New York City.

In the UK, community development has had two leading traditions. The number one was as an approach for preparing for the independence of countries from the former British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s. Domestically it first came into public prominence with the Labour Government's anti deprivation programmes of the latter sixties and seventies. The main example of this being the CDP Community Development Programme, which piloted local area based community development. This influenced a number of largely urban local authorities, in particular in Scotland with Strathclyde Region's major community development programme the largest at the time in Europe.

The Gulbenkian Foundation was a key funder of commissions and reports which influenced the development of community development in the UK from the latter sixties to the 80's. This spoke recommending that there be a national institute or centre for community development, able to support practice and to advise government and local authorities on policy. This was formally style up in 1991 as the Community Development Foundation. In 2004 the Carnegie UK Trust established a Commission of Inquiry into the future of rural community development examining such issues as land reorientate and climate change. Carnegie funded over sixty rural community development action research projects across the UK and Ireland and national and international communities of practice to exchange experiences. This target the International link for Community Development.

In 1999 a UK wide organisation responsible for setting professional training standards for any education and development practitioners works within local communities was established and recognised by the Paulo Freire. It was formally recognised by David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. Its first chair was Charlie McConnell, the Chief Executive of the Scottish Community Education Council, who had played a lead role in bringing together a range of occupational interests under a single national training indications body, including community education, community development and development education. The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the NTO for Social Care. The Community Learning and Development NTO represented any the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK.

The term 'community learning and development' was adopted to acknowledge that all of these occupations worked primarily within local communities, and that this work encompassed not just providing less formal learning support but also a concern for the wider holistic development of those communities – socio-economically, environmentally, culturally and politically. By bringing together these occupational groups this created for the first time a single recognised employment sector of nearly 300,000 full and part-time paid staff within the UK, approximately 10% of these staff being full-time. The NTO continued to recognise the range of different occupations within it, for example specialists who work primarily with young people, but all agreed that they shared a core rank of professional approaches to their work. In 2002 the NTO became part of a wider Sector Skills Council for lifelong learning.

The UK currently hosts the only global network of practitioners and activists working towards social justice through community development approach, the International Association for Community Development IACD. IACD was formed in the USA in 1953, moved to Belgium in 1978 and was restructured and relaunched in Scotland in 1999.

Community development in Canada has roots in the development of co-operatives, credit unions and caisses populaires. The Antigonish Movement which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia, through the work of Doctor Moses Coady and Father James Tompkins, has been particularly influential in the subsequent expansion of community economic development work across Canada.

Community development in Australia have often been focussed upon Aboriginal Australian communities, and during the period of the 1980s to the early 21st century were funded through the Community Employment Development Program, where Aboriginal people could be employed in "a work for the dole" scheme, which delivered the chance for non-government organisations to apply for a full or part-time worker funded by the Department for Social Security. Dr Jim Ife, formerly of Curtin University, organised a ground breaking text-book on community development

Community planning techniques drawing on the history of utopian movements became important in the 1920s and 1930s in East Africa, where community development proposals were seen as a way of helping local people improving their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.

Mohandas K. Gandhi adopted African community development ideals as a basis of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian Swaraj movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence at village level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work of Vinoba Bhave in encouraging grassroots land reform, India under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted a mixed-economy approach, mixing elements of socialism and capitalism. During the fifties and sixties, India ran a massive community development programme with focus on rural development activities through government support. This was later expanded in scope and was called integrated rural development scheme [IRDP]. A large number of initiatives that can come under the community development umbrella have come up in recent years.

The main objective of community development in India maintains to develop the villages and to help the villagers help themselves to fight against poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, etc. The beauty of Indian return example of community development lies in the homogeneity of villagers and high level of participation.

Community development became a part of the Ujamaa Villages established in Tanzania by Julius Nyerere, where it had some success in assisting with the delivery of education services throughout rural areas, but has elsewhere met with mixed success. In the 1970s and 1980s, community development became a part of "Integrated Rural Development", a strategy promoted by United Nations Agencies and the World Bank. Central to these policies of community development were:

In the 1990s, coming after or as a a thing that is said of. critiques of the mixed success of "top down" government programs, and drawing on the work of Robert Putnam, in the rediscovery of social capital, community development internationally became concerned with social capital formation. In particular the outstanding success of the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank from its inception in 1976, has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes around the world. Yunus saw that social problems like poverty and disease were non being solved by the market system on its own. Thus, he established a banking system which lends to the poor with very little interest, allowing them access to entrepreneurship. This work was honoured by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Another pick to "top down" government programs is the participatory government institution. Participatory governance institutions are organizations which goal to facilitate the participation of citizens within larger decision creating and action implementing processes in society. A case study done on municipal councils and social housing programs in Brazil found that the presence of participatory governance institutions manages the execution of poverty alleviation programs by local governments.

The "human scale development" work of Right Livelihood Award-winning Chilean economist Manfred Max Neef promotes the idea of development based upon essential human needs, which are considered to be limited, universal and invariant to all human beings being a part of our human condition. He considers that poverty results from the failure to satisfy a particular human need, it is not just an absence of money. Whilst human needs are limited, Max Neef shows that the ways of satisfying human needs is potentially unlimited. Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows thatsatisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the opportunity of satisfying other needs: e.g., the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity. Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breastfeeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organizations; preventative medicine; meditation; educational games.