16 Facts About Community development

Community development is understood as a professional 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, whether 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.

The purpose of community development is understood by IACD as being to work with communities to achieve participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity, equality and social justice.

Community development practice encompasses a range of occupational settings and levels from development roles working with communities, through to managerial and strategic community planning roles.

Community development involves changing the relationships between ordinary people and people in positions of power, so that everyone can take part in the issues that affect their lives.

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Amongst the earliest community development approaches were those developed in Kenya and British East Africa during the 1930s.

Community development practitioners have over many years developed a range of approaches for working within local communities and in particular 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.

Federal laws, beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, provided a way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and to other nonprofit organizations.

Domestically, community development first came into public prominence with the Labour Government's anti deprivation programmes of the latter 1960s and 1970s.

The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the National Training Organisation for Social Care.

The Community Learning and Development NTO represented all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national-development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK.

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 improve their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.

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.

Community development considers that poverty results from the failure to satisfy a particular human need, it is not just an absence of money.

Social and economic Community development planning in Vietnam uses top-down centralized planning methods and decision-making processes which do not consider local context and local participation.