Community development practitioners are involved in organizing meetings and conducting searches within a community to identify problems, identify assets, locate resources, analyze local power structures, assess human needs, and investigate other concerns that comprise the community's character (case study). These practitioners, sometimes called social activists, use social resources to get the economic and political leverage that a community uses to meet their needs. Often, the social resources within the community are found to be adequate to meet these needs if individuals work collectively through techniques like cooperation and volunteerism. A form of community development that links academic resources to community problems in a reciprocally beneficial manner is community-based participatory research (CBPR), a form of research which engages a community fully in the process of problem definition/issue selection, research design, conducting research, and interpreting the results. One of the principal ways in which CBPR differs from traditional research is that instead of creating knowledge for the advancement of a field or for knowledge's sake, CBPR is an iterative process, incorporating research, reflection, and action in a cyclical process. In the UK Rural Community Councils support local communities to build sustainable futures. They assist local communities in a form of CBPR called community led planning. Rural Community Councils employ experienced, independent community development workers.
A number of different approaches to community development can be recognized, including:
- Community economic development (CED)
- Community capacity building
- Social capital formation
- Political participatory development
- Nonviolent direct action
- Ecologically sustainable development
- Asset-based community development
- Faith-based community development
- Community practice social work
- Community-based participatory research (CBPR)
- Community mobilization
- community empowerment
- Community participation
- Participatory planning including community-based planning (CBP)
- community-driven development (CDD)
- approaches to funding communities directly
No comments:
Post a Comment