Approaches - Community Development - Lecture Slides, Slides of Human Development

Download Approaches - Community Development - Lecture Slides and more Slides Human Development in PDF only on Docsity!

Approaches to Community

Development

Defining Community Development

• A group of people in a community reaching a decision to initiate a social action process (that is, planned intervention) to change their economic, social, cultural, or environmental situation. » Christenson and Robinson, 1978
• Collective Agency
  • believe working together can make a difference
  • organize to address their shared needs collectively

Development “ In ” vs. “ Of ”

the Community

• Development in the community is principally concerned with building the economic or physical infrastructure of a community.
• Development of the community is focused on building the human capacity to address local issues and concerns. As such, it affects the structure of the community.

Reasons for Community Development

• Expand participation
• Reaction against some proposed change in the local area that is deemed as having negative consequences on residents’ quality of life
• Modify severe social, economic or environmental problems in the community
• Satisfy missing needs or resources

Technical Assistance Characteristics

• Usually involves the delivery of programs of services to a local area by some agency or organization
• It is often a “top-down” approach that involves the use of experts
• The focus is mainly on the task to be performed
• Assumes that answers to community problems can be arrived at scientifically

Technical Assistance Characteristics

• If residents wish to participate, they must study and understand a great deal of complex information
• Local citizens are defined as consumers of such development - not participants in it
• The most frequent employers of the technical assistance model is government

Conflict Approach

• Primary focus is upon the deliberate use or creation of confrontation by professional organizers
• The goal is to redistribute power
• A major organizing tool is to confront those forces seen as blocking efforts to solve problems
• In this approach, there is a deep suspicion of those who have formal community power

Conflict Approach

• This perspective assumes that power is never given away, that it has to be taken.
• Goal is to build a people’s organization to allow those without power to gain it through direct action. Their strength is in numbers -- people working collectively.

Steps in the Conflict Approach

• The coalition engages in direct action
  • traditional power structure is confronted through direct action involving a large number of people - publicity or threat: press conferences, advertising, public hearing - action: courts, lobbying, sit-ins, strikes, demonstrations - pressure: boycott of goods or facilities
• People’s organization is then formulized by developing a permanent organizational structure (although not always)

Criticisms of this Approach

• Maintenance of effort : once problem is solved, hard to maintain commitment
• Burn-out : key organizers and volunteer staff often become burnt out after their initial organizational efforts
• Loss of leaders : professional organizer often leave after the issue has been addressed; leaders who remain get tempted to seek local or external positions in government/corporations
• Finance : hard to keep a reliable source of funds available to support the group’s work

In the Self-Help Approach...

• Want to institutionalize a process of change based on building community institutions and strengthening community relationships, rather than to achieve any particular objective

Key Features of the

Self-Help Approach

• Project is community controlled
• Local needs are clearly defined and action is initiated by the community
• Effective leadership and skills are present; effective use of volunteers
• Good efforts to secure financial resources
• Significant cooperation and integration of people and organizations in the effort
• Access to outside support, as needed
• Self-sustaining enterprises that can spur other community improvement efforts

Community vs. Economic

Development

• Community development is much broader than economic development
• Unlike CD, economic development does not necessarily involve local citizen action, and it may not result in an improvement in the quality of life
• If economic development is undertaken without much community involvement, than there is no community development
• Economic development for community development has distinctive features that economic development alone might not have

Community vs. Economic

Development

• It seeks to increase the resources for people to meet their needs
• It encourages the development of jobs, services, facilities, and groups that are needed by the whole community
• It seeks to reduce inequality
• It provides for and depends upon local community action and involvement