Copyright © 2015 Bert N. Langford (Images may be subject to copyright. Please send feedback)
Welcome to Our Generation USA!

Under this Page,
Our Community
we cover what everyone seeks: a sense of community and involvement where we  live and, hopefully, thrive.

See Also
Environment
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Community Pictured below: Building A Community
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

Durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties also define a sense of community, important to their identity, practice, and roles in social institutions such as family, home, work, government, society, or humanity at large. Although communities are usually small relative to personal social ties, "community" may also refer to large group affiliations such as national communities, international communities, and virtual communities.

​The English-language word "community" derives from the Old French comuneté (currently "Communauté"), which comes from the Latin communitas "community", "public spirit" (from Latin communis, "common").

Human communities may have intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, and risks in common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

Perspectives of various disciplines:

Archaeology:

Archaeological studies of social communities use the term "community" in two ways, paralleling usage in other areas.

The first is an informal definition of community as a place where people used to live. In this sense it is synonymous with the concept of an ancient settlement - whether a hamlet, village, town, or city.

The second meaning resembles the usage of the term in other social sciences: a community is a group of people living near one another who interact socially. 

Social interaction on a small scale can be difficult to identify with archaeological data. Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction in the past was conditioned by physical distance. Therefore, a small village settlement likely constituted a social community and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities.

Archaeologists typically use similarities in material culture—from house types to styles of pottery—to reconstruct communities in the past. This classification method relies on the assumption that people or households will share more similarities in the types and styles of their material goods with other members of a social community than they will with outsiders.

Sociology:

Ecology:
Main article: Community (ecology)

In ecology, a community is an assemblage of populations - potentially of different species - interacting with one another. Community ecology is the branch of ecology that studies interactions between and among species. It considers how such interactions, along with interactions between species and the abiotic environment, affect social structure and species richness, diversity and patterns of abundance.

Species interact in three ways: competition, predation and mutualism:
  • Competition typically results in a double negative—that is both species lose in the interaction.
  • Predation involves a win/lose situation, with one species winning.
  • Mutualism sees both species co-operating in some way, with both winning.

The two main types of ecological communities are major communities, which are self-sustaining and self-regulating (such as a forest or a lake), and minor communities, which rely on other communities (like fungi decomposing a log) and are the building blocks of major communities.

​Semantics:

The concept of "community" often has a positive semantic connotation, exploited rhetorically by populist politicians and by advertisers to promote feelings and associations of mutual well-being, happiness and togetherness - veering towards an almost-achievable utopian community, in fact.

In contrast, the epidemiological term "community transmission" can have negative implications; and instead of a "criminal community" one often speaks of a "criminal underworld" or of the "criminal fraternity".

Key concepts:

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft:
Main article: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described two types of human association: Gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and Gesellschaft ("society" or "association").

Tönnies proposed the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy as a way to think about social ties. No group is exclusively one or the other. Gemeinschaft stress personal social interactions, and the roles, values, and beliefs based on such interactions. Gesellschaft stress indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs based on such interactions.

Sense of community:
Main article: Sense of community

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis identify four elements of "sense of community":
  1. membership: feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness,
  2. influence: mattering, making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members
  3. reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs,
  4. shared emotional connection.

A "sense of community index (SCI) was developed by Chavis and colleagues, and revised and adapted by others. Although originally designed to assess sense of community in neighborhoods, the index has been adapted for use in schools, the workplace, and a variety of types of communities.

Studies conducted by the APPA indicate that young adults who feel a sense of belonging in a community, particularly small communities, develop fewer psychiatric and depressive disorders than those who do not have the feeling of love and belonging.

Socialization:
Main article: Socialization

​The process of learning to adopt the behavior patterns of the community is called socialization. The most fertile time of socialization is usually the early stages of life, during which individuals develop the skills and knowledge and learn the roles necessary to function within their culture and social environment. 

For some psychologists, especially those in the psychodynamic tradition, the most important period of socialization is between the ages of one and ten. But socialization also includes adults moving into a significantly different environment where they must learn a new set of behaviors.

Socialization is influenced primarily by the family, through which children first learn community norms. Other important influences include schools, peer groups, people, mass media, the workplace, and government. The degree to which the norms of a particular society or community are adopted determines one's willingness to engage with others. The norms of tolerance, reciprocity, and trust are important "habits of the heart," as de Tocqueville put it, in an individual's involvement in community.

Community development:
Main article: Community development

Community development is often linked with community work or community planning, and may involve stakeholders, foundations, governments, or contracted entities including non-government organizations (NGOs), universities or government agencies to progress the social well-being of local, regional and, sometimes, national communities.

More grassroots efforts, called community building or community organizing, seek to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills often assist in building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda.

Community development practitioners must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions. Public administrators, in contrast, need to understand community development in the context of rural and urban development, housing and economic development, and community, organizational and business development.

Formal accredited programs conducted by universities, as part of degree granting institutions, are often used to build a knowledge base to drive curricula in public administration, sociology and community studies. The General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University are examples of national community development in the United States.

The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York State offers core courses in community and economic development, and in areas ranging from non-profit development to US budgeting (federal to local, community funds).

In the United Kingdom, the University of Oxford has led in providing extensive research in the field through its Community Development Journal, used worldwide by sociologists and community development practitioners.

At the intersection between community development and community building are a number of programs and organizations with community development tools. One example of this is the program of the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University.

The institute makes available downloadable tools to assess community assets and make connections between non-profit groups and other organizations that can help in community building. The Institute focuses on helping communities develop by "mobilizing neighborhood assets" – building from the inside out rather than the outside in. In the disability field, community building was prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s with roots in John McKnight's approaches.

Community building and organizing:
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In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (1987) Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built. Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules. He states that this process goes through four stages:

  1. Pseudocommunity: When people first come together, they try to be "nice" and present what they feel are their most personable and friendly characteristics.
  2. Chaos: People move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves.
  3. Emptiness: Moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to human beings.
  4. True community: Deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community.

In 1991, Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining this sense of community is difficult in the modern world.

The three basic types of community organizing are grassroots organizing, coalition building, and "institution-based community organizing," (also called "broad-based community organizing," an example of which is faith-based community organizing, or Congregation-based Community Organizing).

Community building can use a wide variety of practices, ranging from simple events (e.g., potlucks, small book clubs) to larger-scale efforts (e.g., mass festivals, construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors).

Community building that is geared toward citizen action is usually termed "community organizing." In these cases, organized community groups seek accountability from elected officials and increased direct representation within decision-making bodies. Where good-faith negotiations fail, these constituency-led organizations seek to pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics.

Community organizing can focus on more than just resolving specific issues. Organizing often means building a widely accessible power structure, often with the end goal of distributing power equally throughout the community. Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are open and democratic in governance. Such groups facilitate and encourage consensus decision-making with a focus on the general health of the community rather than a specific interest group.

If communities are developed based on something they share in common, whether location or values, then one challenge for developing communities is how to incorporate individuality and differences. Rebekah Nathan suggests in her book, My Freshman Year, we are drawn to developing communities totally based on sameness, despite stated commitments to diversity, such as those found on university websites.

​Types of community:
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​A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed. One such breakdown is as follows:
  1. Location-based Communities: range from the local neighborhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These are also called communities of place.
  2. Identity-based Communities: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilization, or the global community cultures of today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons, or frail aged people.
  3. Organizationally-based Communities: range from communities organized informally around family or network-based guilds and associations to more formal incorporated associations, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations at a small, national or international scale.

The usual categorizations of community relations have a number of problems: 

(1) they tend to give the impression that a particular community can be defined as just this kind or another;
(2) they tend to conflate modern and customary community relations;
(3) they tend to take sociological categories such as ethnicity or race as given, forgetting that different ethnically defined persons live in different kinds of communities —grounded, interest-based, diasporic, etc.

In response to these problems, Paul James and his colleagues have developed a taxonomy that maps community relations, and recognizes that actual communities can be characterized by different kinds of relations at the same time:
  1. Grounded community relations. This involves enduring attachment to particular places and particular people. It is the dominant form taken by customary and tribal communities. In these kinds of communities, the land is fundamental to identity.
  2. Life-style community relations. This involves giving primacy to communities coming together around particular chosen ways of life, such as morally charged or interest-based relations or just living or working in the same location. Hence the following sub-forms:
    1. community-life as morally bounded, a form taken by many traditional faith-based communities.
    2. community-life as proximately-related, where neighborhood or commonality of association forms a community of convenience, or a community of place (see below).
    3. community-life as interest-based, including sporting, leisure-based and business communities which come together for regular moments of engagement.
  3. Projected community relations. This is where a community is self-consciously treated as an entity to be projected and re-created. It can be projected as through thin advertising slogan, for example gated community, or can take the form of ongoing associations of people who seek political integration, communities of practice based on professional projects, associative communities which seek to enhance and support individual creativity, autonomy and mutuality. A nation is one of the largest forms of projected or imagined community.

In these terms, communities can be nested and/or intersecting; one community can contain another—for example a location-based community may contain a number of ethnic communities. Both lists above can used in a cross-cutting matrix in relation to each other.

Internet communities:

In general, virtual communities value knowledge and information as currency or social resource. What differentiates virtual communities from their physical counterparts is the extent and impact of "weak ties", which are the relationships acquaintances or strangers form to acquire information through online networks.

Relationships among members in a virtual community tend to focus on information exchange about specific topics. A survey conducted by Pew Internet and The American Life Project in 2001 found those involved in entertainment, professional, and sports virtual-groups focused their activities on obtaining information.

An epidemic of bullying and harassment has arisen from the exchange of information between strangers, especially among teenagers, in virtual communities. Despite attempts to implement anti-bullying policies, Sheri Bauman, professor of counselling at the University of Arizona, claims the "most effective strategies to prevent bullying" may cost companies revenue.

Virtual Internet-mediated communities can interact with offline real-life activity, potentially forming strong and tight-knit groups such as QAnon.

See also:







Sense of CommunityPictured below: Neighborhood and Sense of Community
Sense of community (or psychological sense of community) is a concept in community psychology, social psychology, and community social work, as well as in several other research disciplines, such as urban sociology, which focuses on the experience of community rather than its structure, formation, setting, or other features. The latter is the province of public administration or community services administration which needs to understand how structures influence this feeling and psychological sense of community. 

Sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and others have theorized about and carried out empirical research on community, but the psychological approach asks questions about the individual's perception, understanding, attitudes, feelings, etc. about community and his or her relationship to it and to others' participation—indeed to the complete, multifaceted community experience.

In his seminal 1974 book, psychologist Seymour B. Sarason proposed that psychological sense of community become the conceptual center for the psychology of community, asserting that it "is one of the major bases for self-definition." By 1986 it was regarded as a central overarching concept for community psychology (Sarason, 1986; Chavis & Pretty, 1999).In addition, the theoretical concept entered the other applied academic disciplines as part of "communities for all" initiatives in the US.

Among theories of sense of community proposed by psychologists, McMillan & Chavis's (1986) is by far the most influential, and is the starting point for most of the recent research in the field. It is discussed in detail below.

Definitions:

For Sarason, psychological sense of community is "the perception of similarity to others, an acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them, and the feeling that one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure" (1974, p. 157).

McMillan & Chavis (1986) define a sense of community as "a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together."

Gusfield (1975) identified two dimensions of community: territorial and relational. The relational dimension of community has to do with the nature and quality of relationships in that community, and some communities may even have no discernible territorial demarcation, as in the case of a community of scholars working in a particular specialty, who have some kind of contact and quality of relationship, but may live and work in disparate locations, perhaps even throughout the world.

Other communities may seem to be defined primarily according to territory, as in the case of neighbourhoods, but even in such cases, proximity or shared territory cannot by itself constitute a community; the relational dimension is also essential.

Factor analysis of their urban neighbourhoods questionnaire yielded two distinct factors that Riger and Lavrakas (1981) characterized as "social bonding" and "physical rootedness", very similar to the two dimensions proposed by Gusfield.

Early work on psychological sense of community was based on neighborhoods as the referent, and found a relationship between psychological sense of community and greater participation (Hunter, 1975; Wandersman & Giamartino, 1980)
  • perceived safety (Doolittle & McDonald, 1978), 
  • ability to function competently in the community (Glynn, 1981), 
  • social bonding (Riger & Lavrakas, 1981), 
  • social fabric (strengths of interpersonal relationship) (Ahlbrandt & Cunningham, 1979), 
  • greater sense of purpose and perceived control (Bachrach & Zautra, 1985),
  • and greater civic contributions (charitable contributions and civic involvement) (Davidson & Cotter, 1986).

These initial studies lacked a clearly articulated conceptual framework, however, and none of the measures developed were based on a theoretical definition of psychological sense of community.

Primary theoretical foundation: McMillan and Chavis:

McMillan & Chavis's (1986) theory (and instrument) are the most broadly validated and widely utilized in this area in the psychological literature. They prefer the abbreviated label "sense of community", and propose that sense of community is composed of four elements.

Four elements of sense of community:

There are four elements of "sense of community" according to the McMillan & Chavis theory:

1) Membership: Membership includes five attributes:
  • boundaries
  • emotional safety
  • a sense of belonging and identification
  • personal investment
  • a common symbol system

2) Influence: Influence works both ways: members need to feel that they have some influence in the group, and some influence by the group on its members is needed for group cohesion. Current researches (e.g. Chigbu, 2013) on rural and urban communities have found that sense of community is a major factor.

3) Integration and fulfillment of needs: Members feel rewarded in some way for their participation in the community.

4) Shared emotional connection: The "definitive element for true community" (1986, p. 14), it includes shared history and shared participation (or at least identification with the history).

Dynamics within and between the elements:

McMillan & Chavis (1986) give the following example to illustrate the dynamics within and between these four elements (p. 16): Someone puts an announcement on the dormitory bulletin board about the formation of an intramural dormitory basketball team. People attend the organizational meeting as strangers out of their individual needs (integration and fulfillment of needs).

The team is bound by place of residence (membership boundaries are set) and spends time together in practice (the contact hypothesis). They play a game and win (successful shared valent event). While playing, members exert energy on behalf of the team (personal investment in the group).

As the team continues to win, team members become recognized and congratulated (gaining honor and status for being members). Someone suggests that they all buy matching shirts and shoes (common symbols) and they do so (influence).

​Current research:

In their 2002 study of a community of interest, specifically the science fiction fandom community, Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith suggest Conscious Identification as the fifth dimension (Obst, 2002).

Empirical assessment:

Chavis et al.'s Sense of Community Index (SCI) (see Chipuer & Pretty, 1999; Long & Perkins, 2003), originally designed primarily in reference to neighborhoods, can be adapted to study other communities as well, including the workplace, schools, religious communities, communities of interest, etc.

See also:







The NeighborhoodPictured below: Amazon to Stream ‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood’ in Twitch Marathon
A neighbourhood (British English, Australian English and Canadian English) or neighborhood (American English; see spelling differences) is a geographically localized community within a larger city, town, suburb or rural area. Neighborhoods are often social communities with considerable face-to-face interaction among members.

Researchers have not agreed on an exact definition, but the following may serve as a starting point: "Neighborhood is generally defined spatially as a specific geographic area and functionally as a set of social networks. Neighborhoods, then, are the spatial units in which face-to-face social interactions occur—the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realize common values, socialize youth, and maintain effective social control."

Preindustrial cities:

In the words of the urban scholar Lewis Mumford, “Neighborhoods, in some annoying, inchoate fashion exist wherever human beings congregate, in permanent family dwellings; and many of the functions of the city tend to be distributed naturally—that is, without any theoretical preoccupation or political direction—into neighborhoods.” Most of the earliest cities around the world as excavated by archaeologists have evidence for the presence of social neighborhoods. Historical documents shed light on neighborhood life in numerous historical preindustrial or nonwestern cities.

Neighborhoods are typically generated by social interaction among people living near one another. In this sense they are local social units larger than households not directly under the control of city or state officials. In some preindustrial urban traditions, basic municipal functions such as protection, social regulation of births and marriages, cleaning and upkeep are handled informally by neighborhoods and not by urban governments; this pattern is well documented for historical Islamic cities.

In addition to social neighborhoods, most ancient and historical cities also had administrative districts used by officials for taxation, record-keeping, and social control.

Administrative districts are typically larger than neighborhoods and their boundaries may cut across neighborhood divisions. In some cases, however, administrative districts coincided with neighborhoods, leading to a high level of regulation of social life by officials. For example, in the T’ang period Chinese capital city Chang’an, neighborhoods were districts and there were state officials who carefully controlled life and activity at the neighbouhood level.

Neighborhoods in preindustrial cities often had some degree of social specialization or differentiation. Ethnic neighborhoods were important in many past cities and remain common in cities today. Economic specialists, including craft producers, merchants, and others, could be concentrated in neighborhoods, and in societies with religious pluralism neighborhoods were often specialized by religion.

One factor contributing to neighborhood distinctiveness and social cohesion in past cities was the role of rural to urban migration. This was a continual process in preindustrial cities, and migrants tended to move in with relatives and acquaintances from their rural past.

Sociology:

Neighborhood sociology is a subfield of urban sociology which studies local communities Neighborhoods are also used in research studies from postal codes and health disparities, to correlations with school drop out rates or use of drugs. Some attention has also been devoted to viewing the neighborhood as a small-scale democracy, regulated primarily by ideas of reciprocity among neighbors.

Improvement:
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Neighbourhoods have been the site of service delivery or "service interventions" in part as efforts to provide local, quality services, and to increase the degree of local control and ownership. Alfred Kahn, as early as the mid-1970s, described the "experience, theory and fads" of neighborhood service delivery over the prior decade, including discussion of income transfers and poverty. 

Neighborhoods, as a core aspect of community, also are the site of services for youth, including children with disabilities and coordinated approaches to low-income populations. While the term neighborhood organization is not as common in 2015, these organizations often are non-profit, sometimes grassroots or even core funded community development centers or branches.

Community and economic development activists have pressured for reinvestment in local communities and neighborhoods. In the early 2000s, Community Development Corporations, Rehabilitation Networks, Neighborhood Development Corporations, and Economic Development organizations would work together to address the housing stock and the infrastructures of communities and neighborhoods (e.g., community centers).

Community and Economic Development may be understood in different ways, and may involve "faith-based" groups and congregations in cities.

As a unit in urban design:

In the 1900s, Clarence Perry described the idea of a neighborhood unit as a self-contained residential area within a city. The concept is still influential in New Urbanism. Practitioners seek to revive traditional sociability in planned suburban housing based on a set of principles. At the same time, the neighbourhood is a site of interventions to create Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) as many older adults tend to have narrower life space. Urban design studies thus use neighborhood as a unit of analysis.
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Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Neighborhoods:







Community DevelopmentPictured below:  SDG 11 Target and Indicators:  Scaling Community Development
​The United Nations defines community development as "a process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems." It is a broad concept, applied to the practices of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens, and professionals to improve various aspects of communities, typically aiming to build stronger and more resilient local communities.

Community development is also 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 organization, 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. These skills are often created through the formation of social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work 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 well as other countries in the Commonwealth of Nations. It is 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 theory and practice.

Community development approaches are recognized internationally. These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organizations 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.
​
Definitions:

There are complementary definitions of community development.

The United Nations defines community development broadly as "a process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems." and the International Association for Community Development defines it as both a practice based profession and an academic discipline.

Following the adoption of the IACD definition in 2016, the association has gone on to produce International Standards for Community Development Practice. The values and ethos that should underpin practice can be expressed as: Commitment to rights, solidarity, democracy, equality, environmental and social justice.

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.

This practice is carried out by people in different roles and contexts, including people explicitly called professional community workers (and people taking on essentially the same role but with a different job title), together with professionals in other occupations ranging from:  to: 
Community development practice also encompasses a range of occupational settings and levels from development roles working with communities, through to managerial and strategic community planning roles.

The Community Development Challenge report, which was produced by a working party comprising leading UK organizations in the field including the (now defunct) Community Development Foundation, the (now defunct) Community Development Exchange and the (now defunct) Federation for Community Development Learning defines community development as:

A set of values and practices which plays a special role in overcoming poverty and disadvantage, knitting society together at the grass roots and deepening democracy. There is a community development profession, defined by national occupational standards and a body of theory and experience going back the best part of a century.

There are active citizens who use community development techniques on a voluntary basis, and there are also other professions and agencies which use a community development approach or some aspects of it.

​Community Development Exchange defines community development as:
both an occupation (such as a community development worker in a local authority) and a way of working with communities. Its key purpose is to build communities based on justice, equality and mutual respect.

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. It starts from the principle that within any community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience which, if used in creative ways, can be channeled into collective action to achieve the communities' desired goals.

Community development practitioners work alongside people in communities to help build relationships with key people and organizations and to identify common concerns. They create opportunities for :the community to learn new skills and, by enabling people to act together, community development practitioners help to foster social inclusion and equality.

Different approaches:

There are numerous overlapping approaches to community development. Some focus on the processes, some on the outcomes/ objectives. They include:
  • Community Engagement; focuses on relationships at the core of facilitating "understanding and evaluation, involvement, exchange of information and opinions, about a concept, issue or project, with the aim of building social capital and enhancing social outcomes through decision-making” (p. 173).
  • Women Self-help Group; focusing on the contribution of women in settlement groups.
  • Community capacity building; focusing on helping communities obtain, strengthen, and maintain the ability to set and achieve their own development objectives.
  • Large Group Capacitation; an adult education and social psychology approach grounded in the activity of the individual and the social psychology of the large group focusing on large groups of unemployed or semi-employed participants, many of whom with Lower Levels of Literacy (LLLs).
  • Social capital formation; focusing on benefits derived from the cooperation between individuals and groups.
  • Nonviolent direct action; when a group of people take action to reveal an existing problem, highlight an alternative, or demonstrate a possible solution to a social issue which is not being addressed through traditional societal institutions (governments, religious organizations or established trade unions) to the satisfaction of the direct action participants.
  • Economic development, focusing on the "development" of developing countries as measured by their economies, although it includes the processes and policies by which a nation improves the economic, political, and social well-being of its people.
  • Community economic development (CED); an alternative to conventional economic development which encourages using local resources in a way that enhances economic outcomes while improving social conditions. For example, CED involves strategies which aim to improve access to affordable housing, medical, and child care.
    • A worker cooperative is a progressive CED strategy that operates as businesses both managed and owned by their employees. They are beneficial due to their potential to create jobs and providing a route for grassroots political action. Some challenges that the worker cooperative faces include the mending of the cooperative’s identity as both business and as a democratic humanitarian organization. They are limited in resources and scale.
  • Sustainable development; which seeks to achieve, in a balanced manner, economic development, social development and environmental protection outcomes.
  • Community-driven development (CDD), an economic development model which shifts overreliance on central governments to local communities.
  • Asset-based community development (ABCD); is a methodology that seeks to uncover and use the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development.
  • Faith-based community development; which utilizes faith-based organizations to bring about community development outcomes.
  • Community-based participatory research (CBPR); a partnership approach to research that equitably involves, for example, community members, organizational representatives, and researchers in all aspects of the research process and in which all partners contribute expertise and share decision making and ownership, which aims to integrate this knowledge with community development outcomes.
  • Community organizing; an approach that generally assumes that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless.
  • Participatory planning including community-based planning (CBP); involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural.
  • Town-making; or machizukuri (まちづくり) refers to a Japanese concept which is "an umbrella term generally understood as citizen participation in the planning and management of a living environment". It can include redevelopment, revitalization, and post-disaster reconstruction, and usually emphasizes the importance of local citizen participation. In recent years, cooperation between local communities and contents tourism (such as video games, anime, and manga) has also become a key driver of machizukuri in some local communities, such as the tie-up between CAPCOM's Sengoku Basara and the city of Shiroishi.
  • Language revitalization focuses on the use of a language so that it serves the needs of a community. This may involve the creation of books, films and other media in the language. These actions help a small language community to preserve their language and culture.
  • Methodologies focusing on the educational component of community development, including the community-wide empowerment that increased educational opportunity creates.
  • Methodologies addressing the issues and challenges of the Digital divide, making affordable training and access to computers and the Internet, addressing the marginalization of local communities that cannot connect and participate in the global Online community. In the United States, nonprofit organizations such as Per Scholas seek to “break the cycle of poverty by providing education, technology and economic opportunities to individuals, families and communities” as a path to development for the communities they serve.

There are a myriad of job titles for community development workers and their employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental organisations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies. Since the nineteen seventies the prefix word 'community' has also been adopted by several other occupations from the police and health workers to planners and architects, who have been influenced by community development approaches.

History:

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. and especially political power and the need to mobilize people power to affect 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 organizations that support 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 global North:

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.

United States: In the United States in the 1960s, the term "community development" began to complement and generally replace the idea 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 late 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 business and management skills to the social mission of uplifting low-income residents and their neighborhoods. Eventually such groups became known as "Community development corporations" or CDCs. 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 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 provide financing for countless physical and social development programs 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.

United Kingdom: In the UK, community development has had two main traditions. The first 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 programs 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 included 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 set 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 reform 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 included the International Association for Community Development.

In 1999 a UK wide organization responsible for setting professional training standards for all education and development practitioners working within local communities was established and recognized by the Labour Government. This organization was called PAULO – the National Training Organization for Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire). It was formally recognized 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 standards 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 all 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 set 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.

Canada: 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.

Australia: 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 gave 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, organized a ground breaking text-book on community development

In the "Global South":

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.

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 remains to develop the villages and to help the villagers help themselves to fight against poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, etc. The beauty of Indian model 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, following 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 not 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 honored by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Another alternative to "top down" government programs is the participatory government institution. Participatory governance institutions are organizations which aim to facilitate the participation of citizens within larger decision making 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 supports the implementation 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 fundamental 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 that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility 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:
India: Community development in India was initiated by Government of India through Community Development Programme (CDP) in 1952. The focus of CDP was on rural communities. But, professionally trained social workers concentrated their practice in urban areas. Thus, although the focus of community organization was rural, the major thrust of Social Work gave an urban character which gave a balance in service for the program.

Vietnam: International organizations apply the term community in Vietnam to the local administrative unit, each with a traditional identity based on traditional, cultural, and kinship relations. Community development strategies in Vietnam aim to organize communities in ways that increase their capacities to partner with institutions, the participation of local people, transparency and equality, and unity within local communities.

Social and economic development planning (SDEP) in Vietnam uses top-down centralized planning methods and decision-making processes which do not consider local context and local participation. The plans created by SDEP are ineffective and serve mainly for administrative purposes. Local people are not informed of these development plans.

The participatory rural appraisal (PRA) approach, a research methodology that allows local people to share and evaluate their own life conditions, was introduced to Vietnam in the early 1990s to help reform the way that government approaches local communities and development. PRA was used as a tool for mostly outsiders to learn about the local community, which did not effect substantial change.

The village/commune development (VDP/CDP) approach was developed as a more fitting approach than PRA to analyze local context and address the needs of rural communities.[29] VDP/CDP participatory planning is centered around Ho Chi Minh's saying that "People know, people discuss and people supervise." VDP/CDP is often useful in Vietnam for shifting centralized management to more decentralization, helping develop local governance at the grassroots level. 

Local people use their knowledge to solve local issues. They create mid-term and yearly plans that help improve existing community development plans with the support of government organizations. Although VDP/CDP has been tested in many regions in Vietnam, it has not been fully implemented for a couple reasons. The methods applied in VDP/CDP are human resource and capacity building intensive, especially at the early stages.

It also requires the local people to have an "initiative-taking" attitude. People in the remote areas where VDP/CDP has been tested have mostly passive attitudes because they already receive assistance from outsiders. There also are no sufficient monitoring practices to ensure effective plan implementation. Integrating VDP/CDP into the governmental system is difficult because the Communist Party and Central government's policies on decentralization are not enforced in reality.

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) in Vietnam, legalized in 1991, have claimed goals to develop civil society, which was essentially nonexistent prior to the Đổi Mới economic reforms. NGO operations in Vietnam do not exactly live up to their claimed goals to expand civil society. This is mainly due to the fact that NGOs in Vietnam are mostly donor-driven, urban, and elite-based organizations that employ staff with ties to the Communist Party and Central government. 

NGOs are also overlooked by the Vietnam Fatherland Front, an umbrella organization that reports observations directly to the Party and Central government. Since NGOs in Vietnam are not entirely non-governmental, they have been coined instead as 'VNGOs.' Most VNGOs have originated from either the state, hospital or university groups, or individuals not previously associated with any groups. VNGOs have not yet reached those most in need, such as the rural poor, due to the entrenched power networks' opposition to lobbying for issues such the rural poor's land rights. 

Authoritarianism is prevalent in nearly all Vietnamese civic organizations. Authoritarian practices are more present in inner-organizational functions than in organization leaders' worldviews. These leaders often reveal both authoritarian and libertarian values in contradiction. Representatives of Vietnam's NGO's stated that disagreements are normal, but conflicts within an organization should be avoided, demonstrating the one-party "sameness" mentality of authoritarian rule.

See also:







Community-driven DevelopmentPictured below: General logical framework for community driven development (CDD)
Community-driven development (CDD) is a development initiative that provides control of the development process, resources and decision making authority directly to groups in the community.

The underlying assumption of CDD projects are that communities are the best judges of how their lives and livelihoods can be improved and, if provided with adequate resources and information, they can organize themselves to provide for their immediate needs.

CDD projects work by providing poor communities with direct funding for development with the communities then deciding how to spend the money. Lastly, the community plans and builds the project and takes responsibility for monitoring its progress.

Characteristics of CDD:

CDD programs are motivated by their trust in people (Naidoo and Finn, 2001) and hence it advocates people changing their own environment as a powerful force for development.

By treating poor people as assets and partners in the development process, studies have shown that CDD is responsive to local demands, inclusive, and more cost-effective compared to centrally-led NGO-based programs. CDD can also be supported by strengthening and financing community groups, facilitating community access to information, and promoting an enabling environment through policy and institutional reform (Dongier, 2002).

Following from this description, field practitioners at the World Bank have denoted five key characteristics of CDD projects:
  1. A CDD operation primarily targets a community-based organization or a representative local council of a community. This community focus means that the essential defining characteristic of a CDD project is that the beneficiaries or grantees of implementations are agents of the community. Since the focus on small communities is so large the CDD normally targets small scale subprojects in the community.
  2. In CDD operations, community- or locally based representation is responsible for designing and planning the subprojects in a participatory manner. Since the concentration on participatory planning is considerable in CDD operations, often the possible types of subproject investment options are very large with only a small list of subprojects that cannot be carried out.
  3. The defining characteristic of CDD projects is that a transfer of resources to the community occurs and control of the resources is delegated to the community. The amount of transfer and control of resources will depend on the CDD implementations.
  4. The community is directly involved in the implementation of the subproject. Often the participation of the community comes directly in the form of labour or funds. However, the community may also contribute to the subproject indirectly in the form of management and supervision of contractors or the operation and maintenance of the infrastructure when complete.
  5. An element of community-based monitoring and evaluation has become a characteristic of CDD subprojects. Most often it is social accountability tools such as participatory monitoring, community scorecards and grievance redress systems which allow for the community to ensure accountability of the CDD implementation.

CDD vs. CBD:

Community-driven development is derived from community-based development (CBD) which can include a much broader range of projects. For example, CBD projects can include everything from simple information sharing to social, economic and political empowerment of community groups.

However, CDD projects fit on the empowerment end of CBD by actively engaging beneficiaries in the design, management and implementation of projects. The stress on actual control of decision-making and project resources at nearly all stages of a subproject cycle distinguishes CDD from the previous generation of CBD projects. In this continuum of community participation covered by CBD, new-generation CDD projects are located at the extreme right (Tanaka, 2006).

Since community-driven development has only recently diverged from the broad community-based development there are a few contrasts visible in the five characteristics of CDD programs. In essence, all five properties of CDD projects exist together only in the newer generation of CDD implementations.

Nevertheless, the first attribute of community focus would apply to all CDD projects and CBD projects. In contrast, the second characteristic of participatory planning and design and the fourth property of community involvement are often visible among all CDD projects but very rarely in CBD projects.

Moreover, community-based monitoring and evaluation which is the fifth aspect of CDD projects is only found in some of the newer projects. The fifth characteristic is what positions many of the newer CDD projects in the extreme right of the CDD cluster as diagrammatically demonstrated in Figure 1.

As mentioned above, the third characteristic of community control of resources seems to be the key factor to conceptually distinguish between CDD and CBD projects. However, many of the early NGOs implementing CDD projects did not always interpret this factor rigorously (Tanaka, 2006). Thus, the distinction between CDD projects and CBD projects with CDD components was not always clear; however, this would be expected since there was a gradual evolution of CDD out of CBD.

To alleviate the earlier problems of over-reliance on central governments as the main service provider, CDD programs were launched by the World Bank to improve the accountability and services in key areas. However, NGOs quickly learned that well designed and implemented CDD programs had ripple effects of promoting equity and inclusiveness, efficiency and good governance.

By effectively targeting and including the vulnerable and excluded groups, as well as allowing communities to manage and control resources directly it was evident that CDD programs could allow poverty reduction projects to scale up quickly.

Efficiency is gained through demand responsive allocation of resources, reduced corruption and misuse of resources, lower costs and better cost recovery, better quality and maintenance, greater utilization of resources, and the community‘s willingness to pay for goods and services.

Good governance is promoted by greater transparency, accountability in allocation and use of resources because the community participates in project decision-making processes. Some of the principles of CDD—such as participation, empowerment, accountability, and nondiscrimination—are also worthy ends in themselves (Asian Development Bank, 2008).

It was as early as 1881 when T.H. Green who wrote about the maximum power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves (Zakaria, 1999). However, it was not until the 1970s with John Rawls’ book ―A Theory of Justice and in the 1990s with Amartya Sen‘s book ―Development as Freedom where the notions of substantive freedom and the multidimensional nature of poverty were made explicit to the multilateral development banks.

This recognition of the multidimensional nature of poverty as well as the combined failures of both markets and governments and the socio-political complexity of ground level realities has made it clear that relying on traditional top-down, state-led, ―big development‖ strategies would not be effective to combat poverty.

Moreover, this resurgence in participatory development and bottom-up approaches in the NGO and development sector has come in only the last two decades as explained above.

Expansion of community-driven development:

Since the mid-1990s, community-driven development has emerged as one of the fastest-growing investments by NGOs, aid organizations and multilateral developments banks. This continued investment in CDD has been driven mostly by a demand from donor agencies and developing countries for large-scale, bottom-up and demand-driven, poverty reduction subprojects that can increase the institutional capacity of small communities for self-development. 

The success and scale of some CDD projects in the World Bank are especially notable. The World Bank supported approximately 190 lending projects amounting to $9.3 billion in 2000–2005 (Tanaka, 2006). Initiated by the International Development Association (IDA) at the World Bank, CDD projects have been instrumental in harnessing the energy and capacity of communities for poverty reduction. Since the start of this decade, IDA lending for CDD has averaged annually just over 50 operations, for an average total of US$1.3 billion per year (International Development Association, 2009).

Even the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has funded 57 projects worth about $2.5 billion between 2001-2007 that included community-driven development approaches to enhance deliver of inputs and beneficiary participation. They constituted 14% of the total loans approved by the Asian Development Bank during this period.

Over one-third of the projects were in the agriculture and natural resources sector, followed by a smaller proportion of water supply and sanitation, waste management, education and health projects. The projects were primarily in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central and West Asia, where the developing country governments were investing in rural development programs (Asian Development Bank, 2008).

In the last few years the International Fund for Agricultural Development has been working with the following to create a platform for learning and sharing knowledge on community-driven development (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2010):
Intensive forms of community participation have been attempted in projects of several donors for many years. Bilateral donors, such as the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), have used CDD-type approaches for a long time as part of their sustainable livelihoods and integrated basic needs development assistance in developing countries.

The Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and Danish International Development Agency have used CDD principles in the mandate of a rights-based approach to the development projects they fund (FAO, 2010).

More than 80 countries have now implemented CDD projects. The breadth and activities funded by the CDD programs at the World Bank can be explained by providing a brief overview of a few of them.

The Second National Fadama Development Project II (NFDP-II) targets the development of small scale irrigation, especially in the low-lying alluvial floodplains or "Fadama‖". NFDP-II increased the productivity, living standards and development capacity of the economically active rural communities while increasing the efficiency in delivering implementation services to an estimated four million rural beneficiary households and raising the real incomes of households by 45 percent (African Development Bank, 2003).

The Social Fund for Development in Yemen provided support 7 million people of which 49 percent were female and generated 8,000 permanent jobs. It also increased the number of girls‘ schools from 502 to 554 and basic education enrollment rates from 63 percent to 68 percent.

The program focuses on helping the poor to help themselves through providing income-generating activities and building community infrastructure rather than making cash transfers (El-Gammal, 2004). The Social Investment Fund Project V in Honduras benefited 2.5 million people with the implementation of 2,888 projects (1,446 rehabilitated schools, about 700 new schools, 163 new health centers, 347 small water/sanitation systems, and 461 latrines) resulting in all children in the targeted areas attending primary school.

In addition the project communities were provided with better access to health care assistance and access to running water (Perez de Castillo, 1998). The Andhra Pradesh Rural Poverty Reduction Project (APRPRP) in India has help to organize 10.1 million rural poor women into community-based organizations that collectively save over US$770 million and leverage credit over $2.7 billion from commercial banks (World Bank, 2003).

The Kecamatan Development Program (KDP) in Indonesia which is what the National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan is based on has benefitted 18 million people by providing better services which include more than 37,000 kilometers of local roads and 8,500 bridges, 9,200 clean water supply units, and 3,000 new or improved health posts.

In addition, more than 1.3 million people obtained loans to start or complement local businesses through microfinancing (Guggenheim, 2004). Lastly, the National Solidarity Program (NSP) in Afghanistan will be the focus of this research. In this implementation elected village-level community development councils, which include women, use grants and local labor to rebuild bridges and roads, fix schools and install water pumps to benefit 13 million people across Afghanistan thereby building state credibility and strengthening local democracy.

Effect of CDD programs on conflict:

Governments and international organizations persist to address large amounts of development aid to conflict affected areas throughout the world by community-driven development programs, some of it in order to abate conflict by decreasing popular support for insurgent activities.

Despite that, the effect of development aid on civil conflict remains unclear. The Philippines’ Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahiripan - Comprehensive Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI-CIDSS) — a large-scale community-driven development program from 2003 through 2008 implemented by the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development.

The program intends to improve local infrastructure, governance, participation, and social cohesion. More than 4000 villages in 184 municipalities across 40 provinces had received aid through KALAHI-CIDSS. (Crost and Johnston , 2010) investigate the effect of a KALAHI-CIDSS development program in the Philippines, and conclude that the program actually intensify violence in the short term.

There are at least two possible reasons through which aid could intensify conflict. The first is that an inflow of aid will increase the amount of resources, which in turn increases the incentive to fight. The second is that aid increases short-term conflict because it has the potential to weaken insurgents in the long-run, perhaps because it increases peaceful economic opportunities or popular support for the government.

If insurgents expect a successful aid program to weaken their position, they have an incentive to sabotage its implementation by violent means. The National Solidarity Program (NSP), which began in June 2003, is the largest development program in Afghanistan. The program is focused on infrastructure, such as drinking water facilities, irrigation canals and roads, and services, such as training and literacy courses.

NSP is executed by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) of the Government of Afghanistan, funded by the World Bank and a consortium of bilateral donors, and implemented by around25 NGOs. By mid 2010NSP had already been implemented in over 29,000 villages across 361 of Afghanistan‘s 398 districts at a cost of nearly $1 billion.

The results of NSP show that the program has a significant positive effect on the sense of economic wellbeing among the villagers and their support for the central and local governments. There is also evidence that NSP has positive effect on the perception of security situation by the villagers, but no evidence that this has led to a decrease in insurgent attacks there (Beath, 2011).

See also:







Asset-based community developmentPictured below: ​Catalytic Communities engages in Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD).
Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a methodology for the sustainable development of communities based on their strengths and potentials. It involves assessing the resources, skills, and experience available in a community; organizing the community around issues that move its members into action; and then determining and taking appropriate action This method uses the community's own assets and resources as the basis for development; it empowers the people of the community by encouraging them to utilize what they already possess.

The ABCD approach was developed by John L. McKnight and John P. Kretzmann at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. They co-authored a book in 1993, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing A Community’s Assets, which outlined their asset-based approach to community development. 

The Community Development Program at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research established the Asset-Based Community Development Institute based on three decades of research and community work by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight.

Principles:

Needs-based community development emphasizes local deficits and looks to outside agencies for resources. In contrast, asset-based community development focuses on honing and leveraging existing strengths within the community. Related to tenets of empowerment, it postulates that solutions to community problems already exist within a community’s assets.

Principles that guide ABCD include:
  • Everyone has gifts: Each person in a community has something to contribute.
  • Relationships build a community: People must be connected in order for sustainable community development to take place.
  • Citizens at the center: Citizens should be viewed as actors—not recipients—in development.
  • Leaders involve others: Community development is strongest when it involves a broad base of community action.
  • People care: Challenge notions of "apathy" by listening to people's interests.
  • Listen: Decisions should come from conversations where people are heard.
  • Ask: Asking for ideas is more sustainable than giving solutions.
  • Inside-out organization: Local community members are in control.
  • Institutions serve the community: Institutional leaders should create opportunities for community-member involvement, then "step back."

Tools:

The ABCD approach utilizes several tools to assess and mobilize communities:

Capacity inventory:
  1. Skills Information: lists the many skills that a person has gained at home, work, in the community, or elsewhere. Examples of these skills can include internet knowledge, hair-cutting, listening, wallpapering, carpentry, sewing, babysitting, etc.
  2. Community Skills: lists the community work in which a person has participated to determine future work they may be interested in.
  3. Enterprising Interests and Experience: lists past experience in business and determines interest in starting a business.
  4. Personal Information: lists minimum information for follow-up.

Asset mapping:

There are five key assets in any given community:
  1. individuals,
  2. associations,
  3. institutions,
  4. physical assets,
  5. and connections. 

These assets are broken down into three categories: Gifts of individuals, Citizens’ Associations, and Local Institutions.

Asset maps are used in lieu of needs maps which focus solely on negative aspects of communities. Asset maps, on the other hand, focus on community assets, abilities, skills, and strengths in order to build its future:
​Time banks:

Time banks are an example of using community assets to connect individuals' assets to one another Neighbors and local organizations share skills with one another and earn and spend ‘TimeBank Hours’ or ‘credits’ in the process, allowing an hour of child care to equal an hour of home repair or tax preparation.

Ethics:

Since ABCD relies on existing community assets to create change, it has been criticized for implying that disadvantaged communities have all the resources they need to solve community problems.

According to the ABCD Institute, however, ABCD methodology recognizes that systemic injustice may require disadvantaged communities to seek assistance from outside the community. ABCD maintains that interventions from exterior sources will be most effective when a community’s assets are leveraged at full capacity.

ABCD is described as a more sustainable model of community development than needs-based community development, because needs-based approaches may perpetuate community problems by emphasizing deficiencies and the necessity for reliance on outside assistance.

By contrast, ABCD aims to build capacity within communities by expanding their social capital. By working with outside resources and simultaneously building trust within the community, more members can make use of a wider array of strengths.

See also:






​
Community-based Participatory ResearchPictured below: VOICE OF THE STAKEHOLDERS: PRINCIPLES OF
COMMUNITY-BASED PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH (PDF)
​Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, researchers, and others in all aspects of the research process, with all partners in the process contributing expertise and sharing in the decision-making and ownership.

The aim of CBPR is to increase knowledge and understanding of a given phenomenon and to integrate the knowledge gained with interventions for policy or social change benefiting the community members.

There are many ways CBPR can be used to engage in the public sphere and a range of approaches that can encompass the process of engagement. There is some consensus in the way in which practitioners engage communities. This can range from initial engagement of the public to the empowering of communities that can lead to collective goals and social change. Engagement can include lower to higher levels of inclusion. CBPR emphasizes the public engagement end of this spectrum in many cases.

​History:

The historical roots of CBPR generally trace back to the development of participatory action research by Kurt Lewin and Orlando Fals Borda, and the popular education movement in Latin America associated with Paulo Freire.

A CBPR project starts with the community, which participates fully in all aspects of the research process. Community is often self-defined, but general categories of community include geographic community, community of individuals with a common problem or issue, or a community of individuals with a common interest or goal.

CBPR encourages collaboration of “formally trained research” partners from any area of expertise, provided that the researcher provides expertise that is seen as useful to the investigation by the community, and be fully committed to a partnership of equals and producing outcomes usable to the community.

Equitable partnerships require sharing power, resources, credit, results, and knowledge, as well as a reciprocal appreciation of each partner's knowledge and skills at each stage of the project, including problem definition/issue selection, research design, conducting research, interpreting the results, and determining how the results should be used for action. CBPR differs from traditional research in many ways.

One of the principal ways in which it is different 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.

Research:

Scholarship in the area of CBPR is vast and spells out various approaches which consider multiple theoretical and methodological approaches. The content areas include health, ethnic studies, bullying, and indigenous communities.

There is a lot of scholarship exploring how to teach students about CBPR or community based research (CBR). Some have taken what could be called a critical approach to this by emphasizing the “institutional power inequalities” in community based organization-university relationship building.

There are successes and failures in using CBPR approaches in teaching which practitioners can consider. Others have argued that community based work can provide several learning benefits with pros and cons to the various approaches. Scholars continue to problematize approaches that can engage instructors and students in imagining ways to work with communities.

Research challenges:

Scholarship has explored the potential barriers to collecting community-based participatory research data. The CBPR approach is in line with the body of sociological work that advocates for “protagonist driven ethnography". The approach provides for and demands that researchers collaborate with communities throughout the research process. However, challenges can surface given the power relationship between researcher and communities.

The CBPR approach proposes that researchers be mindful of this possibility. The researcher can expect to spend a lot of time navigating and building the researcher-community relationship. Additionally, through CBPR researchers enable communities to hold them accountable to addressing ethical concerns inherent to collecting information from what are often marginalized communities.

Sociologists have entered the discussion from the point of view of the ethnographer or participant observer where some have argued against "exoticizing the ghetto" or "cowboy ethnography". These works could be read as a check on the scholar centered work that can emerge when collecting ethnographic or participant observation data.

The perception of researchers is something to weigh when considering this approach or other forms of field work. One researcher stated that "Researchers are like mosquitoes; they suck your blood and leave.” Through this lens a focus on a CBPR project at the exclusion of the community could harm the goals of co-learning and shared goal accomplishment.

Applications:

Applications of community-based participatory research are more common in health promotions than other areas of research. Prevention, management, and awareness building about diabetes, HIV/AIDS, asthma, cancer, mental health, obesity, and HPV vaccination are a few applications of CBPR studies.

Research with the population from ethnic minorities and marginalized groups are often used CBPR approach for its strength in building trust, acceptance, and engagement of the community members.

Resources:

There are a number of institutions that provide funding and other resources for conducting CBPR work. Organizations and institutions explore CBPR by focusing on youth, communities, and social justice. There are networks of professionals, researchers, and activists that present and collaborate on CBPR projects.





​


Community ServicePictured below: 70 COMMUNITY SERVICE PROJECT IDEAS
Community service is unpaid work performed by a person or group of people for the benefit and betterment of their community without any form of compensation. 

Community service can be distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis and may be compulsory per situation. Although personal benefits may be realized, it may be performed for a variety of reasons including citizenship requirements, a substitution of criminal justice sanctions, requirements of a school or class, and requisites for the receipt of certain benefits.

​Background:

Community service is a non-paying job performed by one person or a group of people for the benefit of their community or its institutions. Community service is distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis. It may be performed for a variety of reasons.
  • It may be required by a government as a part of citizenship requirements, like the mandatory "Hand and hitch-up services" for some municipalities in Germany, or generally in lieu of military service or for civil conscription services.
  • It may be required as a substitution of, or in addition to, other criminal justice sanctions – when performed for this reason it may also be referred to as community payback.
  • It may be mandated by schools to meet the requirements of a class, such as in the case of service-learning or to meet the requirements of graduating as class valedictorian.
  • In the UK, it has been made a condition of the receipt of certain benefits. (see Workfare in the United Kingdom)
  • In Sweden it is a suspended sentence called "samhällstjänst" ("society service").

Reasons:

Some educational jurisdictions in the United States require students to perform community service hours to graduate from high school. In some high schools in Washington, for example, students must finish 200 hours of community service to get a diploma. Some school districts in Washington, including Seattle Public Schools, differentiate between community service and "service learning," requiring students to demonstrate that their work has contributed to their education] 

If a student in high school is taking an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) course, community service is often needed. Whether American public schools could require volunteer hours for high school graduation was challenged in Immediato v. Rye Neck School District, but the court found no violation.

Many other high schools do not require community service hours for graduation, but still see an impressive number of students get involved in their communities. For example, in Palo Alto, California, students at Palo Alto High School log about 45,000 hours of community service every year. As a result, the school's College and Career Center awards 250–300 students the President's Volunteer Service Award every year for their hard work.

Colleges:

Though not technically considered a requirement, many colleges include community service as an unofficial requirement for acceptance. However, some colleges prefer work experience over community service, and some require that their students also continue community service for some specific number of hours to graduate.

Some schools also offer unique "community service" courses, awarding credit to students who complete a certain number of community service hours. Some academic honor societies, along with some fraternities and sororities in North America, require community service to join and others require each member to continue doing community service.

Many student organizations exist for the purpose of community service, the largest of which is Alpha Phi Omega. Community service projects are also done by sororities and fraternities.

Beginning in the 1980s, colleges began using service-learning as a pedagogy. A partnership of college presidents began in 1985 with the initiative of boosting community service in their colleges. This alliance called Campus Compact, led the way for many other schools to adopt service-learning courses and activities.

Service-learning courses vary widely in time span, quality, and in the balance of "service" and "learning" stressed in the course. A typical service-learning course, however, has these factors in common:
  • A service component where the student spends time serving in the community meeting actual needs
  • A learning component where students seek out or are taught information—often both interpersonal and academic—that they integrate into their service
  • A reflection component that ties service and learning together

Reflection is sometimes symbolized by the hyphen in the term "service-learning" to indicate that it has a central role in learning by serving. Reflection is simply a scheduled consideration of one's own experiences and thoughts. This can take many forms, including journals, blogs, and discussions.

Service-learning courses present learning the material in context, meaning that students often learn effectively and tend to apply what was learned. As the book Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? notes, "Students engaged in service-learning are engaged in authentic situations; they get to know real people whose lives are affected by these issues… As a result, they have lots of questions—real questions that they want to have answered." Thus, students become interested and motivated to learn the materials to resolve their questions.

Community service learning strives to connect or re-connect students with serving their community after they finish their course. It creates a bridge for the lack of community service found among college-age people in the United States.

Community service-learning:

The one serving may be able to take something away from the experience and be able to use any newfound knowledge or interpersonal discoveries to improve their future servitude and the people around them. To gain the most from community service requires balancing learning with serving. Learning and serving at the same time improves a student's community while teaching life lessons and building character.

Community service-learning is "about leadership development as well as traditional information and skill acquisition". Therefore, the combination of people doing service and learning at the same time teaches them how to be effective and how to be effective regarding what is important to them. It can improve their overall experience and application opportunities they gain from it.

By adding service to learning, and balancing the two, community service can become more than just the act of serving. The goal of service-learning is to achieve large change through small actions. By being a classroom, a hands-on learning experience, and an opportunity to change the community, people are able to not only serve, but impact themselves as well.

Definition:

According to Fayetteville State University, "service learning is a process of involving students in community service activities combined with facilitated means for applying the experience to their academic and personal development. It is a form of experiential education aimed at enhancing and enriching student learning in course material. When compared to other forms of experiential learning like internships and cooperative education, it is similar in that it is student-centered, hands-on and directly applicable to the curriculum."

Professor Freddy Cardoza defines community service-Learning as "a pedogogy (or a specific teaching-learning approach) that has few lectures, and is a more interactive hands on educational strategy which provides students with instruction while leading them through meaningful community service experiences and engaging them in personal reflection on those experiences in order to build character and to teach problem-solving skills and civic responsibility." 

Cardoza stressed that it was important for a student take some time and reflect on what they are experiencing, seeing, doing, and what problems they are encountering and how they are going to apply what they have been learning to solve these problems.

In other words, service-learning aims to link the personal and interpersonal development with cognitive development, as well as equipping the student with critical knowledge to help them understand the world.

Character.org defines service-learning as "different than community service in several key ways. Service learning includes student leadership, reflective and academic components, and chances for celebration once the service activity has been successfully completed. Students reflect on community needs, ways to help, and once their service has been completed, they can internalize how their efforts have helped, while learning more about academics such as geography, math, or science."

Court ordered service:
See also: Penal labor in the United States
​
People convicted of a crime may be required to perform community service or to work for agencies in the sentencing jurisdiction either entirely or partially as a substitution of other judicial remedies and sanctions, such as incarceration or fines. For instance, a fine may be reduced in exchange for a prescribed number of hours of community service. The court may allow the defendant to choose their community service, which must then be documented by "credible agencies", such as non-profit organizations, or may mandate a specific service.

Sometimes the sentencing is specifically targeted to the defendant's crime, for example, a litterer may have to clean a park or roadside, or a drunk driver might appear before school groups to explain why drunk driving is a crime. Also, a sentence allowing for a broader choice may prohibit certain services that the offender would reasonably be expected to perform anyway.

Corporate social responsibility:

Some employers involve their staff in some kind of community service programming, such as with the United Way of America. This may be completely voluntary or a condition of employment, or anything in between.

In addition, approximately 40% of Fortune 500 companies offer volunteer grant programs where companies provide monetary donations to nonprofit organizations in recognition of their employee's volunteerism (e.g. $500 volunteer grant after 25 hours of community service).

Worldwide examples:

Community service in the United States is often similar to that in Canada. In Europe and Australia, community service is an option for many criminal sentences as an alternative to incarceration.

In the United Kingdom, community service is now officially referred to by the Home Office as more straightforward compulsory unpaid work. Compulsory unpaid work includes up to 300 hours of activities, such as conservation work, cleaning up graffiti, or working with a charity. The Howard League for Penal Reform (the world's oldest prison reform organization) is a prominent advocate for increased community sentencing to reduce prison population and improve rehabilitation.

Starting in 2010, Danish high school students receive a special diploma if they complete at least 20 hours of voluntary work.

The International Baccalaureate program formerly required 50 hours of community service, together with a written reflection on the service performed, to fulfill the requirement of 150 hours of CAS (creativity, action, and service) and receive an IB Diploma.

Florence Nightingale organized fundraisers to raise money for the hospital and arrange more stable living conditions to improve the health of the soldiers in the hospital. Florence Nightingale served a specific group of people and benefited the public—which is an example of community service.

Community service for institutions:

Many institutions require and/or give incentive to students or employees alike to volunteer their time to community service programs. From volunteering to participating in such charity events like walks or runs, institutes continue the practice or requiring their employees or students to grow in camaraderie while giving back to various communities.

Many institutions also provide opportunities for employees and students to work together, and most student groups participate in their own form of community service. Each is unique in its own right; all are incredibly popular with employees; and in all of these programs, human resources plays an integral role.

One such program, Johns Hopkins University, under the leadership of Johns Hopkins University president Ronald J. Daniels and the chief executive officer of Baltimore City Schools, the university's human resources and community affairs departments worked with the school system to develop the Johns Hopkins Takes Time for Schools program in 2009, launching it on March 3, 2010.

The program is a service partnership aimed at providing support and assistance to Baltimore City Schools (BCS) while providing faculty and staff an avenue for community service, offering their talents to the city's youth and improving the administrative and educational capacities of the area's school system.

Some institutes even give their students or employees a guaranteed number of days or weeks of leave for certain acceptable community service programs. One example is East Carolina University, which gives 24 hours of community service leave for full-time employees per year as an incentive and compensation for community service.

Religious reasons for serving:

Beyond required community service, some religious groups emphasize serving one's community. These groups and churches reach out by holding Vacation Bible Schools for children, hosting Red Cross blood drives, having fall carnivals, or offering free meals.

Through these services, churches are able to benefit neighborhoods and families. Some churches create non-profit organizations that can help the public. Crisis pregnancy centers are often run by religious groups to promote pro-life values in local families. To meet impoverished people's needs, some churches provide a food pantry or start a homeless shelter. Also, certain churches provide day care so that busy parents can work.

Christian service:

Christianity promotes community service. According to Freddy Cardoza, a teacher at biblical Biola University, Christians are called to serve people because Christians see the importance of community service to show God's love and to further spread the Gospel.

Some non-governmental (NGO) community service organizations were founded by Christians seeking to put their beliefs into practice. Three prominent examples are Samaritan's Purse, Salvation Army, and Habitat for Humanity.

Samaritan's Purse was inspired by a prayer of evangelist Robert Pierce, "Let my heart be broken for the things which break the heart of God." After traveling through Asia and seeing first-hand the suffering of impoverished children, lepers, and orphans—in 1970, Pierce founded Samaritan's Purse. Today, Samaritan's Purse reaches millions of people across the globe by providing aid such as disaster relief, medical assistance, and child care. A notable Samaritan's Purse project is Operation Christmas Child headed by Franklin Graham.

The Salvation Army was founded by William Booth and his wife Catherine Booth in 1865. Booth was a Methodist minister and preacher on the streets of London. His tent meetings gathered crowds of drunkards, prostitutes and thieves who eventually became the first "soldiers" in the army, which has grown to 1,442,388 members in 126 countries. The Salvation Army's motto is "Doing the Most Good" and does so by providing aid such as shelter, food, clothing, spiritual training and disaster relief.

Habitat for Humanity provides housing for people in need. Founded by Millard Fuller, its vision is to "...put God’s love into action by bringing people together to build homes, communities and hope". Habitat for Humanity has built or repaired over 800,000 homes and served more than 4 million people worldwide since its creation in 1976. They describe their vision as "...a world where everyone has a decent place to live".

Personal benefits of serving:

Community service also allows those participating to reflect on the difference they are making in society. Some participants of a community service project may find themselves gaining a greater understanding of their roles in the community, as well as the impact of their contributions towards those in need of service.

Because community service outlets vary, those who serve are exposed to many different kinds of people, environments, and situations.

With each new community service project, some participants may gain insightful experience in a variety of areas. Participants may also internalize the information that they found personally insightful for future use. While simply performing community service is valuable to the recipients, those serving often find it beneficial to pause and reflect on how they are changing society for the better.

Schools often take students on community service projects so they can learn how their individual actions affect the well-being of the public. Participants may find that serving the public fosters a more solidified view of self and purpose.

Those involved in community service learning may also find that after serving the community for an extended period of time, they have an advantage in real-world experience. Eventually, the skills and knowledge obtained while working with the community may be applied in future areas of work. Community service may also increase a participant's social connectivity.

Because most community service opportunities allow others to interact and work with other individuals, this service may help volunteers network and connect with others towards a common goal.

People gain the most from their community service projects when they volunteer their time to help people that they have never interacted with before. This direct contact allows people to see life from a different perspective and reevaluate their opinions of others. Many young people who get involved in community service come out with a more well-rounded worldview.

Another benefit in participating in community service is a greater understanding and appreciation for diversity. Appreciating other cultures and breaking down stereotypes is important to becoming a responsible citizen and better person. By participating in a community service project where interaction is required, personal relationships can begin to grow.

These personal relationships help people have informal and consistent interactions that through time, often breakdown negative stereotypes.

These relationships can also facilitate more opinions and viewpoints surrounding various topics that help participants to grow in diversity. 

Stereotypes can be defined as, "believing unfairly that all people or things with a specific characteristic are the same." Stereotypes often reveal themselves in quick judgments based solely off of visible characteristics. These judgments move into a biased opinion when you believe that these judgments are always true. These stereotypes can be harmful to both personal relationships and relationships within the work place.

Community Service helps people to realize that everyone does not fall into these preconceived ideas.

Along with breaking down stereotypes, community service work can assist people in realizing that those they are helping and working with are no different from themselves. 

This realization can lead to empathizing with others. Learning to understand the needs and motivations of others, especially those who live different lives from our own, is an important part of living a productive life. This leads to a view of humanity that can help a person stay free of biased opinions of others and can lead to a more diverse and ultimately more productive and thought provoking life.

Choosing the right strategy:

Civilians have a desire and aptitude to organize themselves apart from government to address the needs in their communities. However, making sure an effort has a positive effect on society requires clear analysis and a strategy. Analysis identifies root causes of problems that project implementation must address.

Individuals, like neighborhoods, enjoy permanent change only if it is an inner one—and the greatest form of community service is encouraging that inner change.

Abraham Kuyper advocates sphere sovereignty, which honors the independence and autonomy of the "intermediate bodies" in society, such as schools, press, business, and the arts. He champions the right of every community to operate its own organizations and manage its own groups, with the foundational belief that parents know what their child really needs, and that local people are more capable of helping fellow locals.

Those who agree with his views perceive community service as a tool of empowerment that can help people achieve better employment and lifestyle, avoiding what they see as destructive decision making for mal-established goals by poorly developed community service efforts.

Amy L. Sherman, in her book Restorers of Hope, suggests that community service planning should be made with the valuable opinion of the local residents, since they have firsthand knowledge of the inside realities of their community's current state. Making them a part of the movement, change or project creates in the members of the community a sense of belonging and hope.

​See also:







Community ProjectPictured below: Teaching Through Community-Based Projects*
* -- Teaching Through Community-Based Projects
By: Mario Guerrero

"In my teaching experience I have come to the conclusion that many college students are unaware of the cultural differences and social issues in their communities. I have also realized that some teachers are often limited in delivering academic content inside the classroom, which might prevent learners from contextualizing the knowledge in real-life situations.

Therefore, helping students understand that there is a relevant relationship between their professional skills and their role as citizens within their communities is important. The purpose of including community-based projects in your syllabi is to instill in students a sense of social responsibility and cultural awareness at an early stage in their professional life.

To accomplish this, it is important to understand the meaning of contextualization, field trips and community-based instruction. Mazzeo et al (Perin, 2011, p. 6) define contextualization as instructional strategies intended to link academic content with its application in a specific context relevant to the students. Additionally, community-based instruction is defined as systematic instruction that integrates community settings with meaningful learning and it is age-appropriate to the skills of the students.

Implementing community-based projects in our classes does not mean organizing sporadic field trips. A field trip does not involve the “doing” because it is generally limited to observation. (CBI Handbook, 2005) Field trips are useful as they help enhance learning outside the classroom. However, they generally lack the possibility for students to learn from social interaction.

GETTING STUDENTS INTO THE COMMUNITY:

One of the goals for my Spanish class was to teach students how to interact at a restaurant using the target language. In addition, students had to learn popular recipes and regional ingredients used in the different Latin American countries. Each group visited different Latino restaurants in their neighborhoods, conducted interviews with cooks, and learned about the differences of ingredients.

It would have been easier to have each group bring a different dish to the classroom and explain its ingredients, but that approach would provide little interaction with their communities. Their evaluation consisted of a lunch at a Cuban restaurant in which students had to discuss their experiences with the cooks, interact with Spanish-speaking waiters, and try the traditional Caribbean dishes.

At the end, students mentioned that this experience not only helped them practice real-life Spanish but they also learned about real Latin American food and people living and working in the city.

The final project for my English class was a theory-based presentation that would improve students’ academic speaking skills. The students are future language teachers who are required to intern in their last two semesters. Therefore, I implemented a community-based project. My students had to compare the theory with the practice and report back to the class.

Each group chose a public school from their own community. Students interacted with school administrators, teachers, and students. They observed the teaching conditions in which a second language is taught. Their final presentations included a reflective analysis about the language theories. Students were aware of the realities of the schools and understood that not all of the proposed theories were applicable in their communities.

SKILLS THAT STUDENTS CAN GAIN FROM A COMMUNITY-BASED PROJECT:

Altruism and Social Awareness – Altruism in education should help students develop a sense of belonging to their communities. In addition, the main objective of these experiences should not only be the improvement of the students’ professional skills but it should raise awareness about the realities of others. As a result, these activities might instill in students a sense of inclusiveness, diversity, belonging, and respect for others.

Teamwork – Using teamwork in your community-based projects will help students improve their interpersonal relationships by empowering them with their own decision-making and problem solving.

Critical Thinking – It is very important to teach students to become critical thinkers. It allows them to make decisions through their own reflection and judgment. Community-based projects give students an opportunity to observe and analyze real-world situations while improving their professional skills and learning from the realities of their community.

Interpersonal Skills – When students work in groups in community-based projects, they learn to move beyond their comfort zone to interact with people from diverse backgrounds to find collective solutions. These activities foster enhanced student interaction, which implies communication, peer-assessment, and continuous feedback.

Mario Guerrero is an assistant professor at the University of Nariño in Colombia and former adjunct professor at Fordham University.
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​Community project From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A community project is a term applied to any community-based project. This covers a wide variety of different areas within a community or a group of networking entities. Projects can cover almost anything, including the most obvious section of concern to any community, the welfare element.

Welfare community projects would for example be, a locally run and locally funded orphanage; a Christmas dinner kitchen for the homeless. Another important sector of importance to the community would be charity. Charitable projects in the community can include, but are not limited to, ecological charities concerned with either the maintenance of green spaces, or in some cases, the prevention of the reduction/removal of green spaces.

An old clothes collection service would also be a community-based charity project. One important subdivision of community projects, and at times overlooked, is those of an economic nature such as LETS. The highlight of economic community projects is what is known as Transition Towns. Most economic community projects are designed at creating some sort of economic autonomy.

It begins when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of peak oil and climate change?

Scope and size:

All community projects are different in some way; the size and scope of these projects is determined firstly by the community they cater to.

According to the definition of a community, a community could be the entire human race or parts of it anywhere on the planet. However, because of phenomena like distance decay or demographic factors such as age group, gender and income that determine social identity of groups, the extent of community-based projects is usually much more limited.








Community Advisory BoardPictured below: Best Practices for Convening a Community Advisory Board*
* - Best Practices for Convening a Community Advisory Board

Funder: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
December 2019 | Infographic

Getting meaningful input from people receiving care is crucial for health care organizations in improving services to better support the needs of patients within the community. A consumer advisory board (CAB) is an effective method for encouraging community members to have a more active role in their health care while enhancing care delivery methods for health systems.

This infographic highlights key considerations for health care systems on how to successfully convene and maintain a consumer advisory board. It was created as a part of the Community Partnership Pilot project, which is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and coordinated through the Complex Care Innovation Lab. See the related blog post, Convening a Consumer Advisory Board: Key Considerations, for more details.

___________________________________________________________________________

A community advisory board (often called a CAB) is a type of advisory board consisting of representatives of the general public who meet with representatives of an institution to relay information between the two groups. CABs are especially associated with clinical research, in which case they review the clinical research ethics associated with the human subject research which a medical research institution conducts. CABs are an aspect of community-based participatory research.

Purpose:

Community advisory boards (CABs) benefit research institutions by providing advice about the efficacy of the informed consent process and the implementation of research protocols. The CAB composition is representative of the community participating in the research being reviewed.

Researchers who consult with CABs get information which they would not otherwise get about the target community demographic which they are researching.

Ethics:

The CAB is intended to be a way to respect the rights of research participants. Research in a community has the potential for group harm, which is distinct from the individual harm which can happen to individuals who participate. 

Because of the risk to communities, researchers have an obligation to community stakeholders to seek community feedback about the research.

Duties of CABs:

CABs and researchers must continually decide which powers to invest in a CAB. Here are some common questions which must be decided:
  1. What interaction should CABs have with institutional review boards?
  2. What education and training should the research institution give to the CAB members to enable them to perform their duties?
  3. To what extent should CABs participate in the development of informed consent processes?
  4. To what extent should CABs participate in developing guidelines to determine whether research participants give sufficient consent?
  5. In emergency situations, to what extent can CABs provide consultation on what response researchers should have to the emergency?
  6. When study participants have ethical problems with the research, to what extent should the CAB directly receive those participants' concerns?
  7. When CABs perceive the inevitable lapses in sufficient protection for research participants which occasionally and naturally occur in any study, what power should the CAB have to direct rectification of this lapse?
  8. To what extent should CABs direct the empowerment of their communities to more fully and beneficially participate in research?

Guidelines:

A community advisory board has whatever duties the members invest in it, but various organizations have suggested that they have certain responsibilities. Besides not knowing what CABs should do, it is difficult to determine what CABs should not do.

Some of the perennial problems with CABs are determining the following: who in a community can serve on a CAB, the extent to which the CAB directs research, and the extent to which the community directs the execution of the research. 

Researchers find that research is more productive and ethical when researchers train, recruit, and integrate members from the population targeted by the research into the research team. In consulting with the community, researchers have to meet with individuals who represent a common culture, have a communication network with the community they represent, and have a system for voicing the community's priorities.

Overseeing genetic research:

In 2000 the National Institute of General Medical Sciences held a conference which defined some CAB duties. Those duties are as follows:
  1. Define community in appropriate and meaningful ways.
  2. Understand the potential benefits and risks of research for communities and community members.
  3. Obtain broad community input for all phases of research.
  4. Respect communities as full partners in research.
  5. Resolve all issues pertaining to tissue samples.
  6. Establish appropriate review mechanisms and procedures.
  7. Facilitate the return of benefits to communities.
  8. Foster education and training in community-based research.
  9. Ensure dissemination of accurate information to the media and the public.
  10. Provide sufficient funds for research and encourage community–researcher partnerships.

Challenges in developing countries:

As part of international development many research institutions conduct medical research in developing countries. When this happens, they often opt to get advice from the local community through a CAB. The process of setting up CABs in developing countries has its own problems.








Building a Better CommunityPictured below: Building Community As If People Mattered* (Forbes)
* ​-  Building Community As If People Mattered

“What kind of America would you like to have?

Instead of the usual electoral horserace questions, a recent focus group of citizens was simply asked about their vision for a better nation. Peggy Noonan, the WSJ columnist who reported the story, reprised the group’s answers--“a solid education system,” “no more war,” “people with joy in their work,” “our country leading again, including in morals"—and then reflected that the respondents were looking back to “when things seemed assumptive of progress.” She noted the comments, unexpectedly, emphasized not individual desires, but rather “hopes [that] were communal, societal.”

In Search Of Hope

I was less surprised than Ms. Noonan. Amidst rapid global economic and social change, as institutions and hierarchies erode, people everywhere are trying to find—or rebuild—communal values, to restore some collective optimism to their lives. It’s happening throughout society: in neighborhoods, towns, businesses, churches.

And they are searching for a new kind of leadership to help with that. Many Americans, looking beyond this toxic election, are wondering about something more universal: how do the best leaders actually succeed in “building community”—whatever the would-be community might be?

The 'How' Of Community Leadership:
That question began my recent conversation with Richard Harwood, a practitioner and thinker who since 1988 has devoted himself to such inquiry. His Harwood Institute for Public Innovation has helped transform thousands of communities around the world, strengthening collective progress among people who share some common purpose.

​Though renewing American rust-belt cities first put his Institute on the map, Rich’s experience has since grown to include  lessons for leaders of many kinds of communities, whether geographical, regional, or virtual; whether the relationships are political, economic, or business strategic.

It Begins—And Ends—With The People:

What unifies it all for Rich Harwood is people: building a community always comes back to the core, its human members. As he explained, unless a leader lives that truth, no progress can ever be sustained.

“But ironically, the more ‘community’ has become important to leaders—as it has in recent years—the more they’ve squeezed out the human element as they try to ‘fix the problems.’

They gloss over what people really care about. A new generation of technocrats has turned community building into a Gantt chart, endless initiatives following a schedule. Even worse, they often frame challenges around their own good—not the common good.”

Turning Outward:

Rich went on to describe how would-be community leaders must “turn outward”—away from themselves, instead focusing horizontally on members, their relationships, and their collective yearnings for progress. “Great leaders build community from the outside in, talking and listening to people in their real lives. They abandon the heroic ego of directing top down.”

As we spoke further, a deeper conceptual infrastructure of Harwood’s accumulated experience emerged--about leadership mindset and skills, how to diagnose the state of a community, establishing the right context (creating “public capital”), and promoting a “ripple effect” that encourages other leaders, groups and citizens to join in.

Six lessons for community leaders seemed particularly distinctive:

Hope And Understanding:

1.Your most important job is to help people have hope, and believe in the possibility of progress.

“Members of a struggling community may talk about problems, but what motivates them is hope for a better life, and belief that they might somehow get there. Great leaders will acknowledge challenges—but they rapidly pivot to summon a ‘can-do’ spirit among as many members as possible. Nothing’s more important than sparking a sense that if people work together, they will succeed.”

2. You earn credibility as a leader through authentic understanding of the community itself.

Instead of raw power, Harwood’s approach stresses leadership credibility: becoming trusted as someone who truly understands the opportunities, traditions, networks and relationships which give life to a community. A good leader doesn’t mandate; he or she co-creates.

“Regrettably,” Rich explained, “’community understanding’ often gets defined as data—a poverty rate, school drop-out statistics, etc. Of course data is useful—but it can crowd out what’s really on people’s minds. A leader must combine data with ‘public knowledge’: what people are feeling, talking about, and aspiring to, even if those collective feelings are out of sight.”

“A few years ago, we worked in Mobile County, Alabama, to help accelerate school reform that had been bogged down ever since the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs Board of Education. Polarizing race issues stymied progress: many whites blamed bad schools on unwillingness of blacks to improve their lives, while many blacks felt the root cause was an implicit effort to maintain local segregation. The data highlighted the stagnant student test results, low graduation rates, declining spending, etc.”

“But when we brought together the various community and civic groups, a steering committee formed to engage citizens about their shared aspirations. Local leaders were surprised to learn that white rural people felt just as neglected educationally as members of the black community.

The conversations sparked interest for more people, both black and white, to get involved, working together to improve the schools. This new ‘public knowledge’ stimulated critical collaboration that ultimately led to increased educational funding, new math and science programs, and improved teaching and test results.”

Does Political Identity Matter?

“How important is political identity?” I asked. “Do leaders have to be ‘the right color’ or ethnic origin, or have deep personal experience in a community?”

“Of course those things help—but they’re not required. Most important is that you have the trust and right relationships—and achieve real understanding of people involved. You also need courage to face what will be tough challenges from some of those same people—and demonstrate back to them you really care about helping the community build itself up.

Leadership can’t be about you; it has to be about everybody else.”

Building Momentum:

3. Build momentum by first getting people to work together and then helping others see their progress.

Harwood prioritizes “getting people on the right trajectory”—starting and then building momentum with achievable, hope-inspiring collective work.

“Another misunderstood community leadership practice is ‘creating vision.’ Those exercises can become blue-sky, untethered from reality. People get discouraged when there’s no forward movement. Great leaders start by leading community conversations, and then guide members towards valuable but near-term achievable goals. They build on that progress over time.”

“Mobile County again serves to illustrate. The leaders there laid the foundation for measurable school reform, beginning with local discussions about people’s shared aspirations. Those first steps mobilized a sense of common purpose and public support for more educational funding; that in turn allowed the leaders to involve the broader community in making concrete reforms. As more people worked together, and saw initial success, still others joined in.

​4. Foster “can-do” narratives,” not disconnected storytelling.

Storytelling has become a new pillar of leadership, but Rich Harwood explained how it can sometimes be counter-productive. “People don’t need isolated tales of nostalgia or stories that don’t lead to action. Much more energizing is when leaders encourage what I call “can-do narratives”—accounts collaboratively constructed by members that are coherent, positive and forward-looking.

The best of these evolve organically—laying out the trajectory people see themselves following to achieve longer-term success together.”

“I saw the power of such narratives years ago, in Battle Creek Michigan. Teams collaborating on an initial pilot project constructed a story for one of their retreats, like a Dr. Seuss kids’ book.

This ‘Battle Creek Fable,’ as it came to be called, confessed why they had been struggling, and what they now wanted to achieve to improve local education, healthcare, and social services.”

“They actually acted it out as a little play at the retreat, and then later shared it more widely, as a public document. As they updated the narrative every few months, it became a chronicle about themselves--how they overcame initial barriers, and then began to succeed—and where they next wanted to go. It successfully engaged others to become part of the movement.”

Everyone At The Table?

5. Lead with “pragmatic selectivity”

Another community-building myth Harwood explodes is “always getting everyone around the table.”

​“If you pursue that too literally, it can kill momentum-- and people lose hope. An effective community leader is ruthless about making choices—who to ‘run with’ (the right partners, citizens most committed to real change, etc.), where to productively start collective efforts, how fast to move, etc.”

“The right balance is to be ‘opportunistically inclusive’—work with whoever is authentically willing to collaborate on goals most people agree on. In the Bible, Abraham had a tent that was open on all sides—so that travelers from everywhere could come in.

The good community leader, like Abraham, must be ready to accept new travelers once they are ready to join the collective effort. You should never exclude anyone who legitimately wants to help make progress—but the leader must avoid getting drawn into arguments with naysayers who harp on problems instead of solutions.”

Virtual Or Not:

6. Lead even more intentionally if the community is virtual.

Over the years Harwood’s practice has expanded into helping leaders of regional networks, extended virtual partnerships, and larger, technology-enabled communities. He emphasizes that community-building leadership, whatever the setting, follows most of the same principles that work in smaller towns and cities.

“Building hope, creating momentum for progress, being selective in where and how you work to create initial trust—the practices are essentially the same. But at greater scale, or in virtual situations, the leader does have to be even more intentional, almost exaggerated at times--to help people work together when they don’t know one another or even see one another.”

“With virtual, the typical pitfall is over-emphasizing technology, instead of people’s hopes and aspirations. Remember, virtual communities will likely not be people’s primary source of relationships—and it’s easier for them to opt out.”

“Larger, and virtual community-building calls for particularly focused leadership: to really understand the public knowledge across members, and being clever in packaging it so people understand one another’s deeper aspirations.

The leader must also take extra care to nourish the broader context that fosters collective action—opportunities for people to collaborate on something winnable, encouraging face-to-face relationships whenever possible, creating more easily understood narratives when members are online."

Why All This Now?

I closed by asking Rich why building better communities today really mattered—and why it mattered so much to him.

“Everywhere I look, people are losing hope. They see a status quo that isn’t working. We’ve come to an inflection point, too many people sensing we can’t go on like this."

"But at whatever level or in whatever domain you’re living and working, the greatest source of progress through history has always been ‘the community.’ Tomorrow’s best leaders must do whatever they can to rekindle the can-do spirit of that fundamentally human invention. It’s the challenge that still wakes me up every morning.”

​Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. 

Brook Manville

Brook Manville is Principal of Brook Manville LLC, consulting on strategy and organization, with special interest in networks, learning, and leadership.
​___________________________________________________________________________

​​Community building (Wikipedia):

Community building is a field of practices directed toward the creation or enhancement of community among individuals within a regional area (such as a neighborhood) or with a common need or interest. It is often encompassed under the fields of community organizing, community organization, community work, and community development.

A wide variety of practices can be utilized for community building, ranging from simple events like potlucks and small book clubs, to larger–scale efforts such as mass festivals and building construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.

Activists and community workers engaged in community building efforts in industrialized nations see the apparent loss of community in these societies as a key cause of social disintegration and the emergence of many harmful behaviors. They may see building community as a means to address perceived social inequality and injustice, individual and collective well-being, and the negative impacts of otherwise disconnected and/or marginalized individuals.

​Re-Building:

Leadership, geography, history, socio-economic status all are traditionally used to explain success of community and its well-being. 

Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone finds that a community's well-being is dependent on the quality of relationships among the citizens of that community. He refers to this as social capital. Social capital creates a sense of belonging thus enhancing the overall health of a community. Putnam goes on to identify and examine the decline of social capital in America. Pressures of time and money, suburbanization, the effect of electronic entertainment, and perhaps most importantly the generational change appear to have all been contributing factors in the decline of social capital.

"We must learn to view the world through a social capital lens," said Lew Feldstein of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and co-chair of the Saguaro Seminar. "We need to look at front porches as crime fighting tools, treat picnics as public health efforts and see choral groups as occasions of democracy. We will become a better place when assessing social capital impact becomes a standard part of decision-making."...

Peter Block in the book Community: The Structure of Belonging (pg. 29) states "The context that restores community is one of possibility, generosity, and gifts, rather than one of problem solving, fear, and retribution."

This context allows a new conversation to take place. It requires its citizens to act authentic by choosing to own and exercise their power rather than delegating to others what is in the best interest of that community. Focus must be inclusive for all, not just the leaders but each and every citizen of that community.

While building a community, beliefs are at the base of that community. Some foundational beliefs are: 
Sense of Community:
Main article: Sense of Community

"Community is something we do together. It's not just a container," said sociologist David Brain. Infrastructure, roads, water, sewer, electricity and housing provides the shell within which people live. It is within this shell that people do the things together that allow them to sustain livelihoods. These include but are not limited to education, health care, business, recreation, and spiritual celebration. People working together with shared understandings and expectations are what provide a place of strong community.

Defining Community:

There are several ways that people may form a community, which subsequently influence the way a community may be strengthened:
  1. Locus, a sense of place, referred to a geographic entity ranging from neighborhood to city size, or a particular milieu around which people gathered (such as a church or recreation center).
  2. Sharing common interests and perspectives, referred to common interests and values that could cross-geographic boundaries.
  3. Joint action, a sense of coherence and identity, included informal common activities such as sharing tasks and helping neighbors, but these were not necessarily intentionally designed to create community cohesion.
  4. Social ties involved relationships that created the ongoing sense of cohesion.
  5. Diversity referring not primarily to ethnic groupings, but to the social complexity within communities in which a multiplicity of communities co-exist.[5]

Regardless of the type of community that’s formed, it’s possible to perform community-building and make a difference. The way that community-building takes place varies and depends on the factors listed above. There are many activities that communities use to strengthen themselves.

Community Building Activities:

Community Gardening:
Main article: Community gardening

Community gardening helps to improve neighborhood, build a sense of community, and connect to the environment by planting and harvesting fresh produce and plants.

Community Technology Centers:
Main article: Community Technology Center

Community Technology Centers (CTCs), such as those modeled under the Free Geek franchise activist model, have proven to be loci of support and organization for communities.

Much like community gardens and other functional communities, CTCs have been found to:
CTCs have also fostered connections between glocalized eco-social issues such as environmental destruction and public health and welfare through the re-use of technology and ethical electronic waste (e-waste) stewardship.

Sharing of Gifts:

Music, dance, gardening, craftsmanship, mechanics, any skills or knowledge shared provide excellent opportunities for community-building. Service oriented activities invite individuals to strengthen relationships and build rapport as they help one another. The sharing of gifts strengthens the community as a whole and lays a foundation for future successes in the community’s endeavors due to the overall well-being and unity produced.

Activism:

Activism (different than community organizing) is taking action to produce social change.
 The uniting of communities with an activist perspective may produce a social movement.

Community Organizing:

Organizing is a major way that communities unite. When the term “organizing” is used, it usually means that a group of less powerful people is banding together to solve a problem.

There are several means by which communities are organizing. The most recent is through social media. 

Community organizing is distinguishable from activism if activists engage in social protest without a strategy for building power or for making specific social changes. According to Phil Brown, community organizing is the vehicle that brings the social cohesion and broad coherence to neighborhoods and municipalities, which in turn produces successful environmental justice actions.

Community-Building and the Environment:

Community building efforts may lay the groundwork for larger organizing efforts around issues, such as the negative environmental and health effects of toxic waste pollution, eco-social justice, ecological justice, environmental justice, and the unequal burden and impacts of such effects on oppressed and marginalized communities.

Prior emphases on conservation, preservation, endangered species, rainforest destruction, ozone layer depletion, acid rain—as well as other national global concerns—often had no perceived relevance to individuals and communities with privileged immunity to such effects. These emphases kept the environmental movement a largely middle class and upper middle class movement.

However, due to the spread of negative eco-social problems and burdens to privileged areas within the Global North, glocalized perspectives have emerged, as well as organizing practices in line with these ideas (see alter-globalization). Groups may be as influential as the United Nations  or as small and local as neighborhoods.

The Natural Resources Defense Council lists many publicly organized community-building groups created to decrease the ecological footprint and reduce the environmental impact of humans.

See also:







Sustainable CommunitiesPictured below: Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure (EPA)
Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure (see image above: BY the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency).

This Guide Can Help Communities Better Manage Storm water While Achieving Other Environmental, Public Health, Social, and Economic Benefits

Communities across the country want to protect their water quality while also getting the greatest possible benefit from every investment they make.

Many are conserving, restoring, or enhancing natural areas while incorporating trees, rain gardens, vegetated roofs, and other practices that mimic natural systems into developed areas to manage rainwater where it falls.

These types of approaches, known as "green infrastructure," are an integral component of sustainable communities because they can help communities protect the environment and human health while providing other social and economic benefits, allowing communities to achieve more for their money.

Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure: A Guide to Help Communities Better Manage Stormwater While Achieving Other Environmental, Public Health, Social, and Economic Benefits (2014) aims to help local governments, water utilities, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood groups, and other stakeholders integrate green infrastructure strategies into plans that can transform their communities.

Many communities that want to use green infrastructure approaches face technical, regulatory, financial, and institutional obstacles that limit widespread implementation.

​This report is a guide to develop a plan that can overcome these obstacles for neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions of all sizes. It helps stakeholders create a vision for how green infrastructure can enhance their communities—a vision that engages residents and inspires them to take action. It also directs readers to resources that provide more detailed information that can be tailored to communities' particular climate, goals, and circumstances.

This document covers:
  • Strategies that support both sustainable communities and green infrastructure.
  • How to organize stakeholders to develop a sustainable communities and green infrastructure plan.
  • The different components of a sustainable communities and green infrastructure plan.

Learn more: You may need a PDF reader to view some of the files on this page. See EPA’s About PDF page to learn more. ___________________________________________________________________________

Sustainable community (Wikipedia)

The term "sustainable communities" has various definitions, but in essence refers to communities planned, built, or modified to promote sustainable living. Sustainable communities tend to focus on environmental and economic sustainability, urban infrastructure, social equity, and municipal government. The term is sometimes used synonymously with "green cities," "eco-communities," "livable cities" and "sustainable cities."

Different organizations have various understandings of sustainable communities; the term's definition is contested and still under construction.

For example, Burlington, Vermont's Principles of Sustainable Community Development  stress the importance of local control of natural resources and a thriving non-profit sector to a sustainable community.

The Institute for Sustainable Communities outlines how political empowerment and social well-being are also part of the definition. 

Additionally, referring to communities in Shanghai and Singapore, geographer Lily Kong has paired concepts of cultural sustainability and social sustainability alongside environmental sustainability as aspects of sustainable communities. 

Meanwhile, the UK's 2003 Sustainable Communities Plan often abbreviates its definition of sustainable communities as "places where people want to live and work, now and in the future". Addressing the scale of sustainable communities, political scientist Kent Portney points out that the term sustainable communities has been used to refer to a broad variety of places, ranging from neighborhoods to watersheds to cities to multi-state regions.

Etymologically, the term "sustainable community" grew out of the related discourses of "sustainability" and "sustainable development" that gained widespread use among local, national, and international politicians and policymakers in NGOs starting in the late 1980s.

The term originally referred to environmental concerns and was later applied to cities.

​Examples of Sustainable Community initiatives:

The best example of a real Sustainable Community is Saint Michael's Sustainable Community in Costa Rica. The community produces far more food and water then it needs. It uses regenerative agriculture as a base to live in harmony with nature.

Sustainable community initiatives have emerged in neighborhoods, cities, counties, metropolitan planning districts, and watershed districts at different scales pertaining to community needs. These initiatives are driven by various actor groups that have different methods of effectively planning out ways to create sustainable communities. Most often they are implemented by governments and non-profit organizations, but they also involve community members, academics, and create partnerships and coalitions.

Nonprofit organizations help to cultivate local talents and skills, empowering people to become more powerful and more involved in their own communities. Many also offer plans and guidance on improving the sustainability of various practices, such as land use and community design, transportation, energy efficiency, waste reduction, and climate friendly purchasing.

Some government groups will create partnerships where departments will work together using grants to provide resources to communities like clean air and water, community planning, economic development, equity and environmental justice, as well as housing and transportation choices.

Social movements have gathered momentum, spreading sustainable community ideas around the world, not only through example, but also by offering classes and training on sustainable living, permaculture, and local economics.

International initiatives:

United Kingdom:

The Sustainable Communities Plan was launched in 2003 through the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Lacking an official national spatial development plan, the UK employed the Sustainable Communities Plan as a regional development plan targeted at the South East of England. 

Additionally, the plan created the Academy for Sustainable Communities. The £38 billion plan identifies four key growth areas for development and regeneration:
  1. the Thames Gateway, 
  2. Ashford,
  3. Kent, 
  4. London-Stansted-Cambridge-Peterborough (LSCP) and Milton Keynes/South Midlands (MKSM).

Designed during a period that projected sustained economic growth into the future, the plan's implementation has been slowed and disjointed, particularly since the 2008 economic recession. An affordable housing shortage in the UK has also challenged the Plan's implementation.

National initiatives:

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is an interagency partnership between the Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

These departments work together with a mission to “improve access to affordable housing, increase transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment”. 

All three bureaus offer funding opportunities to support communities in areas of clean air and water, community planning, economic development, energy efficiency, equity and environmental justice, as well as housing and transportation choices. The partnership incorporates six principles of livability into its grant-making and program development:
  • Provide more transportation choices
  • Promote equitable, affordable housing
  • Enhance economic competitiveness
  • Support existing communities
  • Coordinate policies and leverage investment
  • Value communities and neighborhoods

Along with working collaboratively, these government agencies also have their own initiatives. The Department of Housing and Development has an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities which features a Sustainable Housing Initiative, aiming at “supporting the construction and rehabilitation of green affordable housing” and does this through programs that retrofit or construct energy efficient homes.

They also work to standardize energy efficiency standards across federal agencies, as well as expand the availability of financing for home energy improvements and multifamily housing.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a Smart Growth Program which conducts research, publishes reports, showcases outstanding communities, and works with communities through grants and technical assistance. 

They also have a Green Communities Program which provides communities with a tool kit of information to help them reach sustainable goals. The tool kit is arranged in a five-step program which allows communities to:
  • Develop community assessments of their current conditions
  • Formulate trend analyses that answers the question “Where are we going?” in the face of no intervention
  • Create vision statements of where the community sees itself in the future
  • Establish action plans about what programs and initiatives will help the community reach its goals
  • Access tools to implement action plans

The Department of Transportation has a Livability Initiative which issues “grants to eligible recipients for planning, vehicle purchases, facility construction, operations, and other purposes”, with numerous goals, including the improvement of surface transportation, providing public transit on Indian reservations, providing access to disadvantaged communities, etc.

Case Studies from the Partnership for Sustainable Communities:

The Euclid Corridor in Cleveland:

Once a thriving place of business and home to the wealthy and elite, Euclid Avenue in Cleveland had seen a decline in commerce following the Great Depression. During this economic downturn, Cleveland became a shrinking city as many of its residents moved and homes were turned into boarding houses or abandoned altogether.

After decades of work by city leaders and residents to revitalize this part of the city, the bus line HealthLine debuted in 2008. This bus line increased ridership and helped The Euclid Corridor begin to see the redevelopment of abandoned properties as well as investment in development of commerce, to the tune of $4.3 billion. This created thousands of square feet of retail space and thousands of jobs.

The success of the revitalization of the Euclid Corridor is due in large part to engaged community leaders, community members, and NGO's like MidTown Cleveland who worked on ensuring that there was a variety of housing investments. EPA assisted with the redevelopment of abandoned space through their brownfield assessment grants and HUD provided mortgage insurance on properties to aid in the development of Euclid Avenue.

Greenville, South Carolina's Westside:

Following a shift from the cotton production that once thrived in the west end of Greenville, South Carolina, this part of the city began to see a flight of its residents and with it the abandonment and decay of its buildings and facilities, higher crime rates, and more low-income households.

In 2010, HUD and DOT awarded the city $1.8 million to support a three-year planning initiative which sought to improve affordable housing, transportation, and increase economic development. The HUD provided a loan to encourage economic growth, specifically through the conversion of an old cotton warehouse into an area of retail shops, offices, and restaurants known as West End Market.

The success of West End Market led to 230 building permits being issued around the area in a three-year period, resulting in a successful arts district that created jobs as well as drew tourists and locals. EPA assisted with the redevelopment of abandoned space through $200,000 in brownfield assessment grants which allowed for the city to facilitate clean up, or initiate redevelopment.

The city also worked with the Federal Highway Administration in demolishing an unnecessary bridge which allowed for the development of a recreational area with a cross bridge, waterfalls, and walking paths, known as Falls Park on the Reedy.

In 2005, a mixed-use development was constructed across from Falls Park with a hotel, apartments, restaurants, and retail and office spaces to help further spark economic growth in the area

Seattle's South Lake Union Neighborhood:

With investments in transportation, affordable housing, and green space, Seattle's South Lake Union has transformed from a place of freeway traffic, abandoned warehouses, and parking lots to an economically flourishing neighborhood.

An integral part to this transformation was the creation of a street car service, partially funded by the Federal Transit Administration. The streetcar encouraged both Amazon.com and Microsoft to locate campuses in the South Lake Union neighborhood, bringing with it jobs and investment in residential space.

The City of Seattle is proposing a zoning change to promote affordable housing and attract market rate development. HUD provided grants to fund building and support services for the chronically homeless, adults and veterans recovering from addiction, and homeless with mental health issues and substance abuse problems.

HUD also supplied $5.7 million towards the construction of a senior housing facility. To address the problems with the neighborhoods freeways and lack of sidewalks and crosswalks, a $30 million grant was issued by the DOT to help build crosswalks over 12 intersections, widen sidewalks, add bicycle lanes, as well as beautify the space through the addition of landscaping and trees,

State initiatives:

Maryland:

The state of Maryland passed a Sustainable Communities Act in 2010 with the goal of revitalizing and promoting reinvestment in Maryland's older communities as well working to promote “equitable, affordable housing by expanding energy-efficient housing choices for people of all ages, incomes, races, and ethnicity to increase mobility and lower the combined cost of housing and transportation”.

The law also created the Sustainable Communities Tax Credit Program which promotes private investment in the restoration and development of historic sites. Thanks in part to the Sustainable Communities Tax Credit Program, the neighborhood of Remington, Baltimore was able to refurbish an old tin factory into a space for offices and residences, which led to the development of other properties as well as homes, which increased use and population for the neighborhood.
​
In 2013 the Maryland General Assembly passed the Sustainable Communities Tax Increment Financing Designation and Financing Law. This law allows for Maryland counties and municipalities to use funds generated from increased property tax values to fund improvement projects in sustainable communities. Sample projects include expanding sidewalks, the development of tree planting on streets and parks, as well as improvements to water and sewer infrastructure to help encourage economic growth and improve quality of life.

California:

The state of California passed the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, also known as SB 375. The law aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through transportation, housing, and land use planning.

Under the SB 375, the state is broken up into Metropolitan Planning Organizations which are each responsible for developing Sustainable Community Strategies that will help the state reach its goal of reduced emissions.

These strategies are then evaluated by the California Environmental Protection Agency's Air Resources Board. 

Under the Sustainable Community Strategy, the city of Sacramento plans to double transit service and increase bike lanes, offering more transportation choices and reducing vehicle emissions.

The city of San Diego also plans to increase funding towards more transportation choices as well as promote more multi-family housing near high transit areas.

The Southern California Strategies include transit expansion, developing housing closer to public transportation, increasing funding for biking and pedestrians, and the creation of jobs, with most being near public transit.

City government initiatives:

Cities are defined as jurisdictional units that have small divisions of government within them.

These divisions of government have the authority to affect environmental and ecological results Cities are especially important in initiating sustainable communities because they have local authorities that “have political power and credibility to take initiatives to access and deploy resources in ways reflecting local conditions that allows them the capacity to manage and lead urban development for the good of the environment.”

It is also necessary to implement sustainable communities in countries that are industrialized because cities are where most environmental and social problems dwell.

When looking at and comparing sustainable cities certain indicators may be used:
​ The 34 elements inside “Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously" can also be used to determine whether a city is considered sustainable or not.

City examples:

The city of San Francisco uses the Precautionary Principal as a framework to develop laws for a healthier and more just city. The precautionary principal gives more power to community members by allowing them to stand up against corporations in their neighborhoods and leaves the burden of proof to corporations instead of community members.

Companies must prove that their endeavors are harmless to the community instead of the community having to prove they have been harmed by company endeavors. This allows for a sustainable community as environmental justice and social justice are created.

The city of Quebec: to create a sustainable community through political involvement has dedicated studies to discovering why citizens are or are not politically active. Studies from Quebec have shown that citizens’ internal and external efficacy is a large part in determining participation in politics.

When citizens lack the internal belief that one can make change in government and the external belief that the government will make changes according to citizen concerns, political participation dwindles as citizens believe no change will occur. When becoming politically active, a citizen takes into account the history of the city government, the government's actions, and government interactions with other citizens.

After noting the city's sustainability level it is important to note what kinds of communities are targeted and how they are affected through these programs and what kinds of strategies are being used to try to create and transform sustainable communities.

Non-Profit and NGO sector:

The Institute for Sustainable Communities created by former Vermont Governor, Madeleine M. Kunin, leads community based projects around the globe that address environmental, economic, and social issues. Many of these groups help to cultivate local talents and skills, empowering people to become more powerful and involved in their own communities.

​Many also offer plans and guidance on improving the sustainability of various practices, such as land use and community design, green transportation, energy efficiency, waste reduction, and climate friendly purchasing.

The Global Integrity Project is focused on bringing together top scientists and thinkers from around the world in order to analyze the problems of inequality among humankind. These thinkers examine economic and ethical issues faced in protecting and enhancing our environments and make recommendations on restoration techniques that aid in promoting social justice. They also call for a major and imperative paradigm shift in order to ensure good quality of life for many future generations.

Sustainable Seattle is a non-profit organization which has created regional indicators for sustainability through grassroots activism and has become a world leader in these sustainability indicators.

Sustainable Seattle has printed newsletters on a wide range of sustainable community topics, from building to recycling and more, and they are believed to be the first “sustainable community” organization, founded in 1991. There are now hundreds of “sustainable community” organizations across the USA 

Social movement initiatives:

The Take Back Your Time Movement, led by John de Graaf, focuses on the concept of working fewer hours and devoting more time to living a healthy lifestyle. The movement suggests that allowing shorter work days and longer vacations would in turn help better distribute work, while also reducing stress and making for healthier living. Additionally, people would have more free time to make more rewarding and sustainable choices for themselves.

The Voluntary Simplicity Movement or Simple Living movement emphasizes reducing one's material possessions and desires and increasing self-sufficiency through skills such as gardening and DIY.

The Voluntary Simplicity Movement suggests that one should focus on cultivating their own best inner being rather than focus on making material gains and wealth. It also promotes activism within the community to create engaged, educated citizens.

The Degrowth movement is based on anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas, focusing on reducing consumption and promoting happy, healthy lifestyles in non-consumptive fashions. Main aspects of Degrowth include more equal distribution of workload and sharing work, consuming less, and setting aside time for personal and cultural growth through the arts and creativity 

​Movements such as ecovillages are gathering momentum, spreading sustainable community ideas around the world, teaching through example and also offering classes and training on sustainable living, permaculture, and local economics.

Ecovillages seek to integrate themselves harmlessly into the ecosystem surrounding them, so as to live and interact in a way that is sustainable and supportive of the natural world 

Challenges and critiques:

Sustainable communities, both as individual projects and as a whole, have faced challenges impeding their development and have been met with criticism.

Sustainable communities projects have struggled to take hold for:
  • poor economic conditions and inaccessible housing markets: in the UK's Sustainable Communities Plan, the economic downturn of 2008 has led to a general shortage of housing and affordable housing in particular, which run contrary to the plan's premises of livable communities.

Projects have been critiqued for:
  • lacking a well-developed environmental justice framework: urban and environmental policy planner Julian Agyeman has written about the "narrow focus" of civic environmentalism that does not take "social justice" into account, and the need for sustainable communities to be democratic and collaborate with the environmental justice movement.
  • promoting a securitization agenda: British geographer Mike Raco argues that the UK's Sustainable Communities Plan employs the discourse of sustainability as "a series of potentially repressive and counter-productive policy measures.".
  • accommodating to neoliberal economic systems instead of confronting them: while some rationales for sustainable communities conflict with market-driven agendas, economic growth characterizes the means and ends of some initiatives. Additionally, sustainable communities reject the notion that development itself is fundamentally socially divisive or environmentally destructive.

Education:

While there are a variety of graduate degrees at universities that touch on sustainability as it related to urban planning and environmental resources, only a few degree program programs exist that train students in the theory and practice of sustainable communities. The most notable examples are:
See also:







Community-based Education Pictured below: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, Exploratory P20 Research Center grant
Community education, also known as community-based education or community learning & development, is an organization's programs to promote learning and social development work with individuals and groups in their communities using a range of formal and informal methods.

A common defining feature is that programs and activities are developed in dialogue with communities and participants. The purpose of community learning and development is to develop the capacity of individuals and groups of all ages through their actions, the capacity of communities, to improve their quality of life. Central to this is their ability to participate in democratic processes.

Community education encompasses all those occupations and approaches that are concerned with running education and development programmes within local communities, rather than within educational institutions such as schools, colleges and universities.

The latter is known as the formal education system, whereas community education is sometimes called informal education. It has long been critical of aspects of the formal education system for failing large sections of the population in all countries and had a particular concern for taking learning and development opportunities out to poorer areas, although it can be provided more broadly.

There are a myriad of job titles and employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental organizations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies. Schools, colleges and universities may also support community learning and development through outreach work within communities.

The community schools movement has been a strong proponent of this since the sixties. Some universities and colleges have run outreach adult education programs within local communities for decades. Since the seventies the prefix word ‘community’ has also been adopted by several other occupations from youth workers and health workers to planners and architects, who work with more disadvantaged groups and communities and have been influenced by community education and community development approaches.

Community educators have over many years developed a range of skills and approaches for working within local communities and in particular with disadvantaged people. These include less formal educational methods, community organizing and group work skills.

Since the 1960s and 1970s through the various anti poverty programs in both developed and developing countries, 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 especially political power and the need to mobilize people power to effect social change.

Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Friere and his focus upon this work also being about politicizing the poor.

In the history of community education and community learning and development, the UK has played a significant role in hosting the two main international bodies representing community education and community development. These being the International Community Education Association, which was for many years based at the Community Education Development Centre based in Coventry UK.

ICEA and CEDC have now closed, and the International Association for Community Development, which still has its HQ in Scotland.

In the 1990s there was some thought as to whether these two bodies might merge. The term community learning and development has not taken off widely in other countries. Although community learning and development approaches are recognized internationally.

These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organizations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and EU.

In the UK:

In the UK, the term community learning and development has now been widely adopted as describing a discrete employment sector of occupations concerned with outreach education and development work in local communities. In 1999, a UK-wide organization responsible for setting professional training standards for education and development practitioners working within local communities was established.

This organization was called PAULO – the National Training Organisation for Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire.) It was formally recognized by David Blunket, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in the New Labour Government in January 1999. It brought together a range of occupational interests under a single national training standards body, these being, adult education, youth work, 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 all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK. This was the first time that the informal education occupations across the UK had ever come together with the common purpose of creating a publicly recognized occupational sector, in the way that school teachers or college lecturers had long been publicly and officially recognised.

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. In effect this brought together for the first time two traditions.

The former group of occupations – adult educators, youth workers and community education workers had tended to focus upon the provision of informal education support for individuals and groups within communities. They had always seen their work as being educational. The latter group – community workers, community development workers and development educators had tended to focus upon the socio-economic and environmental development of those communities.

Both sets of occupations recognized that they shared very similar values, knowledge base and skill sets and that what brought them together was a common commitment to supporting learning and social action.

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 set of professional approaches to their work.

In 2002 the New Labour Government announced that it wished to cluster NTOs, of which there were over 50 covering a wide range of occupations across the UK labor market, under a smaller number of what they called Sector Skills Councils. A Sector Skills Council was formed called the Lifelong Learning UK Sector Skills Council. PAULO became one of five discrete pillars within LLUK, the others being the former NTOs for Further Education, for Universities, for Library and information Services and for Work Based Education.

Over nearly a decade LLUK did a large amount of labour market mapping, as well as setting standards for the professional training of people working in the CLD area and generally promoted the identity of this sector across wider UK public policies and the public, non governmental and private sector employers.

All Sector Skills Councils in the UK including LLUK were abolished by the Conservative/Liberal coalition Government in 2011 and at the time of writing it is uncertain as to whether a single body representing the professional community learning and development sector will be sustained. The Community and Youth Workers Union which is part of the Unite Union in the UK played the lead role in improving employee’s conditions across the sector but never succeeded in representing all employees within the CLD sector and is not widely represented across all parts of the UK.

The Scottish Government has continued to recognize community learning and development as a discrete employment sector, and has for over a decade supported CLD training for people wishing to work professionally in this area. There is a team of HMI (Her Majesties Inspectors) to inspect the quality of delivery by employers.

In 2007 the Scottish Government established a Scottish Standards Council for Community Learning and Development. This organization oversees quality standards in the professional training of staff working in this field, including the validation and endorsement of professional training courses and is introducing a professional registration scheme for such qualified practitioners. It has continued much of the work of the former LLUK as it operated in Scotland.

At the present time similar CLD Standards Councils have not been set up in other parts of the UK and it does appear that the sector outside Scotland is once again becoming more fragmented. Unlike the formal education sector there is virtually no legislation in the UK underpinning the need to provide and fund community learning and development.

Consequently, it has been vulnerable to cuts in public expenditure due to the recession, particularly projects that were seen as too radical.

National priorities:

Three national priorities have been developed for community learning and development in Scotland:

Achievement through learning for adults: Raising standards of achievement in learning for adults through community-based lifelong learning opportunities incorporating the core skills of literacy, numeracy, communications, working with others, problem solving and information communications technology (ICT).

Achievement through learning for young people Engaging with young people to facilitate their personal, social and educational development and enable them to gain a voice, influence and place in society.

Achievement through building community capacity: Building community capacity and influence by enabling people to develop the confidence, understanding and skills required to influence decision making and service delivery.

Principles and competences:

Competent CLD workers will ensure that their work supports social change and social justice and is based on the values of CLD. Their approach is collaborative, anti-discriminatory and equalities-focused and they work with diverse individuals, communities of place or interest when this is or is not appropriate.

Central to their practice is challenging discrimination and its consequences and working with individuals and communities to shape learning and development activities that enhance quality of life and sphere of influence. They have good interpersonal and listening skills and their practice demonstrates that they value and respect the knowledge, experience and aspirations of those involved.

The Scottish Government have introduced the following set of principles of which community learning and development related activities should be based on:
  1. Empowerment – increasing the ability of individuals and groups to influence issues that affect them and their communities;
  2. Participation – supporting people to take part in decision making;
  3. Inclusion, equality of opportunity and anti-discrimination – recognising that some people may need additional support to overcome the barriers they face;
  4. Self-determination – supporting the right of people to make their own choices; and
  5. Partnership – recognising that many agencies can contribute to CLD to ensure resources are used effectively.

Wisconsin Model:

A philosophical base for developing Community Education programs is provided through the five components of the Wisconsin Model of Community Education. The model provides a process framework for local school districts to implement or strengthen community education. 

A set of Community Education Principles was developed by Larry Horyna and Larry Decker for the National Coalition for Community Education in 1991  These include:
  1. Self-determination: Local people are in the best position to identify community needs and wants. Parents, as children's first and most important teachers, have both a right and a responsibility to be involved in their children's education.
  2. Self-help: People are best served when their capacity to help themselves is encouraged and enhanced. When people assume ever-increasing responsibility for their own well being, they acquire independence rather than dependence.
  3. Leadership Development: The identification, development, and use of the leadership capacities of local citizens are prerequisites for ongoing self-help and community improvement efforts.
  4. Localization: Services, programs, events, and other community involvement opportunities that are brought closest to where people live have the greatest potential for a high level of public participation. Whenever possible, these activities should be decentralized to locations of easy public access.
  5. Integrated Delivery of Services: Organizations and agencies that operate for the public good can use their limited resources, meet their own goals, and better serve the public by establishing close working relationships with other organizations and agencies with related purposes.
  6. Maximum Use of Resources: The physical, financial, and human resources of every community should be interconnected and used to their fullest if the diverse needs and interests of the community are to be met.
  7. Inclusiveness: The segregation or isolation of people by age, income, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or other factors inhibits the full development of the community. Community programs, activities, and services, should involve the broadest possible cross section of community residents.
  8. Responsiveness: Public institutions have a responsibility to develop programs and services that respond to the continually changing needs and interests of their constituents.
  9. Lifelong Learning: Learning begins at our birth and continues until death. Formal and informal learning opportunities should be available to residents of all ages in a wide variety of community settings.

Role of the professional:

The role of a community learning and development professional depends somewhat on the career path followed. For example, someone working with young people may have different priorities than someone working with adults; however, the outcomes are very similar in a sense that both will be aiming to promote a more socially just and equal society.

Community learning and development is a vast field of work and the range of job categories is wide and may include the following: Youth Information Worker, Detached Youth Worker, Community Arts Worker, Community Capacity Worker, Local Authority Community Planning Officer, etc.

Community learning and development workers should see themselves as working with people, rather than for them. Empathy is crucial to understanding the issues faced by those they work with and it is important that they engage in a way that does not intimidate people or place the worker in a position of looking down on those they work with.

The role of a Community learning and development worker is largely different from the role of a formal educator such as a teacher. Community learning and development workers do not follow a curriculum, as they allow the people they work with to form their own way of learning and each individual is believed to have the ability to reach their full potential in life.

A community learning and development approach is arguably a more effective way of learning as every individual has their own unique way to learn and community learning and development workers look for the best possible method that suits the individual. Community learning and development approaches are gradually being adopted in schools to some extent and many other agencies and using a community learning and development approach in their work.

In Canada, a university in Alberta has created a Community-based Bachelor of Education program to prepare teachers for rural community education, making it the first university program in Canada that aims at preparing teachers for rural community education.

Qualifications:

Professional community educators or community learning and development workers usually hold a professional degree in community education or community learning and development, depending on the course offered at the university from which they graduate.

In Scotland, qualifications may be Approved by the Standards Council for Community Learning and Development. This means that the course has been assessed by a group of peers - an Approval Panel. The course must have a practice element totalling 40% of the course to gain Approval. More details on the Approval Process and a list of Approved qualifications are available on the Standards Council website www.cldstandardscouncil.org.uk In order to gain entrance to this course, a history of voluntary work is usually desirable.

Many of those working in the field of community learning and development will be doing so voluntarily. These people are usually encouraged to complete a work-place based alternative to the full-time degree course. Others in paid positions may hold qualifications relevant to the field. These people will also be encouraged to study for a degree in community education.

Some university institutions offer post-graduate degrees in community education such as MA, MSc, PGDip, PGCert, etc.

Participatory democracy:

Youth participation:

In countries where democratic governments exist, people are encouraged to vote for someone to represent them. In today's society there is a dwindling interest in politics from our younger generation and this could have a negative effect on our democracy and political system in years to come. Community learning and development has the potential to encourage young people to become more interested in politics and helping them influence decisions that affect their lives.

In many parts of the world, youth parliament-style organizations have been set up to allow young people to debate issues that affect them and others in their community. Young people engage with these organizations voluntarily and are sometimes elected using a democratic system of voting. Young people are at the heart of these organizations and are usually involved in the management and development. The majority of these organizations are facilitated and staffed by workers trained in community learning and development; however, staff role is mainly to facilitate and be supportive but not intrusive.

These organizations allow young people to gain a voice, influence decision makers who affect their lives and provide them with a sense of self-worth and a place in society.

In the United Kingdom, examples of these organizations include the United Kingdom Youth Parliament (UKYP); in Scotland, the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP); in Wales the Children & Young People's Assembly for Wales; and in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Youth Forum. In Canada, examples include Youth Parliament of Manitoba (YPM), Saskatchewan Youth Parliament (SYP), TUXIS Parliament of Alberta (TUXIS), and British Columbia Youth Parliament (BCYP).

​Parental participation:

Cultural divides and deficit thinking creates mutual distrust between marginalized parents and schools which in turn creates barriers to active parental involvement of marginalized parents in the education of their children. 

Researches also show that parents of high socio-economic status play active and direct role in the education of their children and are more likely to influence school policies that affects their children's schooling whereas parents of low socio-economic status play indirect roles in the education of their children and are less likely to influence school policies that affects their children's schooling. 

The gap between parents' educational involvement among parents from higher socio-economic status and parents from lower socio-economic status results in a more personalized education that caters for the needs of children from higher socio-economic backgrounds and more alienating and generic education systems/policies for students from low socio-economic backgrounds.

The following practices are necessary for parent and community participation in the education of their wards to be effective; students come to school healthy and ready to learn, parents assist schools with financial and or material support, there are frequent communications between parents and school authorities, parents have meaningful authorities in the schools and they also assist in the teaching of their children.

Parents' home based educational involvement such as creating an enabling learning environment at home, helping their children with their assignments, helping their children develop cognitive skills and other school skills and motivating their children to do well in school supports student success.

Researches show that multimodal and effective migrant parental involvement in the education of their children increases the test scores of such students and also shows strong student success even after academic abilities and socio-economic status are taken into consideration.

School officials' racial stereotypes , class stereotypes, biases and attitudes regarding parental involvement in the education of their children hinders school officials from involving parents as partners in the education of their children.

Also, bureaucracies in the public education systems hinders parents from advocating for changes that would benefit their children. Formally organized parental associations in schools that seeks to increase parental involvement, ignore the cultural and socio-economic needs of minorities, thereby contributing to the barriers of parental involvement, especially for marginalized parents.

Research shows that high number of marginalized parents do not actively engage in their children's schooling. There is also a wide gap between the rhetoric of best parental involvement practices and actual parental involvement practices. 

Effective parental involvement in the education of their children involves; parenting, communication, volunteering, home tutoring, involvement in decision-making, and collaboration with the community. Effective parental involvement treats and or makes school officials and parents partners in the education of their children.

See also:






​
Communities of InnovationPictured below: Your Digital Lab Awaits: Why You Should Check Out the Innovation Community Center (Department of Energy)
Communities that support innovation have been referred to as communities of innovation (CoI), communities for innovation, innovation communities, open innovation communities, and communities of creation.

​Definitions:

Lim and Ong (2019) define a community of innovation (CoI) as a group of people with a sense of comaradie, belonging and a collective identity who are jointly facilitating innovation.

CoIs are groups made up of motivated individuals working together towards a common goal because they are convinced of their common cause.

Coakes and Smith (2007) define communities of innovation (CoIs) as a form of communities of practice dedicated to the support of innovation.

Sawhney and Prandelli (2000) proposed the model of communities of creation as a new governance mechanism for managing knowledge found in different companies for the purpose of innovation. In CoIs, intellectual property rights are considered to be owned by the entire community although the community is governed by a central firm which acts as the sponsor and defines the ground rules for participation. This model lies between the closed hierarchical model and the open market-based model.

Role of communities in organizations:

Quoting Mintzberg (2009), Lim and Ong (2019) points out that managers need to re-discover the essence of communities in the organizations in order to appropriately manage people within the organizations, who are not simply an organizational resource to be exploited, but who are the very organization itself.

In other words, employees who feel they are valued and fairly treated by their organizations will usually work generously and in times of need, sacrificially for the success of the organization of which they feel they are a part of. However, employees who perceive themselves as being exploited, or possibly next on the retrenchment list, will more often than not put in only minimal work for the organization.

Relationship between communities and innovation:

Stacey (1969) observed that the term ‘community’ has been used by some to connote social relations in a defined geographical area, and by others to stress the feeling of belonging to a group.

Innovation is the development and implementation of a new idea (Van de Ven, 1986).
Collaboration contributes to innovation (Pouwels and Koster, 2017). 

Macro-processes of communities of innovation:

Lim and Ong (2019) observed three macro-processes, the first macro-process pertaining to having a relax and conducive environment for interaction and innovation, a second macro-process centering on the need for recognition and organizational resources to sustain the innovation process and a third macro-process of narrowing down the choices and implementation of the innovation.

Building on the literature on innovation, they termed the first and third macro-processes the divergence (knowledge sharing, search activities, exploratory, and idea generation) and convergence (elimination of alternatives and narrowing down towards a choice, implementation, exploitation, and commercialization of ideas) macro-processes of community innovation.

They termed the second macro-process the gateway macro-process (evaluation of new knowledge creation, selection, prioritization, control, idea screening and advocacy) as they observed that it consists of the critical processes which the organization uses to choose ideas to endorse for further development. It is the gateway through which informal communities of innovation may enter to become formal communities of innovation within the organization.

The macro-process of divergence management begins with individuals within the community of innovation building trust, sharing and discussing ideas, agreeing to develop ideas together and to seek recognition or funding from their organization. The macro-process of gateway management then evaluates the preliminary results for recognition or funding with the outcome as either funding approved or not approved for the development of the new products or services.

Finally, if the funding is approved, the group dynamics of the community of innovation then becomes formalized within the organization, bringing about the development and implementation of new products or services within the macro-process of convergence management.

​​Communities of innovation compared to communities of practice:

Lim and Ong (2019) observed that in contrast to communities of practice, communities of innovation:
  • may emerge by themselves or be cultivated;
  • they usually exist for a narrower purpose of producing a new service or product over a shorter life span;
  • they are made up of participants from either one or more functions;
  • they require a higher level of trust between participants to be effective;
  • there is a higher cost to their participants; and the potential benefit to the organization may be greater when they are successfully implemented.

They also noted that a community of innovation (COI) may be specialized in one function like a community of practice (COP). An example is an innovation project which involves only staff from the engineering department. It is also possible for communities of innovation to be cross-functional (e.g. involving 2-3 functions).

An example is an innovation project which involves staff from two functions, the business department and the environmental science department. In their research, they observed that cross-functional communities of innovation were able to consider problems from more perspectives and come up with more varied solutions.

​However, cross-functional communities of innovation usually require more time for discussions due to the difference in the members’ level of knowledge concerning different topics and their associated jargons:
​According to Etienne Wenger, a community of practice (CoP) is a group composed of people who are interested in the same topic and often interact with each other in order to increase their knowledge in this topic. CoPs are very similar to CoIs; however, the two differ in a number of critical ways. They can be easily confused between.
​
A CoP is able to connect the attitudes and values of dissimilar organizations. For example, a researcher may have a similar skill-set as someone working at a corporation; however, they may have very different tacit knowledge and motivation.

The formation of a CoP can bring these separate groups with different motivations to form a beneficial partnership.

CoPs and CoIs share many traits and are closely related – so much so that a CoI can be deemed to be a type of CoP.

CoIs are, however, different in certain critical ways not routinely addressed by CoPs, ways that are vital in the process of innovation. CoIs are focused on innovation, and while skills and processes can be transplanted across organizations, innovation processes and methods cannot, without significant customization and adaptation.

Another element that separates a CoI is "inspiration to action", which refers to the relationships formed between kindred spirits – relationships providing support and inspiration for taking on the uphill battle of creating significant change and embarking on new possibilities. In contrast, this process of innovation and bringing about significant change – is not well integrated with corporate strategy.

Drivers of collaborative innovation:

Drivers of organizational innovativeness include team processes and external knowledge (Rose et al., 2016) and networking (Lewis et al., 2018).

Communities of innovation and organizational ambidexterity:

Successful COIs increase innovations within an organization. They, therefore, have the potential to contribute to organizational ambidexterity, which refers to the organization's dual capabilities of managing the current business and being flexible and adaptable to meet future changes and demands.

Examples:

Examples of communities of innovation in history include the communities behind steam engines, iron and steel production, and textile machinery. The Pig Iron industry of Cleveland in the UK during 1850–1870 is a prime example of it.

​In recent decades, the software industry has exhibited the most significant presence of CoIs. 96% of software products developed in 2016 used open source software. Particularly, in software that runs the computing infrastructure of the internet, open source is ubiquitous.

Prime examples of open source software created through communities of innovation include OpenOffice, Python, Blender, GIMP, GNOME, Apache, PostgresQL and PHP, besides Linux.

The CoI that developed Linux:

Traditionally, the company is the most efficient means of managing knowledge belonging to different people. The primary motivation is job security, career advancement, and recognition.

Lee and Cole (2003) argue for a community structure for knowledge creation that crosses firms boundaries. To substantiate their argument they put forth the case of how "thousands of talented volunteers, dispersed across organizational and geographical boundaries, collaborate via the Internet to produce a knowledge-intensive, innovative product of high quality": the Linux kernel (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).

​The Linux community has proved to be a very efficient mean of managing knowledge belonging to different people. The primary motivation is a value system, recognition, and potential career advancement or hop. Lee and Cole (2003) argue that research on knowledge management has to date focused on hierarchy and therefore has not adequately addressed the mobilization of distributed knowledge, the knowledge that is dispersed among many people.

They note that, as illustrated by the Linux case, "the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies has enabled specialized communities to convene, interact, and share resources extensively via electronic interfaces," even across firms' boundaries (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).

People are able to contribute effectively outside their working hours. Coordination of the work (including feedback) is possible even when people are working from different locations. The catchment area is therefore much larger and the critical mass of software engineers required to develop and maintain the Linux project was therefore achievable.

Benefits and disadvantages:

According to Henry Chesbrough, over the twentieth century, the closed innovation paradigm was overtaken by the theory of open innovation, which emphasizes the significantly higher importance of external resources – thanks to an increasing trend towards globalization, new market participants, and simultaneously shorter product life cycles with correspondingly increasing R&D costs.

Innovation through CoIs has many benefits when compared to proprietary or closed-off product development. Particularly, individual innovators and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are expected to gain most from open innovation collaborations due to their inherently limited capabilities.

When the most popular Open Source tools and applications – developed through collaboration among their respective communities of innovation (such as software like Linux, Apache Web Server, PostgresSQL and PHP) were compared with similar proprietary software, Gartner found that open source bested or equaled the quality of their proprietary cousins and that many open source developers and advocates are gainfully employed and at very little risk of losing future work prospects.

Open source products development has proven to be an efficient way of exhibiting skills.
According to the Technology and Innovation Management Review, open innovation generally provides the following benefits: Broader base of ideas, Technological synergy, Improvement of the internal learning capacity through the transfer of external knowledge and learning routines and Use of intellectual property as strategic assets.

However, open innovation is also associated with a slow or delayed development Pace.
Also, over time it has been proven – especially in the case of communities of innovation in the software industry – that due to the nature of patent and intellectual property law, the dream of open source software as advanced by its advocates – has failed. It was believed that democratization of software would result in shared ownership of its intellectual property, but that hasn't happened.

Software built using open source software – is then patented and closed to external collaboration by wealthy companies, who profit much more from the results than the communities of innovation involved in developing the underlying technologies. This leads to greater wealth inequality, as opposed to social good.

According to an article in Technology and Innovation Management Review, open innovation generally suffers from the following disadvantages: strong dependence on external knowledge; loss of key knowledge control; loss of flexibility, creativity, and strategic power.

History:

There is evidence that, contrary to the popular belief, communities of innovation such as those in open source software, are not a recent development. There are many examples in history in which innovators have used collective invention as in the cases of textile machinery, steam engines, and the production of iron and steel.

In these cases, the innovators' behavior was largely dependent on public policy that accommodated knowledge sharing to foster cumulative innovation. Sometimes, knowledge sharing coexisted with patenting.

Despite the historical precedent, today knowledge sharing among innovators is generally regarded as a modern development. The cost for information exchange has drastically decreased due, in a large part, to breakthroughs within the information and communication fields.

According to Henry Chesborough (2003), modern open innovation is often seen as, "a sharp break from the paradigm of the early twentieth century when research labs were largely self sufficient – only occasionally receiving outside visitors, and researchers would seldom venture out to visit universities or scientific expositions". In history, the "heroic inventor" is shown greater consideration than the cooperation of innovators.

Stories of innovative heroes were believed to be more fascinating than other narratives, such as the stories of often nameless farmers, who created and shared new types of wheat on the Great Plains. This demonstrates the cultural shift that caused the "heroic inventor" to be nationally celebrated in Britain and all Western countries.

Knowledge sharing often occurred in the past, though there is not enough evidence to prove whether or not it occurs more frequently today. However, it is known that tension has existed for some time between the depth and scope of open knowledge sharing and the patent system.

Among the foremost examples of collective innovation in the past is Cleveland's Pig Iron industry in the UK during 1850–1870. This industry experienced a "free exchange of information about new techniques and plant designs among firms in an industry".

According to economic historian Robert Allen, the proliferation of knowledge sharing in the iron district had two plausible reasons. First, afterword traveled of a prosperous blast furnace design, the reputations of engineers grew to be more positive. This only increased profits and allowed engineers to improve their careers. Second, such disclosures could cause the value of the revealing party's assets to decrease.

Improving the blast furnace designs, in turn, led to an increase in the values of iron ore deposits, because these Cleveland ore mines were often owned by the blast furnace firms.

This possibly made revealing technical information freely a profitable activity from the individual firm's point of view. Similarities can be drawn to today's communities of innovation, where the primary motivation for participants is recognition and potential career advancement, and for participating firms is related profit.

It is yet to be understood how the rivalry between firms and innovators (that caused knowledge sharing to exist) came to be, while which conditions actually lead to aggressive rivalry and patenting. Bessen and Nuvolari (2011) mention that "... as the technology matures, the nature of firms rivalry, their willingness to share knowledge and their use of patents correspondingly change.

In particular, knowledge sharing is more likely to occur during the early phases of technology or where local innovation has little effect on worldwide prices."

See also:







Community Engagement including Community Emergency Response TeamPictured below: Planning for Community Engagement in Urban Planning
Community engagement is involvement and participation in an organization for the welfare of the community.

​Defining characteristics:

Volunteers actions, which involves giving personal time to projects in humanitarian NGOs or religious groups, are forms of community involvement. The engagement is generally motivated by values and ideals of social justice. 

Community engagement can be volunteering at food banks, homeless shelters, emergency assistance programs, neighborhood cleanup programs, etc.

It is also defined as "a dynamic relational process that facilitates communication, interaction, involvement, and exchange between an organization and a community for a range of social and organizational outcomes". 

As a concept, engagement features attributes of connection, interaction, participation, and involvement, designed to achieve or elicit an outcome at individual, organization, or social levels. 

Current research acknowledges engagement’s socially-situated nature. Community engagement therefore offers an ethical, reflexive, and socially responsive approach to community-organizational relationships with engagement practices that aim to both understand and be responsive to community needs, views, and expectations.

Community engagement is a community-centered orientation based in dialogue. Community engagement enables a more contextualized understanding of community members’ perceptions of the topics and contexts, and facilitates stronger relationships among and between community members. The outcome of community engagement is ultimately social capital and stronger relational networks. 

While community organizing involves the process of building a grassroots movement involving communities, community engagement primarily deals with the practice of moving communities toward change, usually from a stalled or similarly suspended position.
___________________________________________________________________________

Community emergency response team

In the United States, community emergency response team (CERT) can refer to
  • one of five federal programs promoted under Citizen Corps;
  • an implementation of FEMA's National CERT Program, administered by a local sponsoring agency, which provides a standardized training and implementation framework to community members;
  • an organization of volunteer emergency workers who have received specific training in basic disaster response skills, and who agree to supplement existing emergency responders in the event of a major disaster.

Sometimes programs and organizations take different names, such as Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT), or Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET).

The concept of civilian auxiliaries is similar to civil defense, which has a longer history. The CERT concept differs because it includes nonmilitary emergencies, and is coordinated with all levels of emergency authorities, local to national, via an overarching incident command system.
​
Organization:

A local government agency, often a fire department, police department, or emergency management agency, agrees to sponsor CERT within its jurisdiction. The sponsoring agency liaises with, deploys and may train or supervise the training of CERT members. Many sponsoring agencies employ a full-time community-service person as liaison to the CERT members. In some communities, the liaison is a volunteer and CERT member.

As people are trained and agree to join the community emergency response effort, a CERT is formed. Initial efforts may result in a team with only a few members from across the community.

As the number of members grow, a single community-wide team may subdivide.

Multiple CERTs are organized into a hierarchy of teams consistent with ICS principles. This follows the Incident Command System (ICS) principle of Span of control until the ideal distribution is achieved: one or more teams are formed at each neighborhood within a community.

A Teen Community Emergency Response Team (TEEN CERT), or Student Emergency Response Team (SERT), can be formed from any group of teens. A Teen CERT can be formed as a school club, service organization, Venturing Crew, Explorer Post, or the training can be added to a school's graduation curriculum. Some CERTs form a club or service corporation, and recruit volunteers to perform training on behalf of the sponsoring agency.

​This reduces the financial and human resource burden on the sponsoring agency.

​When not responding to disasters or large emergencies, CERTs may
  • raise funds for emergency response equipment in their community;
  • provide first-aid, crowd control or other services at community events;
  • hold planning, training, or recruitment meetings; and
  • conduct or participate in disaster response exercises.

Some sponsoring agencies use state and federal grants to purchase response tools and equipment for their members and team(s) (subject to Stafford Act limitations). Most CERTs also acquire their own supplies, tools, and equipment. As community members, CERTs are aware of the specific needs of their community and equip the teams accordingly.

Response:

The basic idea is to use CERT to perform the large number of tasks needed in emergencies. This frees highly trained professional responders for more technical tasks. Much of CERT training concerns the Incident Command System and organization, so CERT members fit easily into larger command structures.

A team may self-activate (self-deploy) when their own neighborhood is affected by disaster. An effort is made to report their response status to the sponsoring agency.

A self-activated team will size-up the loss in their neighborhood and begin performing the skills they have learned to minimize further loss of life, property, and environment. They will continue to respond safely until redirected or relieved by the sponsoring agency or professional responders on-scene.

Teams in neighborhoods not affected by disaster may be deployed or activated by the sponsoring agency. The sponsoring agency may communicate with neighborhood CERT leaders through an organic communication team. In some areas the communications may be by amateur radio, FRS, GMRS or MURS radio, dedicated telephone or fire-alarm networks.

​In other areas, relays of bicycle-equipped runners can effectively carry messages between the teams and the local emergency operations center.

​The sponsoring agency may activate and dispatch teams in order to gather or respond to intelligence about an incident. Teams may be dispatched to affected neighborhoods, or organized to support operations. CERT members may augment support staff at an Incident Command Post or Emergency Operations Center.

Additional teams may also be created to guard a morgue, locate supplies and food, convey messages to and from other CERTs and local authorities, and other duties on an as-needed basis as identified by the team leader.

In the short term, CERTs perform data gathering, especially to locate mass-casualties requiring professional response, or situations requiring professional rescues, simple fire-fighting tasks (for example, small fires, turning off gas), light search and rescue, damage evaluation of structures, triage and first aid.

In the longer term, CERTs may assist in the evacuation of residents, or assist with setting up a neighborhood shelter.

While responding, CERT members are temporary volunteer government workers. In some areas, (such as California, Hawaii and Kansas) registered, activated CERT members are eligible for worker's compensation for on-the-job injuries during declared disasters.

Member roles:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recommends that the standard, ten-person team be comprised as follows:
  • CERT Leader/Incident Commander. Generally, the first CERT team member arriving on the scene is the designated Incident Commander (IC) until the arrival of someone more competent. This person makes the IC initial assessment of the scene and determines the appropriate course of action for team members; assumes role of Safety Officer until assigned to another team member; assigns team member roles if not already assigned; designates triage area, treatment area, morgue, and vehicle traffic routes; coordinates and directs team operations; determines logistical needs (water, food, medical supplies, transportation, equipment, and so on.) and determines ways to meet those needs through team members or citizen volunteers on the scene; collects and writes reports on the operation and victims; and communicates and coordinates with the incident commander, local authorities, and other CERT team leaders. The team leader is identified by two pieces of crossed tape on the hard hat.
  • Safety Officer/ Dispatch. Checks team members prior to deployment to ensure they are safe and equipped for the operation; determines safe or unsafe working environments; ensures team accountability; supervises operations (when possible) where team members and victims are at direct physical risk, and alerts team members when unsafe conditions arise. Advises team members of any updates on the situation. Keeps tabs on the situation as it unfolds
  • Fire Suppression Team (2 people). Work under the supervision of a Team Leader to suppress small fires in designated work areas or as needed; when not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the search and rescue team or triage team; assist in evacuation and transport as needed; assist in the triage or treatment area as needed, other duties as assigned; communicate with Team Leader.
  • Search and Rescue Team/Extraction (2). Work under the supervision of a Team Leader, searching for and providing rescue of victims as is prudent under the conditions, also bringing injured people to triage or the hospital for medical treatment ; when not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team, assist in the triage or treatment area as needed; other duties as assigned; communicate with Team Leader.
  • Medical Triage Team/Field Medic (2). Work under the supervision of a Team Leader, providing START triage for victims found at the scene; marking victims with category of injury per the standard operating procedures; when not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team if needed, assist the Search and Rescue Team if needed, assist in the Medical Triage Area if needed, assist in the Treatment Area if needed, other duties as assigned; communicate with Team Leader.​
  • Medical Treatment Team (2). Work under the supervision of the Team Leader, providing medical treatment to victims within the scope of their training. This task is normally accomplished in the Treatment Area, however, it may take place in the affected area as well. When not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team as needed, assist the Medical Triage Team as needed; other duties as assigned; communicate with the Team Leader.

Because every CERT member in a community receives the same core instruction, any team member has the training necessary to assume any of these roles. This is important during a disaster response because not all members of a regular team may be available to respond.

Hasty teams may be formed by whichever members are responding at the time. Additionally, members may need to adjust team roles due to stress, fatigue, injury, or other circumstances.

  • Medical Treatment Team (2). Work under the supervision of the Team Leader, providing medical treatment to victims within the scope of their training. This task is normally accomplished in the Treatment Area, however, it may take place in the affected area as well. When not accomplishing their primary mission, assist the Fire Suppression Team as needed, assist the Medical Triage Team as needed; other duties as assigned; communicate with the Team Leader.

Because every CERT member in a community receives the same core instruction, any team member has the training necessary to assume any of these roles. This is important during a disaster response because not all members of a regular team may be available to respond.

Hasty teams may be formed by whichever members are responding at the time. Additionally, members may need to adjust team roles due to stress, fatigue, injury, or other circumstaces.

Training:

​While state and local jurisdictions will implement training in the manner that best suits the community, FEMA's National CERT Program has an established curriculum. Jurisdictions may augment the training, but are strongly encouraged to deliver the entire core content. The CERT core curriculum for the basic course is composed of the following nine units (time is instructional hours):
  • Unit 1: Disaster Preparedness (2.5 hrs). Topics include (in part) identifying local disaster threats, disaster impact, mitigation and preparedness concepts, and an overview of Citizen Corps and CERT. Hands on skills include team-building exercises, and shutting off utilities.
  • Unit 2: Fire Safety (2.5 hrs). Students learn about fire chemistry, mitigation practices, hazardous materials identification, suppression options, and are introduced to the concept of size-up. Hands-on skills include using a fire extinguisher to suppress a live flame, and wearing basic protective gear. Firefighting standpipes as well as unconventional firefighting methods are also covered.
  • Unit 3: Disaster Medical Operations part 1 (2.5 hrs). Students learn to identify and treat certain life-threatening conditions in a disaster setting, as well as START triage. Hands-on skills include performing head-tilt/chin-lift, practicing bleeding control techniques, and performing triage as an exercise.
  • Unit 4: Disaster Medical Operations part 2 (2.5 hrs). Topics cover mass casualty operations, public health, assessing patients, and treating injuries. Students practice patient assessment, and various treatment techniques.
  • Unit 5: Light Search and Rescue Operations (2.5 hrs). Size-up is expanded as students learn about assessing structural damage, marking structures that have been searched, search techniques, as well as rescue techniques and cribbing. Hands-on activities include lifting and cribbing an object, and practicing rescue carries.
  • Unit 6: CERT Organization (1.5 hrs). Students are introduced to several concepts from the Incident Command System, and local team organization and communication is explained. Hands-on skills include a table-top exercise focusing on incident command and control.
  • Unit 7: Disaster Psychology (1 hr). Responder well-being and dealing with victim trauma are the topics of this unit.
  • Unit 8: Terrorism and CERT (2.5 hrs). Students learn how terrorists may choose targets, what weapons they may use, and identifying when chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive weapons may have been deployed. Students learn about CERT roles in preparing for and responding to terrorist attacks. A table-top exercise highlights topics covered.
  • Unit 9: Course Review and Disaster Simulation (2.5 hrs). Students take a written exam, then participate in a real-time practical disaster simulation where the different skill areas are put to the test. A critique follows the exercise where students and instructors have an opportunity to learn from mistakes and highlight exemplary actions. Students may be given a certificate of completion at the conclusion of the course.

​CERT training emphasizes safely "doing the most good for the most people as quickly as possible" when responding to a disaster. For this reason, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training is not included in the core curriculum, as it is time and responder intensive in a mass-casualty incident.

However, many jurisdictions encourage or require CERT members to obtain CPR training. Many CERT programs provide or encourage members to take additional first aid training. Some CERT members may also take training to become a certified first responder or emergency medical technician.

​Many CERT programs also provide training in amateur radio operation, shelter operations, flood response, community relations, mass care, the incident command system (ICS), and the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Each unit of CERT training is ideally delivered by professional responders or other experts in the field addressed by the unit. This is done to help build unity between CERT members and responders, keep the attention of students, and help the professional response organizations be comfortable with the training which CERT members receive.

Each course of instruction is ideally facilitated by one or more instructors certified in the CERT curriculum by the state or sponsoring agency. Facilitating instructors provide continuity between units, and help ensure that the CERT core curriculum is being delivered successfully.

Facilitating instructors also perform set-up and tear-down of the classroom, provide instructional materials for the course, record student attendance and other tasks which assist the professional responder in delivering their unit as efficiently as possible.

CERT training is provided free to interested members of the community, and is delivered in a group classroom setting. People may complete the training without obligation to join a CERT. Citizen Corps grant funds can be used to print and provide each student with a printed manual. Some sponsoring agencies use Citizen Corps grant funds to purchase disaster response tool kits. These kits are offered as an incentive to join a CERT, and must be returned to the sponsoring agency when members resign from CERT.

Some sponsoring agencies require a criminal background-check of all trainees before allowing them to participate on a CERT. For example, the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico require all volunteers to pass a background check, while the city of Austin, Texas does not require a background check to take part in training classes but requires members to undergo a background check in order to receive a CERT badge and directly assist first responders during an activation of the Emergency Operations Center. 

​However, most programs do not require a criminal background check in order to participate.

See also:







Community GardeningPictured below: World's largest urban farm to open – on a Paris rooftop! (The Guardian)
A community garden is a single piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people. Community gardens utilize either individual or shared plots on private or public land while producing fruit, vegetables, and/or plants grown for their attractive appearance. Around the world, community gardens can fulfill a variety of purposes such as aesthetic and community improvement, physical or mental well-being, or land conservation.

Background:
​
According to Marin Master Gardeners, "a community garden is any piece of land gardened by a group of people, utilizing either individual or shared plots on private or public land". 

Community gardens provide fresh products and plants as well as contributing to a sense of community and connection to the environment and an opportunity for satisfying labor and neighborhood improvement. They are publicly functioning in terms of ownership, access, and management, as well as typically owned in trust by local governments or not for profit associations.

Community gardens vary widely throughout the world. In North America, community gardens range from familiar "victory garden" areas where people grow small plots of vegetables, to large "greening" projects to preserve natural areas, to tiny street beautification planters on urban street corners. Some grow only flowers, others are nurtured communally and their bounty shared.

There are even non-profits in many major cities that offer assistance to low-income families, children groups, and community organizations by helping them develop and grow their own gardens.

In the UK and the rest of Europe, closely related "allotment gardens" can have dozens of plots, each measuring hundreds of square meters and rented by the same family for generations.

In the developing world, commonly held land for small gardens is a familiar part of the landscape, even in urban areas, where they may function as market gardens. They also practice crop rotations with versatile plants such as peanuts, tomatoes and much more.

Community gardens are often used in urban neighborhoods to alleviate the food desert effect.

Food accessibility described in urban areas refers to residents who have limited access to fresh produce such as fruits and vegetables. Food deserts often serve lower-income neighborhoods usually in which residents are forced to rely on unhealthy food options such as expensive processed foods from convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.

Community gardens provide accessibility for fresh food to be in closer proximity located in local neighborhoods. Community gardens can help expand the realm for ensuring residents’ access to healthy and affordable food in a community.

Community gardens may help alleviate one effect of climate change, which is expected to cause a global decline in agricultural output, making fresh produce increasingly unaffordable.

Community gardens are also an increasingly popular method of changing the built environment in order to promote health and wellness in the face of urbanization. The built environment has a wide range of positive and negative effects on the people who work, live, and play in a given area, including a person's chance of developing obesity  

Community gardens encourage an urban community's food security, allowing citizens to grow their own food or for others to donate what they have grown. Advocates say locally grown food decreases a community's reliance on fossil fuels for transport of food from large agricultural areas and reduces a society's overall use of fossil fuels to drive in agricultural machinery. 

A 2012 op-ed by community garden advocate Les Kishler examines how community gardening can reinforce the so-called "positive" ideas and activities of the Occupy movement.

Community gardens improve users’ health through increased fresh vegetable consumption and providing a venue for exercise. A fundamental part of good health is a diet rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, and other plant based foods. Community gardens provide access to such foods for the communities in which they are located. Community gardens are especially important in communities with large concentrations of low socioeconomic populations, as a lack fresh fruit and vegetable availability plagues these communities at disproportionate rates.

​The gardens also combat two forms of alienation that plague modern urban life, by bringing urban gardeners closer in touch with the source of their food, and by breaking down isolation by creating a social community. Community gardens provide other social benefits, such as the sharing of food production knowledge with the wider community and safer living spaces. Active communities experience less crime and vandalism.

Ownership:
​
Land for a community garden can be publicly or privately held. One strong tradition in North American community gardening in urban areas is cleaning up abandoned vacant lots and turning them into productive gardens. Alternatively, community gardens can be seen as a health or recreational amenity and included in public parks, similar to ball fields or playgrounds.

Historically, community gardens have also served to provide food during wartime or periods of economic depression. Access to land and security of land tenure remains a major challenge for community gardeners and their supporters throughout the world, since in most cases the gardeners themselves do not own or control the land directly.

Some gardens are grown collectively, with everyone working together; others are split into clearly divided plots, each managed by a different gardener (or group or family). Many community gardens have both "common areas" with shared upkeep and individual/family plots.

Though communal areas are successful in some cases, in others there is a tragedy of the commons, which results in uneven workload on participants, and sometimes demoralization, neglect, and abandonment of the communal model. Some relate this to the largely unsuccessful history of collective farming.

Unlike public parks, whether community gardens are open to the general public is dependent upon the lease agreements with the management body of the park and the community garden membership. Open or closed-gate policies vary from garden to garden. However, in a key difference, community gardens are managed and maintained with the active participation of the gardeners themselves, rather than tended only by a professional staff.

A second difference is food production: Unlike parks, where plantings are ornamental (or more recently ecological), community gardens often encourage food production by providing gardeners a place to grow vegetables and other crops. To facilitate this, a community garden may be divided into individual plots or tended in a communal fashion, depending on the size and quality of a garden and the members involved.

Types of gardens:

There are multiple types of community gardens with distinct varieties in which the community can participate in:
  • Neighborhood gardens are the most common type that is normally defined as a garden where a group of people come together to grow fruits, vegetables and ornamentals. They are identifiable as a parcel of private or public land where individual plots are rented by gardeners at a nominal annual fee.
  • Residential Gardens are typically shared among residents in apartment communities, assisted living, and affordable housing units. These gardens are organized and maintained by residents living on the premise.
  • Institutional Gardens are attached to either public or private organizations and offer numerous beneficial services for residents. Benefits include mental or physical rehabilitation and therapy, as well as teaching a set of skills for job-related placement.
  • Demonstration Gardens are used for educational and recreational purposes in mind. They often offer short seminars or presentations about gardening, and provide the necessary tools to operate a community garden.

​Plot size:

In Britain, the 1922 Allotment act specifies "an allotment not exceeding 40 [square] poles in extent"; since a rod, pole or perch is 5.5 yards in length, 40 square rods is 1210 square yards or 10890 square feet (equivalent to a large plot of 90 ft x 121 ft). 

In practice, plot sizes vary; Lewisham offers plots with an "average size" of "125 meters square".
​
In America there is no standardized plot size. For example, plots of 3 m × 6 m (10 ft × 20 ft = 200 square feet) and 3 m x 4.5 m (10 ft x 15 ft) are listed in Alaska. Montgomery Parks in Maryland lists plots of 200, 300, 400 and 625 square feet In Canada, plots of 20 ft x 20 ft and 10 ft x 10 ft, as well as smaller "raised beds", are listed in Vancouver.

Location:

Community gardens may be found in neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and on residential housing grounds. The location of a community garden is a critical factor in how often the community garden is used and who visits it. Exposure to a community garden is much more likely for an individual if they are able to walk or drive to the location, as opposed to public transportation.

The length of travel time is also a factor. Those who live within a 15-minute or less travel distance are more likely to visit a community garden as compared to those with a longer travel time.

Such statistics should be taken into consideration when choosing a location for a community garden for a target population.

The site location should also be considered for its soil conditions as well as sun conditions. Solar conditions are of paramount importance, as above ground gardening is always possible. An area with a fair amount of morning sunlight and shade in the afternoon is most ideal.

While specifics vary from plant to plant, most do well with 6 to 8 full hours of sunlight.

When considering a location, areas near industrial zones may require soil testing for contaminants. If soil is safe, the composition should be loose and well-draining. However, if the soil at the location is unable to be used, synthetic soil may also be used in raised gardens beds or containers.

​Rushall Garden in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia is situated on land that was formerly a minor railway junction, now repurposed.

​Plant choice and physical layout:

While food production is central to many community and allotment gardens, not all have vegetables as a main focus. Restoration of natural areas and native plant gardens are also popular, as are "art" gardens. Many gardens have several different planting elements, and combine plots with such projects as small orchards, herbs and butterfly gardens. Individual plots can become "virtual" backyards, each highly diverse, creating a "quilt" of flowers, vegetables and folk art.

Regardless of plant choice, planning out the garden layout beforehand will help avoid problems down the line. According to the Arizona Master Gardener Manual, taking measurements of the garden size, sunlight locations and planted crops vs. yield quantity, will ensure a detailed record that helps when making decisions for the coming years.

Other consideration to garden layout would be efficient use of space by using trellises for climbing crops, being mindful of taller plants blocking sunlight to shorter plants and plants that have similar life cycles close together.

Group and leadership selection:

The community gardening movement in North America is inclusive, diverse, pro-democracy, and supportive of community involvement. Gardeners may be of any cultural background, young or old, new gardeners or seasoned growers, rich or poor. A garden may have only a few people active, or hundreds.

Some community gardens “self-support” through membership dues, and others require a sponsor for tools, seeds, or money donations. Churches, schools, private businesses or parks and recreation departments supporters and community leaders.

Finally, all community gardens have a structure. The organization depends in part on whether the garden is "top down" or "grassroots". There are many different organizational models in use for community gardens. Some elect boards in a democratic fashion, while others can be run by appointed officials. Some are managed by non-profit organizations, such as a community gardening association, a community association, a church, or other land-owner; others by a city's recreation or parks department, a school or University.

Gardeners may form a grassroots group to initiate the garden, such as the Green Guerrillas of New York City, or a garden may be organized "top down" by a municipal agency. In Santa Clara, California there is a non-profit by the name of Appleseeds that offers free assistance in starting up new community gardens around the world.

Membership rules and fees:

In most cases, gardeners are expected to pay annual dues to help with garden upkeep, and the organization must manage these fees. The tasks in a community garden are many, including upkeep, mulching paths, recruiting members, and fund raising. Rules and an 'operations manual' are both invaluable tools, and ideas for both are available at the ACGA.

Health effects of community gardens:

Community gardens have been shown to have positive health effects on those who participate in the programs, particularly in the areas of decreasing body mass index and lower rates of obesity. Studies have found that community gardens in schools have been found to improve average body mass index in children.

A 2013 study found that 17% of obese or overweight children improved their body mass index over seven weeks. Specifically, 13% of the obese children achieved a lower body mass index in the overweight range, while 23% of overweight children achieved a normal body mass index. 

Many studies have been performed largely in low-income, Hispanic/Latino communities in the United States. In these programs, gardening lessons were accompanied by nutrition and cooking classes and optional parent engagement. Successful programs highlighted the necessity of culturally tailored programming.

There is some evidence to suggest that community gardens have a similar effect in adults. A study found that community gardeners in Utah had a lower body mass index than their non-gardening siblings and unrelated neighbors. Administrative records were used to compare body mass indexes of community gardeners to that of unrelated neighbors, siblings, and spouses.

Gardeners were less likely to be overweight or obese than their neighbors, and gardeners had lower body mass indexes than their siblings. However, there was no difference in body mass index between gardeners and their spouses which may suggest that community gardening creates healthy habits for the entire household.

Participation in a community garden has been shown to increase both availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables in households. A study showed an average increase in availability of 2.55 fruits and 4.3 vegetables with participation in a community garden. It also showed that children in participating households consumed an average of two additional servings per week of fruits and 4.9 additional servings per week of vegetables.

Policy implications:

There is strong support among American adults for local and state policies and policy changes that support community gardens. A study found that 47.2% of American adults supported such policies. 

However, community gardens compete with the interests of developers. Community gardens are largely impacted and governed by policies at the city level. In particular, zoning laws strongly impact the possibility of community gardens. The momentum for rezoning often comes from the public need for access to fruits and vegetables. Rezoning is necessary in many cities for a parcel of land to be designated a community garden, but rezoning doesn't guarantee garden will not be developed in the future.

Further policies can be enacted to protect community gardens from future development. For example, New York State reached a settlement in 2002 which protected hundreds of community gardens which had been established by the Parks and Recreation Department GreenThumb Program from future development.

At times, zoning policy lags behind the development of community gardens. In these cases, community gardens may exist illegally. Such was the case in Detroit when hundreds of community gardens were created in abandoned spaces around the city. The city of Detroit created agricultural zones in 2013 in the middle of urban areas to legitimize the over 355 “illegal” community gardens.

​Examples:

Australia:

​The first Australian community garden was established in 1977 in Nunawading, Victoria followed soon after by Ringwood Community Garden in March 1980.

Czech Republic (CR):

The trend of community gardening in the Czech Republic is increasing. The first community garden was founded in 2002 and in 2020 you can find at the map of community garden named mapko.cz more than 116. If you are interested in more details, have a look at organization Kokoza.cz, social enterprise promoting community gardening in CR.

Japan:

In Japan, rooftops on some train stations have been transformed into community gardens. Plots are rented to local residents for $980 per year. These community gardens have become active open spaces now.

Mali:

Often externally supported, community gardens become increasingly important in developing countries, such as West African Mali to bridge the gap between supply and requirements for micro-nutrients and at the same time strengthen an inclusive development.

Spain:
​
Most older Spaniards grew up in the countryside and moved to the city to find work. Strong family ties often keep them from retiring to the countryside, and so urban community gardens are in great demand. Potlucks and paellas are common, as well as regular meetings to manage the affairs of the garden.

Taiwan:

There is an extensive network of community gardens and collective urban farms in Taipei City often occupying areas of the city that are waiting for development. Flood-prone river banks and other areas unsuitable for urban construction often become legal or illegal community gardens. The network of the community gardens of Taipei are referred to as Taipei organic acupuncture of the industrial city.

United Kingdom:

In the United Kingdom, community gardening is generally distinct from allotment gardening, though the distinction is sometimes blurred. Allotments are generally plots of land let to individuals for their cultivation by local authorities or other public bodies—the upkeep of the land is usually the responsibility of the individual plot owners.

Allotments tend (but not invariably) to be situated around the outskirts of built-up areas. Use of allotment areas as open space or play areas is generally discouraged. However, there are an increasing number of community-managed allotments, which may include allotment plots and a community garden area, many of them overseen by the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens (a registered charity).

The community garden movement is of more recent provenance than allotment gardening, with many such gardens built on patches of derelict land, waste ground or land owned by the local authority or a private landlord that is not being used for any purpose.

A community garden in the United Kingdom tends to be situated in a built-up area and is typically run by people from the local community as an independent, non-profit organization (though this may be wholly or partly funded by public money). For example, Norwich's Fifth Quarter Community Garden.

It is also likely to perform a dual function as an open space or play area (in which role it may also be known as a 'city park') and—while it may offer plots to individual cultivators—the organization that administers the garden will normally have a great deal of the responsibility for its planting, landscaping and upkeep.

An example inner-city garden of this sort is Islington's Culpeper Community Garden, which is a registered charity, or Camden's Phoenix Garden.

United States:

Community gardening in the United States functions as ecological green space, a gathering place for neighbors, a positive contribution to the reduction of food insecurity, promotes healthier eating through education programs, and provides access to gardening gardening to those who otherwise could not have a garden, such as the elderly, recent immigrants, urban dwellers, or the homeless.

Some gardens are worked as community farms with no individual plots at all, similar to urban farms. Other gardens resemble European "allotment" gardens, with plots where individuals and families can grow vegetables and flowers; including a number which began as "victory gardens" during World War II.

​Community gardens can vary in shape, size, and function, but the goal of bridging the gap between people and nature is central to their creation. Some of the largest community gardens in the nation are reported to be Shiloh Field Community Garden in Denton, TX, measuring at 14.5 acres of land, and DeKalb County Community Gardens in DeKalb, Illinois, measuring over 15 acres of land.

Overview:

​A community garden is any piece of land gardened by a group of people. The majority of gardens in community gardening programs are collections of individual garden plots, frequently between 3 m × 3 m (9.8 ft × 9.8 ft) and 6 m × 6 m (20 ft × 20 ft). This holds true whether they are sponsored by public agencies, city departments, large non-profits, or (most commonly) a coalition of different entities and groups.

Whether the garden is run as a co-op by the gardeners themselves (common in New York City, Boston and other East Coast cities) or managed by a public or non-profit agency, plot holders typically are asked to pay a modest fee each year and to abide by a set of rules. Many gardens encourage activities such as work days, fundraisers, and social gatherings.

Community garden organizers typically say that "growing community" is as important as growing vegetables; or, as the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) puts it: "In community gardening, 'community' comes first."

Community gardening in the United States overlaps to some extent with the related but distinct movement to encourage local food production, local farmers' markets and community supported agriculture farms (CSAs). Leases and rules prevent some, though not all, community gardeners from selling their produce commercially, although their gardens may donate fresh fruits and vegetables to local food pantries, cooperatives, and homeless members of their community.

However, community gardens offer ideal sites for local farmers markets, and gardeners often seek farmers to provide space-intensive crops such as corn or potatoes. They also can hire farmers to provide services such as plowing and providing mulch and manure. In turn, small farmers can reach a wider audience and consumer base by drawing on community gardeners and their contacts.

Although the two approaches are distinct, both can be effective ways to produce local food in urban areas, safeguard green space, and contribute to food security. Community gardens also increase environmental aesthetics, promote neighborhood attachment and social involvement.

In an interesting variant on the practice of reclaiming bombed-out areas for community gardens (also practiced during WWII in the ghettos of Eastern Europe), in American inner-cities, community groups have reclaimed abandoned or vacant lots for garden plots. In these cases, groups have subsequently leased from a municipality that claims the property or claimed squatter's rights or a right to subsistence not currently recognized by the legal system.

Community gardens often face pressure due to economic development, rising land values, and decreased city government budgets. In some cases they have responded to the changes by forming nonprofit organizations to provide assistance and by building gardens on city park spaces and school yards.

History:

The European history of community gardening in the US dates back to the early 18th century, when Moravians created a community garden as part of the community of Bethabara, near modern Winston-Salem, North Carolina – a garden still active and open for visitors today. 

First Nations peoples also gardened with a community approach (Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden paints a picture of gardens among the Hidatsa), likely for generations before the arrival of waves of immigrants.

In the 1890s, Detroit became the first city to use vacant lots for a municipally sponsored urban gardening program. This program, known as “Pingree’s Potato Patches” after Mayor Hazen Pingree, was in response to the 1893 economic recession which left the city's industrial laborers unemployed.

Boston and San Francisco later adopted similar programs due to the success of Detroit's but in general viewed as a temporary program to help the poor.

As adult interest in gardens began to wane, there was a renewed interest in children's gardening with the advocacy of Fannie Griscom Parsons in New York City. In DeWitt Clinton Park, Parsons created a large educational garden in the early 1900s as a way to "show how willing and anxious children are to work, and to teach them in their work some necessary civic virtues:
  • private care of public property,
  • economy,
  • honesty,
  • application concentration,
  • self-government,
  • civic pride,
  • justice,
  • the dignity of labor,
  • and the love of nature by opening to their minds the little we know of her mysteries, more wonderful than any fairy tale.”

During World War I and World War II, Victory gardens were planted on public land to meet some of the domestic need for food, and making gardening patriotic. The term "community garden" came into use to describe collectively grown gardens and gardens with individual plots during World War I.

In the 1960s and 70s, community gardening have been a result of grassroots organizations who promote environmental stewardship and revitalize urban neighborhoods. In 1978, the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was formed to share information and resources and to form a nationwide network of gardeners.

From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, community gardening in a select number of major American cities enjoyed Federal financial support, though many programs struggled to find funding. The loss of the Federal program increased the challenge of finding funding to support programs. Funding remains a key challenge, along with secure land tenure for garden sites, finding insurance, and helping gardeners develop ways to work together smoothly.

Impact:

Community gardens play a part in a larger food systems movements such as food justice, food sovereignty, food security, urban farming, and more. These movements are not only happening in the United States, but transnationally in the Global North and the Global South.

Cultural:

Community gardens are a way for a variety of cultures to come together and create a stronger community. Focusing on creating equitable and respectful spaces where farming knowledge can be shared is crucial to creating a just food system for all community members.

Communities hold specific knowledge and expertise about their local environment, and therefore, community members have the power to play a central role in the creation of their local food system. Partnerships between academic researchers, farmers/practitioners, advocates, and community members will filter knowledge of healthy foods and farming techniques throughout the community as a whole.

All of these benefits will lead, in researcher Montenegro de Wit's opinion, to "a more egalitarian food system" that "will likely emerge from participation by those traditionally excluded from it."

Economic:

As the majority of the United States' farmers reach retirement age, community gardens play an active role in informing and perhaps inspiring a new generation to become involved with and passionate about growing food. Diversifying the food system with community gardens and other methods of urban agriculture will benefit the economy and create competition between product quality and value.

Green spaces in cities often increase the land value of an area and contribute to gentrification. The perception of organic foods being for an affluent population, plus the perceived notion of privilege that comes from organic-based market chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's work against the goals of most urban agricultural initiatives by creating exclusive spaces. 

Community gardens based on crop sharing, knowledge sharing, and community building help to promote access to healthy foods by creating accessible spaces.

One issue faced by lower-income citizens is that they do not have the time or energy needed for becoming active in a community garden, and therefore struggle to receive the benefits they offer. Community gardens that are working for high crop yields are labor-intensive, and some community members may work multiple jobs and have little to no extra time to commit. 

One way that lower-income citizens can gain access to healthy food is through the SNAP program, which is increasingly being accepted at farmer's markets.

Environmental:

Food composting positively impacts our environment and is growing in popularity with community gardens.  A case study conducted in 2019 by the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago determined the impact from decentralized food composting in the City of Chicago. 

In 2015, the City of Chicago implemented an ordinance allowing acceptance and processing of food scraps at community gardens and urban farms.  Approximately 16% of the food waste was processed at 86 registered compost facilities in 2019.  The study estimates capacity for food composting could reach 27% of the city’s residential food waste resulting in an estimated savings of over $4 million dollars per year. 

In addition to the financial cost savings, other benefits include reduced greenhouse gases because of reduced refuse pickup, compost as energy filled fertilizer for community gardens
and urban farms, and waste reduction into landfills.

Community gardens have the potential to positively impact the areas around them. If gardeners employ organic and environmentally conscious techniques, the community gardens can be a step away from chemically dependent and wasteful food systems. Gardens that produce crops and vegetables act to reduce the need for fossil-fuel intensive storage of delivery of food to local community members. 

As researcher Montenegro de Wit states, sustainable agriculture should not be "contained to the countryside." By bringing these techniques into communities, learning opportunities arise as well as the chance of converting land from an "emissions-source" to a "carbon sink" as Robert Biel writes.

In addition to the possible environmental benefits community gardening brings, there are unintended consequences that can result from poor planning and lack of ecological consideration. For example, if most community members have to drive a considerate distance to reach their community garden or farmer's market, the benefits of locally sourced food evens out. The carbon emissions of travel to the community garden, step closer to those of commercial packaging and transportation costs.

Health:

Community gardens benefit community food access by enhancing nutrition and physical activity as well as promoting the role of public health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends eating more dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, legumes, and fruits; eating less refined grains, fat, and calories; and obtaining 60 minutes of physical activity on most days. 

Recent public health evaluations show community gardens as a promising approach to promote healthy behaviors. This is particularly important in establishing healthy behaviors among children given the rise of childhood obesity. One recent pilot study in Los Angeles showed a gardening and nutrition intervention improved dietary intake in children and reduced body mass index.

Community gardens also benefit community food security by providing residents with safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice. 

Community garden initiatives have inspired cities to enact policies for water use, improved access to produce, strengthened community building skills, and created culturally appropriate education programs that help elevate the community's collective consciousness about public health. In impoverished urban areas especially, produce harvested from community gardens provides a nutritious alternative to what Nancy Janovicek calls "the industrial diet," which consists of cheap and accessible options like fast-food chains.

Professor Jill Litt and colleagues at University of Colorado School of Public Health evaluated the effects on community gardening in the Denver metro area on social environment, community building and fruit and vegetable intake.

Community gardeners were more likely than home gardeners and non-gardeners to meet the national recommendations of fruit and vegetable intake. Semi structured interviews carried out by Teig et al. revealed that Denver community gardeners felt a high level of trust between members of the garden and a strong sense of community. 

Furthermore, gardeners were involved in community voluntary efforts and donated surplus produce to populations without access to fresh produce.

Social:

Agricultural activity in communities is a way of promoting self-sufficiency, as well as community empowerment and involvement. Additionally, producing food, helping the environment, and creating green spaces in cities contributes to an overall increase in happiness by helping community members accomplish fundamental human tasks such as growing food. 

Space in cities and communities reserved for growing vegetables and flowers promotes well-being, neighborliness, and the protection of nature.

Resources:

Resources are available when considering the addition of a community garden for your local neighborhood including startup guides, financial support, volunteers and training.

The American Community Gardening Association is a non-profit organization promoting community gardens in the United States and Canada through various support programs including advocacy, training, conferences and events, and resources.

The University of Illinois Extension provides resources for Cook County, Illinois and a video series Community Gardens - 10 Steps to Successful Community Gardens to assist organizations or groups who are researching the opportunity of starting their own community garden. 

The University of Missouri Extension created a Community Gardening Tool Kit that includes a step by step guide, forms, and a list of resources.

In addition, the National Agricultural Library of the United States Department of Agriculture provides numerous resources on their website for community gardens including financial resources.

Author and community garden advocate, Ms. LaManda Joy, wrote several books including Start a Community Food Garden, The Essential Handbook which offers all the information needed to start a community garden (available in print and audio books).

Grants provide additional financial resources for starting and maintaining community gardens. State and local governments may offer financial assistance or programs to support your community garden.

Implementation:

To find a community garden in your area, visit the communitygarden.org website

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Community Gardening:

​





Community Mobilization Pictured below: Ten Essential Public Health Services
Community mobilization is an attempt to bring both human and non-human resources together to undertake developmental activities in order to achieve sustainable development.

Process:

Community mobilization is a process through which action is stimulated by a community itself, or by others, that is planned, carried out, and evaluated by a community's individuals, groups, and organizations on a participatory and sustained basis to improve the health, hygiene and education levels so as to enhance the overall standard of living in the community.

A group of people have transcended their differences to meet on equal terms in order to facilitate a participatory decision-making process. In other words, it can be viewed as a process which begins a dialogue among members of the community to determine who, what, and how issues are decided, and also to provide an avenue for everyone to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

Requirements:

Community mobilization needs many analytical and supportive resources which are internal (inside the community) and external (outside the community) as well. Resources include:
Strategies:

The Centre for Disease Control envisions that strong healthcare initiatives will be readily owned by a community if the leaders ("grass tops"), the citizens ("grass roots"), and youth are fully engaged in mobilizing the community, educating stakeholders, and implementing evidence-based interventions. To this respect, 14 strategies guided by best practice have been reported (Huberman 2014):

1. Secure strong leadership
2. Establish a formal structure
3. Engage diverse organizations, community leaders, and residents
4. Ensure authentic participation and shared decision making
5.ensure authentic and productive roles for young people
6. Develop a shared vision
7. Conduct a needs assessment
8. Create a strategic plan
9. Implement mutually reinforcing strategies
10. Create a fundraising strategy
11. Establish effective channels for internal communication
12. Educate the community
13. Conduct process and outcome evaluations
14. Evaluate the community mobilization effort separately

Implications:

"Community mobilization" is a frequently used term in developmental sector. Recently, community mobilization has been proved to be a valuable and effective concept which has various implications in dealing with basic problems like health and hygiene, population, pollution and gender bias.



​



​
Complete CommunitiesPictured below: Are We There Yet? Creating Complete Communities for 21st Century America
Complete communities is an urban and rural planning concept that aims to meet the basic needs of all residents in a community, regardless of income, culture, or political ideologies through integrated land use planning, transportation planning, and community design. 

While the concept is used by many communities as part of their community plan, each plan interprets what complete community means in their own way. The idea of the complete community has roots in early planning theory, beginning with 

The Garden City Movement, and is a component of contemporary planning methods including Smart Growth.

History:

The Garden City Movement was one of the first proponents for creating communities that accommodate a wide range of community members through a mix in housing types and uses.

Increasing urban sprawl, and its associated negative social, environmental, and health effects, prompted a turn in theory towards increasing density in urban areas. This idea has been brought into contemporary theoretical movements including Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Sustainable Development, which all advocate high-density 'compact' communities, and also increase the mix of activities and land uses that contribute to a complete community. 

The move toward compact and complete communities in modern planning is summarized in the first two Ahwahnee Principles, a landmark document created by the California Local Government Commission that provided the foundation for Smart Growth and New Urbanism: (1) "all planning should be in the form of complete and integrated communities including housing, shops, workplaces, schools, parks and civic facilities essential to the daily life of the residents" and (2) "community size should be designed so that housing, jobs, daily needs, and other activities are within easy walking distance of each other."

Since the 1970s, Canadian planning policy has aimed to make communities more attractive and efficient through compact form, mixed-use, higher densities and a range of housing types. 

Households in North America are becoming smaller, have a different form than previous generations and are more socially and economically diverse; while housing costs have increased dramatically in some parts of the country, resulting in smaller lot sizes and an increase in multi-family housing options and suburban density.

One of the typical critiques of past suburban growth patterns is that they replicate trends of a homogeneous landscape consisting mainly of white, middle class, nuclear families.

Social diversity and affordability looked to be addressed through the creation of a different form, through the design of new communities that look to promote diversity. When measured on a scale looking at four elements of complete communities - living, working, moving, thriving - New York City and San Francisco rank at the top, while Atlanta and Dallas ranked quite low.

Defining elements:

The 'complete community' is seen as a way to deal with issues of social isolation, address inefficient land uses and meet the needs of diverse households.

A common definition of a complete community is one where people live, work and play, and where the automobile is left at home in favor of walking and public transport. This is supported by a diverse housing mix. While each community applies the term in its own way as part of its community plans, there are several defining elements.

Densification:

A benchmark for complete communities is access to services within a five-minute walk, which contrasts the typical sprawl associated with the suburbs.

Diverse housing mix:

In Canada, many municipalities have focused on providing a mix of housing types as the key component of creating a complete community based on directives from provincial and regional policies.

Diverse land use mix:

Complete communities advocate for densification within existing neighborhoods to provide services to users which sometimes run in contrast to zoning regulations currently there. Barriers to complete communities include zoning and bylaws that do not promote building with diverse uses and design in mind.

Employment options:

One central goal of developing complete communities involves promoting a concentration of employment opportunities, with a labor force both working and living within the geographic boundaries of the community. This is believed to be a response to the negative effects associated with commuter towns.

Transportation options:

As the suburbs grew, roadways that prioritized the automobile grew with them. Especially in the United States, widened and expanded metropolitan areas led to poor inner-suburb communities, which worked to destroy the connection to neighborhoods, institutions, parks and town centers.

Planners began to advocate for a community plan where a mix of housing types and uses in compact form would be centered around transportation nodes for ease of mobility of residents. Additionally, some transportation planners take planning for a connected community one step further by pushing for inclusive multi-modal and equitable transportation systems that work for people of all ages, ability, income and racial demography.

Debate/Critique:

Although there is a general definition for complete communities, the term sometimes has differing meanings within certain contexts. Within many municipal plans the term complete community is used to describe a city mandate, without a given description of how the community defines the term. This leads to the term being used for a number of different objectives, depending on the goals of the specific community.

While many planners look to use urban policy as a way of creating a diverse housing mix, some critics argue that it is actually market pressures rather than planners and policy makers who are actually creating the increase in the share of multi-family housing in suburban areas. 

Most developers will not actually use the term ‘complete communities,’ however, many larger master-planning developers will talk about providing a range of housing types as a way of remaining competitive and selling community.

Examples:

The following are examples of places that have been described as complete communities:
  • Kirkland, Washington

The following are examples of places that have gone through, or are currently undergoing, a planning process that is informed by the concept of a complete community:
  • Metro Vancouver, British Columbia
  • City of North Vancouver, British Columbia
  • Winnipeg, Manitoba
  • Greater Golden Horseshoe, Ontario
  • Austin, Texas
  • Vancouver Campus of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia
  • City of Nanaimo, British Columbia
  • Town of Gibsons, British Columbia
  • City of St. Albert, Alberta

See also:







Communities that CarePictured below: Five Phases of CTC
Communities That Care (CTC) is a program of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) in the office of the United States Government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). CTC is a coalition-based prevention operating system that uses a public health approach to prevent youth problem behaviors such as violence, delinquency, school drop out and substance abuse. 

Using strategic consultation, training, and research-based tools, CTC is designed to help community stakeholders and decision makers understand and apply information about risk and protective factors, and programs that are proven to make a difference in promoting healthy youth development, in order to most effectively address the specific issues facing their community's youth.

Research base:

Public health understanding of risk and protective factors:

The field of public health has developed a systematic methodology for understanding and effectively preventing health problems. Through rigorous research, the etiology of diseases has been documented, and the factors contributing to those diseases have been identified.

Once these contributing factors are understood, careful study and application of approaches to amend those factors have demonstrated reductions in the disease burden. For example, heart disease has been one of the primary causes of death among American adults.

Research shows, however, that adequate exercise, a healthy diet, and avoidance of smoking can help to prevent heart disease. These behaviors are considered protective factors, just as smoking, high blood pressure, and a family history of heart disease are considered risk factors for poor heart health.

Since the late 1970s, researchers in a variety of disciplines (for example, criminology, sociology, social work, psychology, community psychology, education) have been applying this public health approach to the study of the healthy development of young people. This work has created a field called prevention science,  which identifies the factors that contribute to the healthy development of children and youth (protective factors) and the factors that impede that development (risk factors).

Cause: Longitudinal studies of youth development:

Protective Factors and the Social Development Model. The prevention of health and behavior problems in young people requires, at its foundation, the promotion of the factors required for positive development.

Research shows that five basic factors promote positive social development:
  1. opportunities for developmentally appropriate involvement,
  2. skills,
  3. recognition for effort, improvement and achievement,
  4. strong social bonds,
  5. and clear, consistent standards for behavior.

All children need opportunities to be actively involved with positive adults and peers, the skills to participate and succeed in social, school, and civic settings, and recognition for their efforts, improvements, and accomplishments. When young people are provided with opportunities, skills, and recognition, they develop strong social bonds, that is connections with and commitment to the families, schools, and communities that provided them.

When families, schools, and communities communicate to young people clear standards for behavior, those who feel bonded, emotionally connected, invested in the group, will follow those standards that promote health and success.

​These five factors are protective factors that promote positive development in young people (Hawkins & Weis, 1985), and form the basis for the Social Development Model.

​Risk Factors. Research has also identified risk factors that can interrupt the process of positive social development. High quality longitudinal studies have identified risk factors in neighborhoods and communities, families, schools, and peer groups, as well as in individuals themselves. 

These factors increase the probability of delinquency, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, and other behavioral problems in young people. The risk factors shown in the risk factor chart (right) have been found in at least two high-quality studies to predict later health and behavior problems in young people. Many of these risk factors predict multiple problems.

For example, the risk factor of “Poor Family Management” has been shown to predict five youth problem behaviors: substance abuse, delinquency, teen pregnancy, school drop-out, and violence. Providing effective parent training programs in a community, therefore, could potentially impact all five of these undesirable outcomes.

Intervention: Testing effectiveness of interventions:

The identification of risk and protective factors provides the foundation for advances in preventing adolescent health and behavior problems. Prevention scientists have rigorously tested programs and policies that address these risk and protective factors in studies funded largely by the National Institutes of Health, and an increasing number and range of effective prevention approaches have now been identified.

By 2004, 56 tested and effective programs were available in the United States that have been demonstrated to reduce involvement in problem behaviors and/or increase positive outcomes for youth. 
​
Sixteen of these programs have been tested at least twice with replicated findings and have been designated as Blueprint model programs, which, if rigorously followed, will significantly reduce youth violence and substance abuse.

Programs range from prenatal (for example, Olds, 1997) and early childhood interventions (for example, Reid et al., 2001), to community policies related to alcohol (e.g. Holder et al., 2000), to school-based curricula that teach youth social and emotional skills that will help them navigate life (e.g. Botvin at al, 2003, Eisen at al., 2002, and Grossman et al., 1997).

Systems: Researching systems change in states and communities:

Prevention scientists understand that the final task arising from these research findings is the application of proven prevention programs, policies and strategies in the real world in order to enhance youth development on the ground in communities. In collaboration with communities and state and federal governments, researchers are studying the impact that prevention science can have on the effectiveness of prevention efforts within those systems. 

Description:

Five Phases:
​
Communities That Care guides the community's prevention efforts through a five-phase process which includes:
  1. Get Started—assessing community readiness to undertake collaborative prevention efforts;
  2. Get Organized—getting a commitment to the CTC process from community leaders and forming a diverse and representative prevention coalition;
  3. Develop a Profile—using epidemiologic data to assess prevention needs;
  4. Create a Plan—choosing tested and effective prevention policies, practices, and programs based on assessment data;
  5. Implement and Evaluate—implementing the new strategies with fidelity, in a manner congruent with the programs' theory, content, and methods of delivery, and evaluating progress over time.

CTC activities are planned and carried out by the CTC Community Board, a prevention coalition of community stakeholders who work together to promote positive youth outcomes.

Board members participate in a series of six CTC training workshops in which they build their coalition and learn the skills needed to install the CTC system.

Working through the five phases of CTC provides the opportunity to increase communication, collaboration, and ownership among community members and service providers invested in healthy youth development.

Phase One: Getting Started. With technical assistance provided by a CTC trainer, a community catalyst and small group of advisors assess community readiness to undertake collaborative prevention efforts, and identify the stakeholders who need to be involved. Key activities in this phase include recruiting key leaders to serve as champions of the effort, obtaining school district support to conduct a youth survey to provide epidemiological data on risk, protection, and youth behaviors, and hiring a coordinator to manage CTC activities.

Phase Two: Organizing, Introducing, Involving. In Phase Two a diverse and representative prevention coalition is formed. Specific tasks for this phase include involving and educating stakeholders who were identified in Phase One; developing a vision for the future of the community's children, and putting an organizational structure in place to help the community move toward the vision. The first two CTC trainings are implemented in this phase: the Key Leader Orientation (KLO) and the Community Board Orientation (CBO). These trainings introduce prevention science to community stakeholders, and help community members create an appropriate structure for the Community Board.

Phase Three: Developing a Community Profile. This is the data collection phase, including a comprehensive community assessment of adolescent behaviors and current prevention services. This phase usually requires administration of the CTC Youth Survey.

Members of the Risk and Protective Factor Assessment Work Group participate in the Community Assessment Training, in which they learn about key data sources for risk and protective factors (such as the student survey) and how to analyze the data. In communities already using the CTC Youth Survey, this training is tailored to help the work group interpret survey results and identify elevated risk factors, depressed protective factors, and problem behaviors prevalent among youth in the community. From this analysis, the work group recommends priority risk and protective factors for focused attention by the CTC Board.

The second component of the community profile is an assessment of current community programs, policies, and resources that address the prioritized risk and protective factors. The Resource Assessment workgroup is trained in assessment procedures during the Community Resource Assessment Training. The goals of the resource assessment are to identify existing evidence-based programs that address the priority factors, discern the gaps in existing program delivery, and recommend where new programs or policies are needed.

Phase Four: Creating a Community Action Plan. During the fourth phase of CTC, the results of the assessment process are reviewed by the full Community Board, and a community action plan is developed. The Community Plan Training (CPT) is provided to Community Boards during this phase. During this training, Board members select prevention policies and programs that target their prioritized risk factors to fill gaps in current prevention services. The CTC Prevention Strategies Guide is a tool used during this process. It describes prevention programs that have been demonstrated in at least one high quality research trial to be effective in changing risk, protection, and problem behaviors.

Once program choices are made, CPT participants are trained to write an action plan that sets clear, measurable goals regarding anticipated outcomes, and also develop an evaluation plan.

Phase Five: Implementing and Evaluating the Community Action Plan. In this phase, the CTC Board implements selected strategies, and evaluates progress over time. Board members and staff for the selected preventive programs attend the final CTC training workshop, the Community Plan Implementation Training (CPIT), which emphasizes the importance of implementing prevention programs with fidelity; that is, ensuring that the programs' content, dosage, and manner of delivery adhere to the protocols identified by program developers.

Participants also learn methods for tracking implementation progress, assessing desired changes in participants, and using this information to adjust implementation as needed to fulfill program objectives.

CTC is intended as an ongoing process. The process of monitoring implementation progress and community level changes in risk, protection and youth outcomes is repeated every two years. Based on a review of these data, CTC boards revise their action plans as needed.

Essential components:

The CTC system is collaborative, proactive, science-based, and data driven, and provides structure, tools, training and technical assistance for coalitions.

Collaborative. CTC uses a coalition approach to address issues at the community level. The coalition will include a diverse group of stakeholders concerned with youth development (youth-serving agency staff, school representatives, health professionals, city leaders, law enforcement, United Way, other funding entities, neighborhood groups, business people, parents, media representatives, faith community members, youth, etc.) in applying prevention science principles to decisions affecting the community's youth.

By providing a setting and common language for all stakeholders to discuss prevention, the model ensures that all voices in the community are heard and respected.

Proactive. Rather than reacting to problems once they have already occurred, CTC focuses on strengthening protections and decreasing risks in order to promote healthy youth development and decrease the likelihood of problem behaviors.

Science based. CTC is grounded in rigorous research from a variety of disciplines, including public health, sociology, psychology, criminology, and community psychology. This research has identified the predictors of youth problem behaviors, developed epidemiologic assessment tools for measuring those predictors in a community, and tested programs that work in addressing those predictors.

Data driven. The CTC system ensures local control of decisions based on local data and needs assessments, and flexibility to implement actions specific to the priorities identified by community members. The CTC system provides tools for measuring levels of risk and protective factors, selecting priority factors on which to focus a strategic plan, selecting appropriate prevention responses, and tracking progress toward desired changes in priority risk factors.

a. The CTC Youth Survey is the primary tool for needs assessment and monitoring. This is a confidential, schoolwide survey for students appropriate for Grades 6-12, that measures a majority of the risk and protective factors identified to predict youth problem behaviors. Coalition members use survey results from students in their community as well as community archival data to prioritize risk and protective factors for attention. The survey is re-administered every 2 years in order to monitor progress over time.

b. Effective program selection is another element of the data-driven process. Coalition members review policies and programs that have been tested and proven effective in addressing their priority factors. They consider the suitability of each program to the community's circumstances, and select prevention responses most likely to be successful in that environment. Information on program effectiveness is summarized in menus of effective programs, for example CTC's Prevention Strategies Guide and The Blueprint for Violence Prevention list of effective programs.

c. Monitoring of program implementation is the third element of the data-driven process. Throughout the implementation cycle of each prevention program or strategy, coalitions collect data to ensure that the program is delivered with fidelity to the original program design.

This monitoring information is important, because without close replication, the effectiveness of these programs can be compromised (see, for example, Elliot & Mihalic, 2004).

Monitoring implementation is also a management tool for identifying challenges that can be addressed before they lead to program failure.

Structure and tools. The CTC structure includes six training workshops and additional tools that help walk community members through each stage of the process. Training manuals are composed of modules that provide comprehensive information, exercises, and guidelines for each stage of the process.

The Milestones and Benchmarks checklist functions as a roadmap for the entire effort. Milestones are major tasks that must be accomplished in each phase of CTC, and benchmarks provide essential steps toward achieving each of these major tasks. Booklets are available to help local leaders evaluate and address community readiness issues before initiating the process, and to explain the system to key leaders and potential board members.

Training and technical assistance. Successful CTC efforts include high-quality training and technical assistance from experienced and certified facilitators. Feinberg et al. (2004), Gomez et al. (2005) and Greenberg et al. (2005) studied the functioning and sustainability of CTC coalitions in Pennsylvania, and found three factors strongly related to effective coalition function: community organizational and motivational readiness, initial training, and ongoing technical assistance (TA). The Pennsylvania study also documented that the sustainability of the effort was predicted by the prevention knowledge of coalition members, the quality of coalition functioning, and their fidelity to the CTC model.

Online CTC materials:

The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention provides all CTC materials free of charge at www.communitiesthatcare.net. Materials include:
  • Introductory booklets for community members
    • Investing in Your Community's Youth: an Introduction to the Communities That Care System
    • Tools for Community Leaders: a Guidebook for Getting Started
  • Training manuals and PowerPoint presentations for all 6 CTC training workshops
    • Key Leader Orientation
    • Community Board Orientation
    • Community Assessment Training
    • Community Resource Assessment Training
    • Community Plan Training
    • Community Plan Implementation Training
  • CTC Youth Survey questionnaire and a scale construction dictionary. This is the primary tool for needs assessment and monitoring.
  • Milestones and Benchmarks checklist tool which itemizes the steps needed to complete each phase of CTC.
  • The Prevention Strategies Guide which provides detailed information on 56 prevention programs that have been tested and proven effective in addressing risk and protective factors and reducing youth problem behaviors.

Tested and effective programs:

A cornerstone of effective community-level prevention involves the implementation of appropriate responses to the priority needs identified during the assessment phase of the process. The CTC system guides community groups to choose and implement appropriate tested and effective programs, policies, and practices in families, schools, and communities (see the CTC Prevention Strategies Guide and the Blueprints for Violence Prevention website). These programs have shown significant effects on minimizing youths' risky behaviors and enhancing positive choices.

Evaluation results:

​Evaluation of implementation:

The CYDS evaluated community efforts to faithfully implement (1) the core principles of the CTC prevention system, and (2) tested and effective prevention programs with respect to content and delivery specifications. The study found that CTC communities achieved high implementation fidelity at the system and program levels when supported by training and technical assistance in CTC.

Control communities did not achieve these things. At the start of the CYDS, CTC and control communities did not differ in their use of a science-based approach to prevention. By the third year of the intervention, key leaders in CTC communities reported a higher stage of adoption of science-based prevention, relative to control communities. They also were willing to provide greater funding for prevention.

Differences were sustained one year after the implementation phase of the trial ended. At this point, key leaders in CTC communities also reported significantly stronger community norms against adolescent drug use. The CTC Milestones and Benchmarks Survey was used to track progress in the implementation of core components of the CTC prevention system.

In each year of the intervention, CTC communities enacted an average of 90% of the key features of the CTC prevention system, including developing a community board, prioritizing risk and protective factors, selecting tested and effective preventive interventions from the Communities That Care Prevention Strategies Guide, implementing selected implementation programs with fidelity, and periodically assessing risk and protective factors and child and adolescent well-being through surveys of students. 

One year after the implementation phase of the trial had ended, eleven of 12 CTC coalitions continued to operate in CTC communities. These coalitions continued to implement key CTC milestones and benchmarks to a significantly greater degree than coalitions in control communities, even without ongoing study-provided support.

Control communities did not make this progress over time in completing CTC milestones and benchmarks, implementing scientifically proven prevention programs, and monitoring program impacts. Over the course of the trial, the 12 CTC communities demonstrated faithful implementation of 17 different school-based, after-school, and parenting interventions selected from a menu of 39 possible tested and effective programs for 5th through 9th grade students contained in the Communities That Care Prevention Strategies Guide.

On average, CTC communities implemented 2.75 tested and effective prevention programs per year (range: 1-5). High rates of fidelity were achieved consistently over time with respect to adherence to program objectives and core components (average = 91-94% per year) and dosage (number, length, and frequency of intervention sessions; average = 93-95% per year).

Faithful implementation continued two years after study support ended. CTC coalitions still offered significantly more tested and effective intervention programs, implemented them with high quality, monitored implementation to a significantly greater degree, and reached significantly more children and parents, compared to control coalitions.

Impact evaluations for Pennsylvania: 

The Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University has been studying the process and impact of the statewide CTC system since its inception in the early 1990s. Summaries of their findings will be posted here soon.

Community Youth Development Study:

The Community Youth Development Study (CYDS) is the first controlled experimental trial of the Communities That Care system. Twenty-four communities in 7 states agreed to participate in the study. These communities consisted of 12 matched pairs which had equivalent demographics and equivalent levels of youth risks and problem behaviors at the start of the study. 

Communities were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. The intervention communities received funding to hire a full-time community coordinator, who formed a community coalition that subsequently participated in the full cycle of CTC trainings. These communities then created community action plans, and were awarded up to $75,000 per year for the next four years to implement the tested, effective prevention strategies selected as part of the action planning process. ​Control communities continued prevention business as usual.

Hawkins et al. 2008, reported finding no significant differences between CTC and control communities in average levels of community-targeted risks among students in fifth grade, prior to the start of the CTC programs.

By the third year of the intervention, key leaders in CTC communities reported a higher stage of adoption of science-based prevention, relative to control communities. They also were willing to provide greater funding for prevention.

Differences were sustained one year after the implementation phase of the trial ended. At this point, key leaders in CTC communities also reported significantly stronger community norms against adolescent drug use. The longitudinal panel youth in CTC and control communities reported similar levels of targeted risk in Grade 5, when the intervention began, but targeted risk exposure grew more slowly for youth in CTC communities between Grade 5 and Grade 10. 

Significantly lower levels of targeted risk were first reported by CTC panel youth 1.67 years into the intervention, in Grade 7, and have continued to be reported by CTC panel youth through Grade 10.

Panel youth from CTC and control communities also reported similar levels of delinquency, alcohol use, and cigarette smoking at Grade 5 baseline. However, between Grades 5 and 10, CTC had significant effects on the initiation of these behaviors by youth. Significant differences in the initiation of delinquency were first observed in the spring of Grade 7. Panel youth from CTC communities were 25% less likely than panel youth from control communities to initiate delinquent behavior, and they remained so in Grade 8.

Significantly lower delinquency initiation rates were sustained through Grade 10, when panel youth from CTC communities were 17% less likely to initiate delinquency than panel youth from control communities.

Preventive effects on alcohol use and cigarette use were first observed in the spring of Grade 8, 2.67 years after intervention programs were implemented. Grade 8 youth from CTC communities were 32% less likely to initiate alcohol use, and 33% less likely to initiate cigarette smoking than Grade 8 youth from control communities (Hawkins et al., 2009).

Preventive effects were again sustained through Grade 10 when CTC panel youth were 29% less likely to initiate alcohol use and 28% less likely to initiate cigarette smoking than panel youth from control communities.

Differences in the initiation of delinquency, alcohol use, and cigarette smoking from Grade 5 through Grade 10 led to cumulatively lower rates of initiation over time: 62% of 10th-grade youth in the panel from CTC communities had engaged in delinquent behavior compared with 70% of 10th-grade youth in the panel from control communities; 67% vs. 75% had initiated alcohol use; and 44% vs. 52% had smoked cigarettes.

CTC also significantly reduced the prevalence of youth problem behaviors in Grade 8 and Grade 10. In Grade 8, the prevalence of alcohol use in the past month, binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row) in the past two weeks, and the variety of delinquent behaviors committed in the past year were all significantly lower in CTC panel youth compared to control community panel youth. 

The CYDS also found significant effects of CTC in reducing the prevalence of cigarette use in the past month and delinquent behavior and violence in the past year in the spring of Grade 10.

Child Trends Research Brief: An overview of the Communities That Care system and up to date research information is available from Child Trends with an in depth research brief that can be found here . Other research is also available through the Child Trends Website.

Conclusions: CTC's theory of change hypothesizes that it takes from 2 to 5 years to observe community-level effects on risk factors, and 5 or more years to observe effects on adolescent delinquency or substance use.

These early findings from the first randomized community trial of CTC are promising, suggesting that CTC is slowing the usual developmental increase in adolescents' risk exposure. Longer follow-up measurements are needed to determine if CTC can significantly reduce community levels of delinquency and drug use as hypothesized. The Community Youth Development Study will collect additional data from these students in 2007 and 2008.

​These data will allow tests of CTC's effects on community rates of delinquency and substance use initiation among young people through the spring of grade 9, almost 5 years after CTC was introduced in the intervention communities and approximately 3+1⁄2 years after communities began implementing tested and effective prevention programs chosen through the CTC system.


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Community TelecentresPictured below: A Guidebook for Managing Telecentre Networks
A telecentre is a public place where people can access computers, the Internet, and other digital technologies that enable them to gather information, create, learn, and communicate with others while they develop essential digital skills.

Telecentres exist in almost every country, although they sometimes go by a different names including:
  • public internet access center (PIAP),
  • village knowledge center,
  • infocenter,
  • Telecottage,
  • Electronic Village Hall, 
  • community technology center (CTC),
  • community multimedia center (CMC),
  • multipurpose community telecentre (MCT),
  • Common/Citizen Service Centre (CSC)
  • and school-based telecentre.

While each telecentre is different, their common focus is on the use of digital technologies to support community, economic, educational, and social development—reducing isolation, bridging the digital divide, promoting health issues, creating economic opportunities, and reaching out to youth for example.

Evolution of the telecentre movement:

The telecentre movement's origins can be traced to Europe's telecottage and Electronic Village Halls (originally in Denmark) and Community Technology Centers (CTCs) in the United States, both of which emerged in the 1980s as a result of advances in computing. At a time when computers were available but not yet a common household good, public access to computers emerged as a solution.

Today, although home ownership of computers is widespread in the United States and other industrialized countries, there remains a need for free public access to computing, whether it is in CTCs, tele-cottages or public libraries to ensure that everyone has access to technologies that have become essential.

​There are also CTCs located in the state of New South Wales, Australia, that provide technology, resources, training and educational programs to communities in regional, rural and remote areas.

Types:

Beyond the differences in names, public ICT access centers are diverse, varying in the clientele they serve, the services they provide, as well as their business or organizational model. Around the world, some telecentres include NGO-sponsored, local government, commercial, school-based, and university-related.

In the United States and other countries, public access to the Internet in libraries may also be considered within the “telecentre concept”, especially when the range of services offered is not limited to pure access but also includes training end-users. Each type has advantages and disadvantages when considering attempts to link communities with ICTs and to bridge the digital divide.

Among the various types:
  • NGO-sponsored telecentres are hosted by an NGO, which manages the center and integrates it, to one degree or another, into the organization's core business
  • Local government telecentres seek to further local development; they often aim to disseminate information, decentralize services, and encourage civic participation, in addition to providing public ICT access.
  • Commercial telecentres, launched by entrepreneurs for profit, range from the purely commercial cybercafé to the social enterprise, where profit and social good objectives are combined.
  • School-based telecentres can be structured to involve community members during off-school hours, but costs need to be shared by the school system and the community.
  • University-related telecentres can offer social outreach to disadvantaged and community groups, provide training, develop locally relevant content, and establish and facilitate virtual networks.
  • Internet access in public libraries.

Need for telecentres:

It is estimated that 40% of the world's population has less than US$20 per year available to spend on ICT.

In Brazil, the poorest 20% of the population counts with merely US$9 per year to spend on ICT (US$0.75 per month). 

In Mexico, the poorest 20% of the society counts with an estimated US$35 per year (US$3 per month).

For Latin America it is estimated that the borderline between ICT as a necessity good and ICT as a luxury good is roughly around the "magical number" of US$10 per person per month, or US$120 per year.

Telecentres and international development institutions:

In the 1990s, international development institutions such as Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and UNESCO, sponsored the deployment of many telecentres in developing countries. Both IDRC and UNESCO are still very involved in the telecentre movement.

The former telecentre.org program at IDRC was transferred to the telecentre.org Foundation in the Philippines in March 2010 and continues to support networks of telecentres around the world.

Within the Philippines, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has rolled-out Tech4ED (Technology for Education, to gain Employment, train Entrepreneurs towards Economic Development). This telecenter program has implemented over 42,000 centers throughout the countryside to promote citizen participation in e-Government services and provide IT education to the masses, specifically, the underserved and marginalized citizens within the country. 

UNESCO continues to support the growth of community multimedia centers (CMCs), which, unlike most other telecentres, have a local community radio, television or other media component.

Sustainability considerations:

In light of the rapidly evolving technologies that support telecentres and in light of the increased penetration of mobile technologies (i.e., cell phones), the telecentre model needs to continuously evolve in order to remain relevant and to continue to address the changing needs of the communities they serve.

As mobile communication technologies become more pervasive around the world, including in rural areas, the telecentres may no longer need to provide phone services, yet they may still be very relevant in terms of access to web-enabled e-government services, e-Learning, and basic Internet communication needs (email and web browsing).

Among the various sustainability considerations:

Evolving models — since the local demand for information and communication services is evolving, the telecentre models need to evolve as well. Franchises and other approaches to linking and networking telecentres are proving to be popular.

Evolving technologies — wireless connectivity technologies, beyond VSAT (known to be expensive) are being explored in many communities around the world. These technologies provide new opportunities for connecting communities through telecentres and eventually at the individual household level.

Evolving services — the types of services that telecentres can and should provide is also rapidly evolving. As the fields of eGovernment, eHealth, e-Learning, eCommerce are evolving and maturing in many countries, telecentres need to take advantage of opportunities to extend the benefits to the community at large, through their public access. Some governments are pursuing the deployment of telecentres precisely as a means of ensuring that larger segments of the population are able to access government services and information through electronic channels.

Community stakeholders - identifying leaders among the community who champion the concept of shared services through telecentre mode, play a crucial role as a bridge between the telecentre operator and hesitant villagers. Indeed, There is a maturing period during which community leaders have to invest constant efforts to drive changes of behaviour in the adoption of innovations.

Community involvement is required however, at the initial phase of the telecentre set up, starting with the site selection and creating a sort of empathy and feeling of empowerment.

Furthermore, the telecentre should be well rooted in the socio-cultural context of the community.

​Networks:

The telecentres of today and of the future are networked telecentres, or telecentres of the 2.0 generation. Increasingly, telecentres are not operating as independent, isolated entities but as members of a network. At times, the network takes the form of a franchise. In other circumstances, the network is much more informal.

One such regional network targeted towards Asia-Pacific is, the Asia-Pacific Telecentre Network.

In the United States, more than 1,000 community technology centers were organized under the leadership of CTCnet, a nonprofit association headquartered in Washington, D.C..

CTCs are also organized under the banner of state organizations, such as the Ohio Community Computing Network, or city programs such the City of Seattle Community Technology Program. and Austin FreeNet.

Further information:

For more information on telecentre networks, visit telecentre.org. An overview of telecentre networks can also be found in Chapter 7 of Making the Connection: Scaling Telecentres for Development.

Additional information about concept of community telecentres can also be found in the online book From the Ground Up: the evolution of the telecentre movement.

Additional information about the practice of building and sustaining telecentres can be found in this page on Telecentre Sustainability.

Additional information about the social, political, economic, and technical problems and challenges facing the development and sustainability of telecentres can be found at Telecenters.

There is a growing research and analytical literature on telecentres and other community based technology initiatives and approaches particularly within the context of Community informatics as an academic discipline and through the Journal of Community Informatics.

See also:







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