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Community development

Community development

Overview
Community development is a broad term applied to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of local communities.
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Encyclopedia
Community development is a broad term applied to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of local communities.

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to affect change in their own communities. These skills are often created through the formation of large 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.

Definitions


There are complementary definitions of community development. The Community Development Challenge report, which was produced by a working party comprising leading UK organizations in the field (including (Foundation Builders) ommunity Development Founsadvantage, knitting society together at the grass roots
The Grass Roots
The Grass Roots is an American rock band that charted between 1966 and 1975 as the brainchild of songwriting duo P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri.In their career, The Grass Roots achieved two gold albums, one gold single and charted singles a total of 21 times. Among their charting singles, they...

 and deepening democracy. There is a CD 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 CD techniques on a voluntary basis, and there are also other professions and agencies which use a CD 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.


A number of different approaches to community development can be recognized, including: community economic development
Community economic development
Community Economic Development is a field of study that actively elicits community involvement when working with government, and private sectors to build strong communities, industries, and markets...

 (CED); community capacity building
Capacity building
Capacity building also referred to as capacity development is a conceptual approach to development that focuses on understanding the obstacles that inhibit people, governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations from realizing their developmental goals while enhancing...

; Social capital
Social capital
Social capital is a sociological concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. The concept of social capital highlights the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to get collective or economic results. The term social capital is frequently...

 formation; political participatory development
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...

; nonviolent direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...

; ecologically sustainable development
Sustainable development
Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use, that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come...

; asset-based community development
Asset-based community development
Asset-based community development is a methodology that seeks to uncover and utilize the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development....

; faith-based community development; community practice social work
Community practice
Community Practice is a branch of social work in the United States that focuses on larger social systems and social change, and is tied to the historical roots of United States social work...

; community-based participatory research
Community-based participatory research
Community-based participatory research is research that is conducted as an equal partnership between traditionally trained "experts" and members of a community. In CBPR projects, the community participates fully in all aspects of the research process....

 (CBPR); Community Mobilization
Community Mobilization
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 empowerment
Empowerment
Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, racial, educational, gender or economic strength of individuals and communities...

; community participation
Community Participation
community participation is a fora where people in the society take role in planning and management of their society.It aims at attracting coordination and promoting wellness of the people in the society.pple can participate through the following ways:-...

; participatory planning
Participatory planning
Participatory planning is an urban planning paradigm that emphasizes involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural...

 including community-based planning (CBP); community-driven development (CDD); and approaches to funding communities directly.

Education and the community-wide empowerment that increased educational opportunity creates, form a crucial component of community development and certainly for under-served communities that have limited general educational and professional training resources. Workforce development
Workforce development
Workforce development is an American economic development approach that attempts to enhance a region's economic stability and prosperity by focusing on people rather than businesses. It is essentially a human resources strategy...

 and the issues and challenges of crossing the Digital divide
Digital divide
The Digital Divide refers to inequalities between individuals, households, business, and geographic areas at different socioeconomic levels in access to information and communication technologies and Internet connectivity and in the knowledge and skills needed to effectively use the information...

, and increasing community-wide levels of Digital inclusion have become crucially important in this and both for affordable access to computers and the Internet, and for training in how to use and maintain these resources.

Local communities that cannot connect and participate in the larger and increasingly global Online community
Online community
An online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted...

 are becoming increasingly marginalized because of that. So where Urban development with its focus on buildings and physical infrastructure was once viewed as a primary path forward to community development, development of computer and online infrastructure and access, and the community enablement they support have to become central areas of focus moving forward. This has become an area of active involvement for both public and private sector organizations including foundations and nonprofit organizations. In the United States, nonprofit organizations such as Per scholas
Per scholas
Per Scholas is a United States registered 501 nonprofit organization based in Bronx, New York. Per Scholas was founded in 1995 by a consortium of leading foundations and corporations to build and distribute computers at a significant discount to schools serving low-income neighborhoods...

 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.

The history of community development


Community development has been a sometimes explicit and implicit goal of community people, aiming to achieve, through collective effort, a better life,that has occurred throughout history.

In the global North


In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen
Robert Owen
Robert Owen was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.Owen's philosophy was based on three intellectual pillars:...

 (1771–1851), sought to create a more perfect community. At New Lanark
New Lanark
New Lanark is a village on the River Clyde, approximately 1.4 miles from Lanark, in South Lanarkshire, Scotland. It was founded in 1786 by David Dale, who built cotton mills and housing for the mill workers. Dale built the mills there to take advantage of the water power provided by the river...

 and at later communities such as Oneida
Oneida Community
The Oneida Community was a religious commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in the year 70 AD, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be free of sin and perfect in this...

 in the USA and the New Australia Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create utopian or intentional utopian communities, with mixed success.

In the United States in the 1960s, the term "community development" began to complement and generally replace the idea of urban renewal
Urban renewal
Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...

, which typically focused on physical development projects often at the expense of working-class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...

 communities. In the late 1960s, philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

 and government officials such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also referred to by his initials RFK, was an American politician, a Democratic senator from New York, and a noted civil rights activist. An icon of modern American liberalism and member of the Kennedy family, he was a younger brother of President John F...

 took an interest in local nonprofit organizations—a pioneer was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn—that 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 Corporation
Community Development Corporation
Community Development Corporation is a broad term referring to not-for-profit organizations incorporated to provide programs, offer services and engage in other activities that promote and support community development. CDCs usually serve a geographic location such as a neighborhood or a town....

s" or CDCs. Federal laws beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act
Housing and Community Development Act of 1974
The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 is a United States federal law that, among other provisions, authorizes "Entitlement Communities Grants" to be awarded by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and the mandated the formation of a National Institute of...

 provided a way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and other nonprofit organizations
Non-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

. National organizations such as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (founded in 1978 and now known as NeighborWorks America
NeighborWorks America
The Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, doing business as NeighborWorks America,is a Congressionally chartered nonprofit organization that supports community development in the United States. The organization provides grants and technical assistance to 235 U.S...

), the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (founded in 1980 and known as LISC), 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
Types of rural communities
Sociologists have identified a number of different types of rural communities, which have arisen as a result of changing economic trends within rural regions of industrial nations....

. The CDCs and similar organizations have been credited with starting the process that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner city
Inner city
The inner city is the central area of a major city or metropolis. In the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland, the term is often applied to the lower-income residential districts in the city centre and nearby areas...

 areas such as the South Bronx
South Bronx
The South Bronx is an area of the New York City borough of The Bronx. The neighborhoods of Tremont, University Heights, Highbridge, Morrisania, Soundview, Hunts Point, and Castle Hill are sometimes considered part of the South Bronx....

 in New York City.

Community development in Canada has roots in the development of co-operatives, credit union
Credit union
A credit union is a cooperative financial institution that is owned and controlled by its members and operated for the purpose of promoting thrift, providing credit at competitive rates, and providing other financial services to its members...

s and caisses populaires. The Antigonish Movement
Antigonish Movement
The Antigonish Movement blended adult education, co-operatives, microfinance and rural community development to help small, resource-based communities around Canada’s Maritimes improve their economic and social circumstances. A group of priests and educators, including Father Jimmy Tompkins, Father...

 which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...

, through the work of Doctor Moses Coady
Moses Coady
Rev. Dr. Moses Michael Coady was a Roman Catholic priest, adult educator and co-operative entrepreneur best known for his instrumental role in the Antigonish Movement...

 and Father James Tompkins
James Tompkins
Father Jimmy Tompkins was a Roman Catholic priest who founded the Antigonish Movement, a progressive effort that incorporated adult education, cooperatives and rural community development to aid the fishing and mining communities of northern and eastern Nova Scotia, Canada...

, has been particularly influential in the subsequent expansion of community economic development work across Canada.

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.

Mohondas K. Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , pronounced . 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement...

 adopted African community development ideals as a basis of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian Swaraj
Swaraj
Swaraj can mean generally self-governance or "self-rule", and was used synonymously with "home-rule" by Gandhi but the word usually refers to Gandhi's concept for Indian independence from foreign domination. Swaraj lays stress on governance not by a hierarchical government, but self governance...

 movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence
Economic interdependence
Economic interdependence is a consequence of specialization, or the division of labor, and is almost universal. The participants in an economic system are dependent on others for the products they cannot produce efficiently for themselves. This physical interdependence implies corresponding...

 at village level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work of Vinoba Bhave
Vinoba Bhave
Vinoba Bhave , born Vinayak Narahari Bhave often called Acharya , was an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights. He is best known for the Bhoodan Andolan...

 in encouraging grassroots
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...

 land reform
Land reform
[Image:Jakarta farmers protest23.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Farmers protesting for Land Reform in Indonesia]Land reform involves the changing of laws, regulations or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution,...

, India under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru , often referred to with the epithet of Panditji, was an Indian statesman who became the first Prime Minister of independent India and became noted for his “neutralist” policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the principal leaders of India’s independence movement in the...

 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.

Community Development became a part of the Ujamaa Villages
Arusha Declaration
The Arusha Declaration was made by Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere on 5 February 1967, outlining the principles of Ujamaa to develop the nation's economy...

 established in Tanzania
Tanzania
The United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.Tanzania is a state...

 by Julius Nyerere
Julius Nyerere
Julius Kambarage Nyerere was a Tanzanian politician who served as the first President of Tanzania and previously Tanganyika, from the country's founding in 1961 until his retirement in 1985....

, 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
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 Agencies and the World Bank
World Bank Group
The World Bank Group is a family of five international organizations that makes leveraged loans, generally to poor countries.The Bank came into formal existence on 27 December 1945 following international ratification of the Bretton Woods agreements, which emerged from the United Nations Monetary...

. Central to these policies of community development were
  • Adult Literacy
    Literacy
    Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...

     Programs, drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire
    Paulo Freire
    Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy.-Biography:...

     and the "Each One Teach One
    Each One Teach One
    Each One Teach One is a known African Proverb. The original author is unknown.This phrase originated in the US during slavery, when Africans and African Americans were denied education, including learning to read...

    " adult literacy teaching method conceived by Frank Laubach
    Frank Laubach
    Frank Charles Laubach was an Evangelical Christian missionary and mystic known as "The Apostle to the Illiterates." In 1935, while working at a remote location in the Philippines, he developed the "Each One Teach One" literacy program. It has been used to teach about 60 million people to read in...

    .
  • Youth and Women's Groups, following the work of the Serowe Brigades of Botswana
    Botswana
    Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana , is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. The citizens are referred to as "Batswana" . Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name after becoming independent within the Commonwealth on 30 September 1966...

    , of Patrick van Rensburg.
  • Development of Community Business Ventures and particularly cooperatives, in part drawn on the examples of José María Arizmendiarrieta
    José María Arizmendiarrieta
    Father José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga was a Catholic priest and founder of the Mondragón cooperative movement in the Basque Country....

     and the Mondragon Cooperatives
    Mondragón Cooperative Corporation
    The MONDRAGON Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Founded in the town of Mondragón in 1956, its origin is linked to the activity of a modest technical college and a small workshop producing paraffin heaters...

     of the Basque
    Basque Country (autonomous community)
    The Basque Country is an autonomous community of northern Spain. It includes the Basque provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa, also called Historical Territories....

     Region of Spain
  • Compensatory Education
    Compensatory Education
    Compensatory education offers supplementary programs or services designed to help children at risk of cognitive impairment and low educational achievement reach their full potential.-Children at risk:...

     for those missing out in the formal education
    Education
    Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

     system, drawing on the work of Open Education
    Open educational resources
    Open educational resources are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone...

     as pioneered by Michael Young.
  • Dissemination of Alternative Technologies
    Alternative technology
    Alternative technology is a term used to refer to technologies that are more environmentally friendly than the functionally equivalent technologies dominant in current practice....

    , based upon the work of E. F. Schumacher
    E. F. Schumacher
    Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s...

     as advocated in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people really mattered
    Small Is Beautiful
    Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr...

  • Village Nutrition Programs and Permaculture
    Permaculture
    Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that is modeled on the relationships found in nature. It is based on the ecology of how things interrelate rather than on the strictly biological concerns that form the foundation of modern agriculture...

     Projects, based upon the work of Australians Bill Mollison
    Bill Mollison
    Bruce Charles 'Bill' Mollison is a researcher, author, scientist, teacher and naturalist. He is considered to be the 'father of permaculture', an integrated system of design, co-developed with David Holmgren, that encompasses not only agriculture, horticulture, architecture and ecology, but also...

     and David Holmgren
    David Holmgren
    David Holmgren is an ecologist, ecological design engineer and writer. He is known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison.- Life and work :Holmgren was born in the state of Western Australia...

    .
  • Village Water Supply
    Water resources
    Water resources are sources of water that are useful or potentially useful. Uses of water include agricultural, industrial, household, recreational and environmental activities. Virtually all of these human uses require fresh water....

     Programs


In the 1990s, following critiques of the mixed success of "top down" government programs, and drawing on the work of Robert Putnam
Robert Putnam
Robert David Putnam is a political scientist and professor of public policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also visiting professor and director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester...

, in the rediscovery of Social Capital
Social capital
Social capital is a sociological concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. The concept of social capital highlights the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to get collective or economic results. The term social capital is frequently...

, community development internationally became concerned with social capital formation. In particular the outstanding success of the work of Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist and founder of the Grameen Bank, an institution that provides microcredit to help its clients establish creditworthiness and financial self-sufficiency. In 2006 Yunus and Grameen received the Nobel Peace Prize...

 in Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...

 with the Grameen Bank
Grameen Bank
The Grameen Bank is a microfinance organization and community development bank started in Bangladesh that makes small loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral...

, has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit
Microcredit
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans to those in poverty designed to spur entrepreneurship. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimal qualifications to gain access to traditional credit...

 schemes around the world. This work was honoured by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel.-Background:According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who...

.

The "Human Scale Development" work of Right Livelihood Award
Right Livelihood Award
The Right Livelihood Award, also referred to as the "Alternative Nobel Prize", is a prestigious international award to honour those "working on practical and exemplary solutions to the most urgent challenges facing the world today". The prize was established in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull, and is...

 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
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 results from the failure to satisfy a particular human need, it is not just an absence of money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...

. 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
Arms race
The term arms race, in its original usage, describes a competition between two or more parties for the best armed forces. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapons, greater armies, or superior military technology in a technological escalation...

, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy
Representative democracy
Representative democracy is a form of government founded on the principle of elected individuals representing the people, as opposed to autocracy and direct democracy...

, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...

; commercial television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, while used to satisfy the need for recreation
Recreation
Recreation is an activity of leisure, leisure being discretionary time. The "need to do something for recreation" is an essential element of human biology and psychology. Recreational activities are often done for enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure and are considered to be "fun"...

, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity. Synergic
Synergy
Synergy may be defined as two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable.The term synergy comes from the Greek word from , , meaning "working together".-Definitions and usages:...

 satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding
Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding is the feeding of an infant or young child with breast milk directly from female human breasts rather than from a baby bottle or other container. Babies have a sucking reflex that enables them to suck and swallow milk. It is recommended that mothers breastfeed for six months or...

; self-managed production; popular education
Popular education
Popular education is a concept grounded in notions of class, political struggle, and social transformation. The term is a translation from the Spanish educación popular or the Portuguese educação popular and rather than the English usage as when describing a 'popular television program,' popular...

; democratic community organizations; preventative medicine
Preventive medicine
Preventive medicine or preventive care refers to measures taken to prevent diseases, rather than curing them or treating their symptoms...

; meditation; educational games.
'

See also

  • Community
    Community
    The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...

  • Community building
    Community building
    Community building is a field of practices directed toward the creation or enhancement of community among individuals within a regional area or with a common interest...

  • Community art
    Community art
    Community Art could be loosely defined as a way of creating art in which professional artists collaborate more or less intensively with people who don't normally actively engage in the arts. Community arts, also sometimes known as "dialogical art", "community-engaged" or "community-based art,"...

  • BetterTogether
    BetterTogether
    Better Together: Restoring the American Community is both a book and website published as an initiative of the Saguaro Seminar conducted at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government...

  • Community media
    Community media
    Community media is any form of media that is created and controlled by a community, either a geographic community or a community of identity or interest. Community media is separate from commercial media, state run media, or public broadcasting. The fundamental premise is to engage those groups...

  • Community film
    Community film
    Community Film is a variety of practices and approaches which emerged in the 1970s that claim to interrogate and challenge the dominant use of "film" and "cinema" in association with a global, big budget "industry". DeeDee Halleck noted in her 2002 book "It's one thing to critique the mass media...

  • Community organizing
    Community organizing
    Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. A core goal of community organizing is to generate durable power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence...

  • Community practice
    Community practice
    Community Practice is a branch of social work in the United States that focuses on larger social systems and social change, and is tied to the historical roots of United States social work...

  • Rural community development
    Rural community development
    Rural community development encompasses a range of approaches and activities that aim to improve the welfare and livelihoods of people living in rural areas. As a branch of community development, these approaches pay attention to social issues particularly community organizing. This is in contrast...

  • Urban regeneration
  • Urbanism
    Urbanism
    Broadly, urbanism is a focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment.-Philosophy:...

  • Community engagement
    Community engagement
    Community engagement refers to the process by which community benefit organizations and individuals build ongoing, permanent relationships for the purpose of applying a collective vision for the benefit of a community...

  • Participatory planning
    Participatory planning
    Participatory planning is an urban planning paradigm that emphasizes involving the entire community in the strategic and management processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes, urban or rural...


Further reading

  • Briggs, Xavier de Souza, and Elizabeth Mueller and Mercer Sullivan, From Neighborhood to Community: Evidence on the Social Effects of Community Development Corporation. Community Development Research Center, 1997.
  • Ferguson, Ronald F.
    Ronald Ferguson (economist)
    Ronald F. Ferguson is an economist who researches factors that affect educational achievement. Major themes in his work include the race-related achievement gap in the United States and how to improve schools and identify effective teachers....

     and William T. Dickens, eds., Urban Problems and Community Development. Brookings Institution
    Brookings Institution
    The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...

     Press, 1999. ISBN 0815718756, 9780815718758
  • Grogan, Paul and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival. Westview Press, 2002. ISBN 0813339529, 9780813339528
  • von Hoffman, Alexander, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods. Oxford University Press
    Oxford University Press
    Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...

    , 2003, Ppbck. ed., 2004. ISBN 0195176146, 9780195176148

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