Community development aims to empower communities and promote social justice. It is defined as building active communities based on mutual respect and removing barriers to participation. A community can be defined by geography, culture, social factors or networks. Key principles of community development include participation, empowerment, being community-led, and promoting social justice. Activities involve profiling communities, capacity building, organizing, networking and negotiating. Practitioners face dilemmas around funding, accountability, acceptability of issues to authorities, and evaluating complex community-level outcomes. The overall goal is to empower disadvantaged communities to have greater control over decisions impacting their health and lives.

2. Strengthen community Action
Presented By:
Ayaz Ahmed
MPH-Fellow
School of Public Health-DUHS

3. Objective
• Defining Community development
• Community development in health promotion
• Working with a community development
approach
• Community development activities
• Dilemmas for practice

4. Defining Community
• There are different ways of defining community,
but the most commonly cited factors are
geography, culture and social stratification.
• These factors are viewed as being linked to the
subjective feelings of belonging or identity which
characterizes the concept of community.
• Others factors are;
• Social network or
• systems of contact.

5. Geography
• A community may be defined on a geographical
basis. A well known example is the east end
London, but this use of community is not
restricted to working class or urban areas.

6. Culture
• Community may be defined in cultural terms, as
in “the chinese community” or “the jewish
community.
• The most commonly cited elements of common
cultural heritage are:
• Ethnic origin,
• Language,
• Religion and
• Customs.

7. Social Stratification
• A community may be based on interests held to
be common, which are usually the products of
social stratification.
• Thus we have; “the working class community”
and “the gay community”.
• Members of community shares;
• Networks of support,
• Knowledge and
• Resources.

8. Community
• The meaning and significance of community
vary enormously.
• How one defines community is important
because it influences how practitioners
understand the dynamics within communities
and the potential challenges that may present
when working with them.

9. Community development
• Community development has been defined as:
• “ Building active and sustainable communities
based on social justice and mutual respect. It is
about changing power structures to remove the
barriers that prevent people from participating in
the issues that affects their lives . Community
workers support individuals, groups and
organization in this process (standing
conference for community development 2001)”.

10. Community development
• Community development is both a philosophy
and a method. As a philosophy its key features
are:
• Equality
• Enabling all communities to be heard
• Valuing of peoples own experience
• Collection of problems and together identify and
implement action
• Recognize the skills, knowledge and expertise
• The empowerment of individuals and
communities through education, skills
development, sharing and joint action.

11. Community development
• As a method it has two different characteristics:
Community-based Community development
Problem, targets and action defined by sponsoring body Problem, targets and action defined by community
Community seen as medium, venue or setting for intervention Community itself the target of intervention in respect to capacity-
building and empowerment
Notion of ‘community’ relatively unproblematic Community recognized as complex, changing, subject to power
imbalances and conflict
Target is largely individuals within either geographic area or specific
subgroup in geographic area defined by sponsoring body
Target may be community structures or services and policies that
impact on the health of the community
Activities largely health-oriented Activities may be quite broad-based, targeting wider factors with an
impact on health, but with indirect health outcomes (empowerment,
social capital)

12. Community development and health promotion
• Community development is a recurring theme in
health promotion. Shared personal experience
led to a new understanding of health issues as
well as providing positive effects and social
cohesion for participants. Black and ethnic-
minority groups also addressed health issues,
particularly the effect of racism within the health
services (Jones 1991).
• In the latter part of 1980s there was wide spread
lip service to the notion of community
development, stimulated in part by WHO.

13. Working with a community development approach
• The ways in which community development is
carried out vary enormously. However, there are
a number of core principles underpinning
community development work, which overlap
and link together. These principles are:
• Participation,
• Community empowerment,
• Community-led, and
• Social justice

14. Working with a community development approach
Participation
• Participation, engagement and involvement are
terms that are used frequently in the health
sector.
• While these terms have different meanings they
all relate to a central aspect of community
development, that of increasing people’s
involvement in decision, service design and
delivery.

15. Participation may be thought of as a ladder
which includes many different activities
Citizens are involved in planning
and decision-making through joint
comities, delegated
representatives or complete
control.
Citizens have a voice but may not
be heeded.
Those with power educate or cure
citizens are receipients.

16. Community empowerment
• A process by which communities gain more
control over the decisions and resources that
influence their lives, including the determinants
of health. Community empowerment builds from
the individuals to the group to the wider
collective and embodies the intention to bring
about social and political change (Laverack
2007, p.29).

17. Community Empowerment
Nine
domains to
understand
C.E by
Laverack
Improves
Participation
Develops Local
Leadership
Builds
empowering
Organizational
structure
Increase
problem
assessment
capacities
Enhances the
ability of
community to
“Ask Why”
Improve
Resource
mobilization
Strengthens
links to other
organization
and people
Creates an
equitable
relationship
with outside
agencies
Increase
control over
programme
management

18. Community-led
• In contrast to professionally determined
priorities, community development starts with
priorities identifies by and common to
communities.
• The term community-led requires us to make a
commitment to learning from communities, being
accountable to communities and working in
partnership.

19. Social Justice
• Community development recognizes that
inequalities exist within society and that some
communities are:
• More privileged,
• Better resourced and consequently
• More healthy than
Others communities.

20. Social
justice
mean
Working to
promote the
health of
disadvantaged
groups
Increasing the
accessibility of
sources
Influencing the
commissioning
of services
Acting as an
advocate and
representing
the interests of
disadvantaged
groups
Building a
social profile of
community,
highlighting the
relationship to
health status.

22. Types of Activities involved in community
development
• A large number of activities may be included as
part of a community development approach:
• Profiling,
• Capacity-building,
• Organizing,
• Networking and
• Negotiating

23. Profiling
• Community profiling involves the community,
statutory and voluntary organizations in identifying
the community’s:
• Needs,
• Particular issues and
• Resources
• It’s an important and early stage of community
development process.

24. Capacity-building
• Capacity-building is working with individuals and
groups within communities to recognize and develop
the skills and resources they have (their assets) in
order to identify and meet their own needs.
• The charity commission sees it as being concerned
with two key areas.
• Providing opportunities for people to learn through
experience-opportunities that would not otherwise be
available to them.
• Involving people in collective effort so that they gain
confidence in their own abilities and their ability to
influence decisions that affect them (Charity
commission 2000)

25. Organizing
• An important area of work that community
development workers are engaged in is the
process of organizing to organize the community
to work together collectively.
• This may include:
• Helping to establish self-help groups or
• Organizing community efforts such as health
forums

26. Networking
• Networks are the ties that link the people
together within communities. Gilchrist (2004,
2007) identifies two different types of networks:
• Strong ties: are based on bonds of:
• Friendship,
• Family relations and
• Whom we look for support and give
companionship.
• Weak ties: they link different clusters of networks
together-forming bridge between the sections of
community and/or between organizations.

27. Networking
• Both type of networks are an important asset
within a community and are an indicator of levels
of social capital.
• Strong networks creates opportunities for;
• Skills,
• Information,
• Learning,
• Creating energy and
• Lead more effective community action.

28. Negotiating
• Communities are not homogenous entities but
include;
• Hierarchies,
• Imbalances in power and
• Differences.
• Such diversity must be negotiated and managed
in order to achieve consensus, particularly in
relation to priorities needs and agreeing actions
to meet needs.
• Community development worker must negotiate
and advocate on behalf of community.

29. Dilemmas in community development practice
• Common dilemmas facing the community
development worker relates to:
• Funding,
• Accountability,
• Acceptability,
• The role of the professional and
• Evaluation

30. Funding
• Most community development projects are
funded by Statutory agencies, such as;
• Health authority,
• Education authority, and sometimes
• Joint funding.
• Other projects which might come under label
“community development” belong to voluntary
sector, and are funded by;
• Government grants fund raising

31. Accountability
• All community development workers have dual
accountability:
• To their employee and
• To their communities.
• Funding agencies naturally require projects to be
accountable, and this can lead to problems where the
priorities of the community and the agency are not the
same.
• Community development workers may feel themselves to be
trapped in the role of mediator, informing statutory services
about community needs and informing the community about

32. Acceptability
• Community development tends to focus on small
numbers of peoples whereas employers tend to
be responsible for large populations.
• Issues which are raised through a community
development approach (such as discrimination
in service provision) may be unacceptable to
employing authorities.
• Community development workers may also find
that they need to establish and negotiate their
role before they are accepted by a community.

33. Role of the professional
• Community development also poses problems
for workers whose primary training lies in other
areas.
• Professional workers are taught a particular area
of expertise and tend to assume that they know
what is best for their clients.
• They may be sensitive to individual
circumstances but the secondary socialization
encountered during professional training
reinforces the notion of expertise.

34. Role of the professional
• The task of professional is to enable a
community to express its needs, and support the
community in meeting those needs themselves.
• The skills involved in community work also tend
to be different from those acquired in
professional training (unless this includes
community development ).

35. Role of the professional
• Professional key skills concern process rather
than content and include:
Key
skill
s
Organizational skills, e.g.
Developing appropriate
management structures such as
management committees or
steering groups
Communication skills,
e.g. consultation and
communication with a
variety of groups
including community
groups, finding agency
and co-workers.
Evaluation skills, e.g.
monitoring the impact of
intervention and self-
evaluation

36. Evaluation
• Community development has often been
described as difficult to evaluate because it
works on so many levels, is a long-term strategy
and encompasses so many strands of work.
• ABCD model was developed by the Scottish
Community Development Centre to support both
the planning and evaluation of projects and
provides a framework for measuring
participation and empowerment (Barr &
Hashagen 2000).

37. Conclusion
• What [inner-city community health projects] are
doing is creating a climate in which some of the
most oppressed and deprived sections of our
urban communities can find a voice with which
to challenge the forces which both determine
their health and control the quantity and quality
of health services to which they have access
(Rosenthal 1983).

38. Reference
• Foundations for health promotion by Naidoo 4th
edition, chapter 10.