subject: Important aspects of Community Development [print this page] Important aspects of Community Development
Community Development, casually called community building is a wide term useful to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders, activists, occupied citizens and professionals to improve a variety of prospects of local communities. Community development seeks to allow individuals and groups of people by providing these groups with the skills they need to influence change in their own communities. These skills are often concentrated about building political power through the development of large social groups working for a common program. 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 is a planned intervention that gives communities better control over the situation that affects their lives. This does not resolve all the problems faced by a local community, but it does build up self-confidence to begin such problem as successfully as any local action can. Community development works at the level of limited groups and organizations rather than with individuals. The range of local groups and organizations representing communities at local level constitutes the community sector.
Community building is a field of practices bound in the direction of the creation or improvement of community among individuals inside a regional area with a general interest. It is sometimes encompassed below the field of community development. A broad variety of practices can be utilized for community building, ranging from simple measures like potlucks and small book clubs, to largerrange efforts such as mass festivals and building construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.
Education and the community-wide empowerment that increased educational possibility creates, form a critical component of community development and surely for undeserved communities that have limited general educational and professional training resources. Workforce development and the issues and challenges of crossing the Digital divide, 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.
In sociology, the concept of community has lead to important debate, and sociologists are yet to reach agreement on a definition of the term. Traditionally a community development has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to pass on to a group that is organized around regular values and is attributed with social structure within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household. The word can also refer to the national community or international community.
