Community development

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

The values and ethos that should underpin practice can be expressed as: Commitment to rights, solidarity, democracy, equality, environmental 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 social work, adult education, youth work, health disciplines, environmental education, local economic development, to urban planning, regeneration, architecture and more who seek to apply community development values and adopt community development methods.

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.

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.

In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen (1771–1851), sought to develop a more perfect community.

[23] 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.

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 to other nonprofit organizations.

The CDCs and similar organizations have been credited by some with starting the process that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner-city areas such as the South Bronx in New York City.

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).

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.

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.

In 1999 the Labour Government established a UK-wide organisation responsible for setting professional-training standards for all education and development practitioners working within local communities.

The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the National Training Organisation (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.

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.

The beauty of Indian model of community development lies in the homogeneity of villagers and high level of participation.

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.

Participatory governance institutions are organizations which aim to facilitate the participation of citizens within larger decision making and action implementing processes in society.

"[31] VDP/CDP is often useful in Vietnam for shifting centralized management to more decentralization, helping develop local governance at the grassroots level.

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.

[31] 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.

[33][32] 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.

[33] NGOs are also overlooked by the Vietnam Fatherland Front, an umbrella organization that reports observations directly to the Party and Central government.

[34] 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.