Community development (CD) 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 these
groups with the skills they need to affect change in their own communities. These skills are often
concentrated around building political power 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.

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 Community Development Foundation, Community Development
Exchange and the Federation of 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 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 (CED); community capacity building; Social capital
formation; political participatory development; nonviolent direct action; ecologically sustainable
development; asset-based community development; faith-based community development;
community practice social work; community-based participatory research (CBPR); Community
Mobilization; community empowerment; community participation; participatory planning
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 underserved
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.

Local communities that cannot connect and participate in the larger and increasingly global
Online community 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 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, sometimes implicit goal of community
people, aiming to achieve, through collective effort, a better life, and has occurred throughout
history.

In the global North

In the 19th century, the work of the 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 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, which typically focused on physical development
projects often at the expense of working-class communities. 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—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 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 Neighbour Works America), 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. 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.

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 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.

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

 Adult Literacy Programs, drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the
"Each One Teach One" adult literacy teaching method conceived by Frank Laubach.
 Youth and Women's Groups, following the work of the Serowe Brigades of Botswana, of
Patrick van Rensburg.
 Development of Community Business Ventures and particularly cooperatives, in part
drawn on the examples of José María Arizmendiarrieta and the Mondragon Cooperatives
of the Basque Region of Spain
 Compensatory Education for those missing out in the formal education system, drawing
on the work of Open Education as pioneered by Michael Young.
  Dissemination of Alternative Technologies, based upon the work of E. F. Schumacher as
advocated in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people really mattered
 Village Nutrition Programs and Permaculture Projects, based upon the work of
Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.
 Village Village Water Supply Programs

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.

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,
has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes around the world. This work was
honoured by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

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 breast-feeding; self-managed production;