community development

Community Workanomics : How Socio-Political and Economic Factors Changed the Concept of Community Development

Community development is mainly focused on eradicating poverty and creating a positive change to uplift the lives of the people in a community . It also aims to find solutions to the existing socio-political and economic realities of the society . Community involvement and participation was brought to greater heights by the United Nations , where political action was practiced to materialize the plight for change and improvement . Currently , the United Nations is implementing the Eight Millennium Development Goals , which seek

to halve poverty by the year 2015 . Community development has a short history but is grounded with a lot of socio-political and economic perspective that have contributed to the development of this concept . The economics behind the concept of community development is on the problem of the existence of the poor , the malnourished and the underdeveloped economies . The politics behind it is on the practice or action itself the implementation of community-based programs to deal with the harsh realities of life . I will first discuss the development of community work in the UK and later on discuss the factors and their respective community development strategies

Smith [1996 , 2006] discussed a brief history of the development of community work in the UK . He mentioned that community work emerged during the 1950s and 1960s as some form of occupation . Community work or community development was viewed to be a work , which involved providing local neighborhoods of services geared towards the goal of meeting their basic needs . During this era , there were two popular initiatives - the Gulbenkian Report , a study group that observed the nature and future prospects of community development as an occupation the Community Development Projects , a program that started in 1970s that tackled community work as an anti-poverty strategy . In the 1980s , Thomas [1983] introduced five major aspects of community work : community action community development , social planning , community organization , and service extension . Service extension changed the nature of community development . Thomas [1983] argued that services provided by different agencies are given importance by increasing their accessibility in the neighborhood . Come the 1990s , community work was seen as a capacity-building strategy , which allowed better training for community workers to be able to pursue to a much higher concern - economic development . Currently , state-sponsored community work is still present and government programs have ever been more widespread As mentioned earlier , community development is very much rooted to poverty . The existence of poverty allowed different organizations to pursue on community work . The economics behind such initiative can be tackled by using economic theories on the existence of poverty . Poverty is greatly influenced by the underdevelopment of people - the lack of access of basic need , which can be represented by the Maslow 's hierarchy of needs [Maslow , 1943] . Once one of the needs is not met , one is considered poor . However , practically speaking , poverty can be caused by the following : individual deficiencies , cultural beliefs system socio-political and economic distortions , geographical disparities cumulative and cyclical...