The Community Development perspective (or 'Community Work') also has a relatively long history, arising in the same circumstances as the town planning approach in the latter part of the 19th century. Whereas town planning focused on physical environment of urban areas, community development focused on the social factors of people living in close proximity and the extent to which they formed cohesive communities. The underlying theoretical bases are those of sociology and, later, social psychology. The development of these areas of the social sciences during the early part of the 20th century, and their application to urban problems, played a significant role in the emergence of the related field of social work. However, whilst social work tends to focus on individuals and families, community work/ development focuses on wider groupings of people linked together in terms of shared concerns and needs.
The area of community work/ development did not undergo the same degree of professionalisation, and there is no formal requirement for qualifications. There is an emphasis on working with the community, particularly with self-organised groups such as tenants and residents associations, local voluntary action groups, mutual support groups, play schemes, neighbourhood watch schemes (for crime prevention), etc. Often local groups arise in the context of particular problems coming to the fore, when particular individuals may take on leadership roles by popular acclaim because of the degree of commitment and effort they exhibit.
A significant element in the development of the community work occupation was its sponsorship by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a charitable trust established by an industrialist. This sponsorship, during the 1960s, which also involved the National Institute of Social Work Training, helped to establish community work as a professional occupation. In the early 1970s, the Association of Community Workers was set up. The Community Development Foundation (CDF) was established in 1968; this is a not-for-profit organisation, working with communities, disseminating findings and examples of best practice, and providing advice on new policy proposals.
The CDF describes community development as 'a structured intervention that gives communities greater control over the conditions that affect their lives. This does not solve all problems faced by a local community, but does build up confidence to tackle such problems as effectively as any local action can ... Community development is a skilled process and part of its approach is the belief that communities cannot be helped unless they themselves agree to this process. Community development has to look both ways: not only at how the community is working at the grass roots, but also at how responsive key institutions are to the needs of local communities.' Source: Commmunity Development Foundation Website: http://www.cdf.org.uk/CD.htm
A key emphasis is upon 'the community sector', the wide range of localised joint activity by people in terms of shared needs and concerns, whether in professional voluntary organisations, or in various community groups and networks which may be very small and informal. This is seen as a sub-set of the larger voluntary sector, which would also include national charities and not-for-profit organisations. The CDF list a number of contributions that the community sector makes to society. These include added economic value, including the creation of jobs in community businesses and other activities. Examples such as food co-operatives, credit unions, and Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), enable those on low incomes to get better value for their expenditure and for that money to circulate within the local economy. CDF argues that the community and voluntary sector employs enough people to be considered an economic sub-sector; it therefore constitutes as valid a basis for regeneration as other initiatives.
A major development for community development took place in the late 1960s when the government established a number of Community Development Projects (CDPs) in areas of severe urban deprivation. This initiative was undertaken in the context of the 'rediscovery' of urban poverty, which challenged the prevailing notion that the post-war boom and the welfare state had eradicated the extremes of poverty experienced pre-war. The CDPs were set up on the basis of action research projects, whereby trained community workers would move into the chosen areas, research the problems and needs of those areas, engage in activity to stimulate and support voluntary initiatives by local people, and research these processes and evaluate their outcomes. Each project had an action team and a research team; the latter would be attached to an academic institution, thus connecting the research work to the wider academic community.
The underlying rationale for the CDP initiative was one of social pathology, ie that poverty persisted largely because of 'maladaption' by the poor, a poverty 'subculture' in which the poor failed to engage in initiatives to make use of the resources available to them to overcome their situation. As the CDPs developed, the community development workers and researchers began to develop analyses of the situations which contradicted the assumptions on which the initiative was established. The radical analysis that emerged was that urban poverty was the result of national issues, particularly unemployment and bad housing conditions. These were explicable in terms of the conflict between capital and labour, whereby the capitalist state sought to ensure the accumulative capabilities of capital. Reports with titles such as 'Workers on the scrapheap' and 'Guilding the Ghetto' were published by the national organisation set up by the CDP workers. The role of community development workers was seen as enabling bridges to be developed between the poor and the more affluent working class (particularly through the trade unions), to challenge injustices and obtain significant changes in their conditions. Within a decade all of the CDPs had been closed down, with differing reasons being put forward by Government, the CDP workers, and those sharing the radical analysis.
However, this conflict view of community work/ development has continued, and so the ideas underlying community development may be seen to range between the pragmatic and the radical. In practice, approaches to community work/ development seem to be concerned with pragmatic attempts to help communities engage in collective action to deal with their shared needs and problems through mutual self-help. This is combined with the articulation of their needs to relevant state institutions on the basis of their rights to resources and support, and of the benefits to society that would accrue from the provision of such resources and support. Overt ideological politicisation has tended to be eschewed, although militant activity such as demonstrations and rent strikes may still take place in particular contexts.
Community work/ development has thus developed as a professionalised area in a manner where jurisdictional control is problematic. By the very nature of the work itself, with the emphasis upon enabling the community to develop its own expertise coupled with the pragmatic versus conflict issues, professionalisation is itself problematic. Community work professionals have difficulty in claiming to have the technical expertise to define and deal with the problems which they seek to address, because the very definition of the problems and the strategies for dealing with them must be 'owned' by the community itself. The strong humanitarian and humanistic values basis is characteristic of community work as an occupation, probably as much as the expertise required. Because of this, entry to this area is very open. Many people enter as volunteers themselves, getting engaged in issues and initiatives to which they are committed. Local councils often provide some form of part-time wage payment, as 'sessional workers' ie without continuity of employment with the council. In some cases, this may lead on to more formal employment as a community worker. Some people enter employment with a local council, from a background of social work or a relevant degree such as applied social studies.
A recent development has been the development of 'occupational standards' for community work. These form the basis of National Vocational Qualifications in this area, but can also be used for the analysis of training and development requirements and planning to meet these, without the formality of a qualification. As the occupational standards and NVQs have only recently been introduced, it is too early to evaluate their impact on the field. Figure 4 shows the basic outline of the occupational standards.
In figure 5, we show advertisements for typical jobs in this area.