Tuigse air Eagrachadh Coimhearsnachd

Understanding Community Organization

• Key learning outcomes include: describing community, discussing community organizing concepts, conducting needs assessments, identifying improvement areas, designing mobilization plans, engaging stakeholders, explaining community service elements, mobilizing students, and realizing volunteerism's value.

Introduction to Community Development

• Community development involves assessing the present and future of a community.
• It requires collective planning, implementation, and evaluation to advance, considering financial, human, physical, and natural resources.
• Understanding community organization is essential for effective community immersion and project implementation.
• Key areas of focus are community types, concepts, principles, needs analysis, improvement strategies, mobilization plans, networking, community service, and student mobilization.

Core Concepts: Community and Organizing

• Community, in sociology, is a group with a social structure, culture, norms, values, and status, working together in a specific place.
• It can be a group bound by a sense of belonging across time and space, or a group that benefits from a community development project.
• "Community" originates from the Latin "communitas," meaning common or public, shared by many.
• Community is a group living in the same place or sharing norms, religion, values, or identity, solving problems together.
• Communities can be categorized by age, ethnicity, gender, religion, location, or profession.
• Ferdinand Toennies contrasted Gemeinschaft (close rural social ties) with Gesellschaft (impersonal urban ties).
• Chris Drew defines community as a social unit with common networks, like values, interests, goals, and kinship.

Categories and Types of Communities

• Communities of place: Urban, suburban, rural, neighborhood, suburb, national, and global communities.
• Urban communities are densely populated, rely on external food and materials, and provide services.
• Suburban communities are less dense, family-oriented, with interests in education and cost of living.
• Rural communities are agrarian, face healthcare access issues, and have conservative political leanings.
• Neighborhoods are small, localized groups sharing services.
• Suburbs are larger than neighborhoods but smaller than cities, with local governance and shared interests.
• National community: Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" share identity through media and government.
• Global community includes everyone worldwide.

Communities Based on Shared Interest

• Subcultures: Groups with distinct beliefs and interests from the dominant culture (e.g., surfing, gaming).
• Countercultures: Distinct cultural groups opposed to the dominant culture (e.g., hippies, Amish, cults).
• Sporting communities: Groups sharing a sport, developing practices and events (e.g., global football).

Identity-Based Communities

• Religious communities: They cohere around spiritual beliefs, acting as support networks.
• Virtual communities: They connect online based on shared interests.
• Ethnic groups: These share history, practices, cultures, and beliefs.

Communities of Need

• Disabled community: People share experiences, advocate for needs, and offer support.
• Deaf community: Subset of the disabled, sharing language (sign) and culture.
• Elderly community: Groups share aging experiences, medical resources, and build community.

Practice-Based Communities

• Professional communities: People share a profession or expertise, advocate, set standards, and learn.
• Guilds and associations: Groups connected to hobbies (e.g., woodworking, birdwatching).
• Business communities: Groups advocate for business interests and efficient regulations.
• Economic communities: Larger than business communities, linked to nation-state economies (e.g., APEC, European Economic Community).

Community Organizing Explained

• Community organizing involves methods and strategies to address public issues and empower collective action.
• Eduard C. Lindeman (1921) defined it as a conscious, democratic effort to control community affairs.
• Walter W. Pettit (1925) saw it as assisting people to recognize and meet common needs.
• Sanderson and Polson (1939) described it as obtaining consensus on values and welfare through best available means.
• It involves applying knowledge, practice, and procedures for planned change towards community improvement.

Models of Community Organization

• Three Models include: locality development, social planning, and social action.
• Locality development involves enhancing people's involvement and planning and finding solutions together.
• Social planning involves evaluating welfare needs and suggesting service delivery improvements.
• Social action involves using conflict to address inequalities.

Six Steps in Community Organizing

• Step 1: Community assessment identifies needs and trends to inform outreach strategies, using demographic, geographic, and historical data.
• Step 2: Community outreach involves surveys and listening to concerns through face-to-face meetings, door-knocking, phone surveys, or social media.
• Step 3: Clarify goals by aligning the mission and listing exactly what one seeks to achieve, divided into internal and external objectives.
• Step 4: Frame community organizing strategies such as forums, rallies, emailing government leaders, press conferences.
• Step 5: Build local leadership by electing community leaders to lead local initiatives.
• Step 6: Mobilize people by gathering people and taking collective action, utilizing checklists, reminders, and benchmarks.

Importance of Community Organizing

• Issues Identification: Identify issues to shed light on community concerns and assess policy changes.
• Supporting inclusivity: Equally distributing community power by electing leaders.
• Policy Changes: Directing communities to change policy.
• Amplifying Voices: Giving individuals a platform to make their voices heard and create change.
• Building Power: Helps communities to build real power and influence.

Key aspects of Community Action

• Accountability: Community organizing holds decision-makers accountable.
• Fostering community: It brings people together to do community building.
• Driving change: Creates real and lasting change.

Focuses in Community Development

• Community Development: Planned effort to enable democratic participation in problem-solving.
• Process: The process is collaborative, consultative, and participative.
• The Australians Institute of Family Studies suggests the use of a "wheel of participation" in community development.
• Community: Refers to local citizens not service providers.
• Consultation: Seeking community members via surveyes, interviews, etc.
• Participation: Full involvement and leadership of community members in planning, delivering, and evaluating community actions.