Should community development workers only be recruited from within the communities where they will work?

In response to a recent IACD news post, one of our members in South Africa, has suggested that ‘Community workers should be picked from that community from which they live. My argument is that most of the community workers are those people born elsewhere in an urban area so this CDW doesn’t understand the living styles, interests, culture and at times have no idea about poverty as they might have learnt it only from books and haven’t experienced the pains of the problem they are trying to solve in a particular community’.

IACD has never proposed that community development workers should only be indigenous i.e from the communities where they live. However we do recognise the huge strengths that indigenous practitioners bring. We have long argued that professional training courses should have ‘wider access’ measures in place for people from poorer communities who may never have had the secondary and further education opportunities available to others.

Indigenous workers can bring great assets to community development. They have had similar life experiences to people living within a given community; they will speak the same language/dialect and have a close cultural feel for a community, whether of place or identity. They can also bring well honed skills and knowledge from the experience of having been a community activist, someone with maturity who has campaigned to improve the lives of the people they wish to serve. IACD would celebrate and honour all of this. And again, it is for this reason that as a professional association, we have long argued that such activists should be supported to gain the additional knowledge and skills and accreditation that a professional community development course should be able to offer.  And this is why we have raised concerns recently that we believe that professional community development graduate courses have become too academic and may be preventing such people from acquiring a relevant community development qualification in order to get a paid community development job. We shall be focussing upon this issue more during the year through our forthcoming work on International Occupational Standards and Ethics. But for now, IACD would certainly support this member’s argument that our field needs to open up more opportunities for indigenous people to get community development type jobs.

However, IACD has never argued that community development workers should only be indigenous. Our field has long attracted people from all social classes and ethnic backgrounds and we would want to continue to encourage this. Just because someone may have not grown up living in poverty, should not exclude them from becoming a community development worker deeply impassioned to tackle poverty or with an understanding of its causes and effects. Indeed sometimes people coming in from outside a community can see the wood for the trees. People from different backgrounds, equipped with good quality community development training, should be able to practice wherever they can get a job and when, on the basis of a good employment selection process, they are deemed by the employer to be able to do a good job. We should also remember that the majority of community development jobs tend to be short term due to restricted funding, so community development workers, like teachers or social workers (similar people professions) need to be able to move and find employment often outside the community where they live or grew up. Community development qualifications should be giving practitioners a portable currency that enables them to practice in other areas, indeed other countries.

So we should surely be arguing for an inclusive approach where we train and select community development practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds and only on the basis that they can do the job. But in saying this we would also argue that it would greatly strengthen the selection process, if representatives of the local community where the person will be working are on the selection panel alongside the employing agency.  What is essential is that all community development practitioners be committed to shared ethical values underpinning practice, have good quality skills and the knowledge and insights to be able to quickly gain a deeper understanding of the community where they are working, of the issues, needs and assets; of being a good community educator and an effective community organiser; of being able to work both with local people, many of whom have little power, but also with external agencies – elite groups, government, companies, NGOs etc – that have power and that impact upon people’s lives. In this sense all practitioners need to be able to operate within multiple contexts if they are to effectively support communities to influence and shape political, social, economic and environmental change.