Practice Insights magazine now out: Special 65th Anniversary issue.

The Special Birthday Issue of IACD’s magazine Practice Insights is now available to download. The magazine has also been sent to all IACD members. This Special Issue looks at the key influencers and shapers of the community development profession and movement since the association was set up 1953.

There is a saying that we spend our lives looking forward, but only understand it looking back. Over the past six decades tens of
thousands of community development practitioners have dedicated their expertise to empowering communities to take action collectively to improve the lives of people and to care for the planet.
Their work has supported some of the most vulnerable people across the world to have not simply a voice, but also the means to take action. Community development practitioners generally stay in the shadows.

For years our professional mantra has been ‘to do yourself out of a job’, with community development practitioners rarely in the limelight. This has not always been the case of course. And a few have become well known internationally. For years our professional mantra has been ‘to do yourself out of a job’, with community development practitioners rarely in the limelight.

Our starting point, 1953, is somewhat artificial in that clearly there were people working to educate and organise disadvantaged communities for centuries. But it was only after the Second World War, with the creation of the United Nations, that it and its member countries explicitly recognised the need for community development professionals. This context is helpful in appreciating influences that are with us today – the
concept of developed and developing countries; the United States, Russia and China offering different paradigms for development alongside European countries as they sought closure on their
overseas empires and forged the European Union; the indigenous liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America; the globalization of the world economy; the environmental crisis; and the
recognition that community development programmes were as relevant to developed as developing countries.

You can download the full magazine here:

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