About our Awards


 IACD presents awards to members deemed by the Board to have made a significant contribution towards the work of the association and to the field of community development. These awards are presented at our international conferences. To date we have had four Lifetime Achievement Awards and fifteen Global Ambassador Awards. 

The IACD Global Ambassador Award is presented to an individual or individuals who have provided an outstanding contribution to the work of IACD.

The IACD Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to an individual who has provided an outstanding contribution to international community development throughout a significant portion of their career. 


2022 Awards


Ronnie Fay — Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award


25.10.17. Navan, Ireland. RONNIE FAY Pavee Point Traveller & Roma Centre. ©Photo by Derek Speirs (Image use subject to licence -credit photo Derek Speirs)

The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to individuals who have provided an outstanding contribution to international community development throughout a significant portion of their career. 

This year, the presentation is particularly poignant in that it is being awarded posthumously to Ronnie Fay from Ireland, who sadly died in January.

At our 2022 Annual General meeting, IACD expressed our warmest welcomed to Philip Watt, Ronnie’s husband, and to members of Ronnie’s family who joined that day. We also welcomed colleagues from Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, based in Dublin, where Ronnie was Co-Director, and to colleagues from Community Work Ireland, where Ronnie was Chair.

Community Work Ireland is a long-standing organizational member of IACD and was a principal partner in the organizing and hosting of the World Community Development Conference in Maynooth in 2018.

Ronnie’s outstanding contribution to community work, human rights, equality, and justice is well recognised, respected, and highly regarded at all levels from Presidents, politicians and policy makers to the people she worked with every day.

One of our own Trustees knew Ronnie well.  Anastasia Crickley is a founder member of Pavee Point and a longstanding member and former chairperson of Community Work Ireland.  She and Ronnie were colleagues and friends for many years. Anastasia presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ronnie’s husband, Philip. 


Dee Brooks, Maryam Ahmadian, and Connie Loden — IACD Global Ambassador Award


At our AGM last week, we were delighted to honor Dee, Maryam, and Connie with the Global Ambassador Award as well. Dee has been instrumental in promoting IACD across the Pacific region and building our membership through innovative approaches – she was recognized at our 2020 AGM with an Outstanding Contribution Award. Dee’s approach to networking and connecting through the virtual world has positively influenced how we approach global networking. She will also remain active in IACD through her role with WCDC2023.

Maryam maintained a focus on the needs and circumstances of communities within the Middle East and North Africa through regional updates. She also collaborated with former Trustee for SE Asia to promote IACD in Malaysia, and attended a number of UN events in New York on IACD’s behalf. Connie was very active around supporting development of our systems and processes for membership, marketing and communications. She was a strong contributor to developing our governance systems as well. Along with her colleagues in North America and the Caribbean, she helped to maintain our connection to the Community Development Society.


2021 Awards


Marjorie Mayo — Lifetime Achievement Award


Marjorie Mayo is Emeritus Professor of Community Development, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research has included learning for active citizenship, and access to justice in disadvantaged communities.

She has made a longstanding and hugely influential contribution as an academic and author and as board member of the Oxford University Press Community Development Journal.

Active for many years working in the field of community development, in the UK and internationally, and in particular pioneering the role of women in CD. 


Jody Kretzmann and John L McKnight — Lifetime Achievement Award


John is formerly the director of community studies at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research.

Jody is a former faculty member at the School of Education and Social Policy and IPR Faculty Associate at Northwestern.

John and Jody are the co-founders of the ABCD Institute which they established in the mid 1990-s at Northwestern University (which later moved to DePaul University), building on years of community organising practice and urban neighbourhoods’ research.

They have published extensively on their work and produced widely used resources supporting the ABCD approach. The Institute continues to share and grow their teachings around the world.


Asnarulkhadi Abu Samah, Colette McGarva, and Daniel Muia — IACD Global Ambassador Award


At our 2021 AGM, we were honored to award the IACD Global Ambassador Award to three IACD Regional Directors who have made a huge impact on IACD and the field of community development.

Congratulations to Asnarulkhadi Abu Samah (Regional Director for Southeast Asia), Colette McGarva (Regional Director for Europe), and Daniel Muia (Regional Director for Sub-Saharan Africa)!


Past Award Winners


Clare MacGillivray


Last year, IACD was thrilled to announce Clare MacGillivray as the recipient of the IACD Global Ambassador Awards.

Clare is the Treasurer for IACD and served as the Chair of the 2019 World Community Development Conference.


Dee Brooks, Michelle Dunscombe, and Anastasia Matvievskaya


IACD also recognized three others for their achievements lastyear with the IACD Outstanding Contribution Award.

This was awarded to Anastasia Matvievskaya, IACD Regional Director for Europe; Dee Brooks, IACD Regional Director for Oceania; and Michelle Dunscombe, IACD Country Correspondent for Australia.


Charlie McConnell


Charlie is a previous President and Secretary General of IACD. He was a member of the Board for eighteen years, during which he was instrumental in re-building the association and bringing its HQ in Scotland. He first served on the Board from 1989-2004, by which time he had moved to become the CEO of the Carnegie foundation in the UK where he approved grant funds for IACD to run its operations, which subsequently ran until 2012. Following his retirement in 2012, Charlie rejoined the IACD Board as its treasurer and from 2014 was elected President. Charlie was the author of IACD’s definition of community development as a practice based profession and chaired the IACD working group which produced the International Standards for Community Development.

Charlie has had a near forty five career in community development.  This included being the first Chair of the Scottish Association of Community Workers, the CEO of the Scottish Community Education Council and European Director of the Community Development Foundation, where he worked closely from 1989 with the Council of Europe, EU and OECD. Charlie was appointed by the British government as the first Chair of the National Training Standards Organisation for Community Learning and Development professional training in 1999. He is the author/editor of five books, one of which – The Making of an Empowering Profession ran to three editions. The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Charlie in 2017, in acknowledgement of his work in building the community development profession and IACD as the international voice for community development.


Gary Craig


Gary was President of IACD from 1999-2007 and played a central role in rebuilding the association over those years. Gary led the association at several international conferences and was the co-author of the Budapest, Yaoundé and Hong Kong Declarations. Gary is a prolific author, writing and editing more community development books and articles than anyone else in our field. He was one of the main authors of the British Community Development Project (CDP) publications, that influenced the thinking of a new generation of community development practitioners in Britain and beyond. He was for two decades the editor of the Community Development Journal, where he encouraged those working in community development practice and scholarship across the world to share their work.

The world’s first Professor of Social Justice, Gary’s special interests are in race and ethnicity, poverty and inequality, community development, and local governance.  Gary became IACD’s first Global Ambassador in acknowledgement of his work for IACD and his international work around community development and social justice.


Ingrid Burkett


Ingrid was IACD’s first woman President and served from 2010-14. She played a lead role in the Brisbane conference and in raising the association’s profile across Oceania and in subsequent conferences in the US and Europe.  During her tenure IACD launched its first Practice Exchange and Practice Insights magazine and led IACD’s work on asset based community development. Ingrid runs a social business in Australia and is a passionate advocate of community-based practice.

Ingrid specialises in local and international community economic development and is interested in links between community development, community economic development and community cultural development. She has practised, taught and researched community development for over 20 years. The Global Ambassador Award was presented to Ingrid in 2014, in acknowledgement of her international work around community economic and asset-based community development.


Randy Adams


Randy is a previous Vice President of IACD and chair of the Research and Policy Committee, where he led IACD’s global mapping project of CD education. Randy also represented IACD at the UN consultations in the lead up to the adoption of the SDG 2015-30 Agenda. Randy is also a past President of the Community Development Society (CDS) in the U.S. and for many years worked with the US Peace Corps in over forty countries.

Latterly Randy was the Executive Director of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP) in the U.S. The Global Ambassador Award was presented to Randy in 2016, in acknowledgement of his international development work for IACD and in promoting community development through the Peace Corps.


Anita and Kalyan Paul


Anita Paul was a Vice President of IACD from 2015-18 and has been an IACD Board director for Southern Asia for several years. She and her partner, Kalyan Paul are the founders of the inspiring Pan Himalayan Grassroots Development Programme which for four decades has been supporting community development in the highland regions of India. Here they have initiated a holistic community approach to tackling problems of rural poverty, economic development and environmental sustainability. They were critical of social, economic development and environmental projects that tried to address and silo one problem only and did not see the inter-relationship between these issues within communities. 

In 2016 Anita and Kalyan organised IACD’s Practice Exchange programme to projects in northern India, and the New Delhi Round Table conference on community development and the Sustainable Development Goals. Later that year they represented IACD at the first UN SDG High Level Political Forum event in New York and at the Minnesota conference panel with the World Bank Vice President.  The Global Ambassador Award was presented to Anita and Kalyan in 2017, in acknowledgement of their huge contribution towards building an holistic sustainable development approach to community development in India and in so doing, shaping much of IACD’s continuing professional development support for members in addressing the SDG Agenda 2030.


Anastasia Crickley


Anastasia is a Vice President of IACD and has had a distinguished career as a practitioner working with migrants and as a community development educator in Ireland and internationally. She was Head of the Department of Applied Social Studies at Maynooth University. Anastasia played a central role in creating Ireland’s community development association. She was actively involved in the establishment of the Community Workers’ Co-operative (CWC), now called Community Work Ireland, becoming its chair and played a central role in enhancing professional standards in community work training and practice across Ireland. Anastasia chaired the 2018 World Community Development Conference planning committee and chairs the association’s International and National Relations Committee, where amongst other initiatives she played an important role in strengthening IACD’s links with the European Community Development Network.

In 2016 Anastasia was appointed President of the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, where in that role she enhanced the profile of both the association and of community development internationally. Anastasia  was presented with the Global Ambassador Award to honour her over forty years’ community development career working for the rights of marginalised, minority and migrant communities and for her work at the United Nations.


Muhammad Bello Shitu


Muhammad Shitu was from 2015-18 a Vice President of IACD. Muhammad is a Community Development and Innovations Diffusion Specialist and for many years has had a distinguished career in rural community development as a practitioner and teacher. A Professor, he has taught, researched and written on rural community development for many years. He was a co-founder of the Nigerian Institute for Community Development Practitioners and of the Nigerian Community Development  Journal. He has organised several regional conferences for IACD and the Nigerian Association.

Muhammad has been a Regional Director for Africa since 2012 and chair of the association’s Membership Committee. In recent years his untiring efforts has seen the largest growth in the association’s membership in Africa. He was awarded the Global Ambassador Award in 2018 in honour of his teaching and networking work in community development in West and Sub Saharan Africa and in raising the profile and membership of the association across Africa.


Stewart Murdoch


Stewart was a board member for twelve years, and a former treasurer and Vice President. Between 1980 and 1990 Stewart was the Director of the Maryhill Community Central Halls, a community business which employed 90 staff delivering a wide range of services under the control of a locally elected board of trustees.

He set up and chaired the West of Scotland Community Work Accreditation Unit which set out to recognise the competence of community activists who had not had the opportunity to take part in professional training.  And was  chair of the Scottish Community Development Centre, Scottish Community Development Alliance and the education and training standards body for Community Education in Scotland. Stewart moved to Tayside as Regional Community Education Organiser in 1990. and then Director for Communities and latterly as Director for Leisure and Culture for the City of Dundee. He was responsible for hosting the HQ of IACD in Dundee for some 6 years,  and for establishing a funding partnership with the Scottish Government. He chaired the planning group for the 2014 Glasgow Conference. The Global Ambassador Award was presented to Stewart for his work on rebuilding IACD as the international network for community development and for his longstanding advocacy for community development within local government.


Kwok Kin Fung and Hung Suet Lin


Kwok Kin Fung has been promoting IACD across China and East Asia for many years years as IACD director for the region.  Together with his partner Hung Suet Lin IACD’s first ever Country Correspondent (for China) they have played the lead role in raising awareness of the association through a roadshow of IACD presentations across China, the first ever undertaken by the association. Kwok Kin has also been chair of the Publications Committee and edited the East Asia Practice Insights Special and a special edition of the Community Development Journal on CD in the region.

Kwok Kin is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Social Work, Hong Kong Baptist University. At present, his teaching and research work is on areas of community development, social policy, globalization and social welfare, and child poverty. In addition, he has also been actively involved in training for community development services and social workers in Hong Kong and Mainland China.  Hung Suet Lin is the Associate Head  & Director of Social Work Practice at Hong Kong Baptist University and has been practicing community work by organizing women and residents to advocate for social changes for many years. She has written extensively on Women’s and Migrant issues in China, on globalisation and community work and on strategies to build social capital. The Global Ambassador Award was presented to Kwok Kin Fung and Hung Suet Lin for their work in promoting community development across China.


Mini Bedi


Mini Bedi has been a member of IACD since 1986 and served on the Board from the re-launch of the association in 1999 for three full terms – a total of 12 years. Her contribution over the years has been tremendous, including hosting the first of three Practice Exchanges in India and the Community Leadership Programme and  Practitioner Dialogue held in India.

For many years Mini worked for Oxfam in India, promoting community development projects across the country to combat poverty and discrimination.The Global Ambassador Award was presented to Mini Bedi for the key role she has played in raising the profile of IACD and community development across India for over three decades.


Paul Lachapelle


Paul Lachapelle is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Montana State University-Bozeman.  His teaching and research spans many disciplines and practices including community climate change resiliency, diversity and  inclusion, and social justice topics.  His publications include the edited book, “Addressing Climate Change at the Community Level” (Routledge 2019) as well as journal articles on energy impacts in communities, democratic practice and local governance, and community visioning and leadership.

He earned a Ph.D. (Forestry) at the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation with a focus on natural resource policy and governance and serves as Editor of the Community Development Society Current Issues Book Series and member of the Board of Directors (and past-President 2016-2019) of the International Association for Community Development.


Spotlight on Community Development Pioneers


There is a saying that we spend our lives looking forward, but only understand it looking back. As we celebrated our 65th anniversary year, we put the spotlight on some of the pioneers who shaped our profession and movement since the 1950s.  We invited IACD members to submit names of people and movements from around the world, that have had significant influence upon shaping our profession since 1953. You can find them here, in this Special Issue of Practice Insights magazine.