At the 2017 Auckland IACD/ACDA international conference consultation workshop on International Occupational Standards for Community Development, we were asked to clarify whether the new definition of community development, adopted by the IACD Board last year, sufficiently acknowledged the historical role of citizen and community led community action.
Some of the participants at the Auckland international CD Standards Workshop.
We wish to clarify that IACD fully recognises and honours citizen and community led action as a part of the rich tradition that has led to the creation of community development as a practice-based profession and an academic discipline. Long before community development emerged as a profession, with practitioners now employed by a wide range of governmental and non-governmental organisations around the world, communities themselves organised to improve their lives. It is we believe helpful to define and distinguish this as ‘community action’ and the work of the professional development worker and development agency as being ‘community development’. Together they are part of the spectrum of ways in which especially vulnerable communities can organise more effectively.
We similarly acknowledge that the community development profession and academic discipline owes much to professional social work, environmental work, health education, cultural work, politics, social planning and outreach adult and community education in helping to inform many of the community organising and educational methods and approaches taken by community development practitioners.
We are still a relatively young profession, albeit in 2018 IACD will be celebrating its 65th birthday. We were born out of values of co-operation and empathy, and of the need for practical knowledge and skills to strengthen the voice of the less powerful.
As professionals we must ensure that our practice is as effective as possible in the service we give to communities. This is why IACD’s latest policy initiative, to create a set of international occupational standards and practice ethics, is so important and, why IACD is so keen to improve the quality of initial professional community development education and the continuing professional development of practitioners.
This is not about distancing ourselves as professionals from the communities we serve, but of providing better quality of service to them. And as a part of this, it is our firm belief that one of the routes into becoming a professional community developer should be that of having had experience of community action. Some of the most skilled and empathetic professional community developers are those who come into our field from prior involvement in community action. This is why it is so important to ensure that access routes and support exists to help low income and indigenous activists to become trained as community development practitioners.
In Auckland we began the process of consultation about what these international standards might look like, building upon two decades of work in different countries led by national CD associations and others. We shall be progressing this work over the coming months. This will lead to an international event in Scotland later in the year. Our intention is to publish the IACD Position Statement in late 2017. Please watch the IACD website for further news.
