Each year, the International Association for Community Development publishes multiple issues of our Practice Insights Magazine. Our readers can use this resource to explore aspects of how community development is practiced and implemented around the world. Our 14th issue of Practice Insights focuses on Community Development and Disability.
A Word from the Editors
In this issue of IACD’s magazine Practice Insights we present articles from fifteen different countries – from Kazakhstan to the Philippines, from Peru to Australia, Scotland to Belarus and more. This special issue of Practice Insights is special for two very important reasons.
The first is the theme – community development and disability. This is the first time that we have given over the whole magazine to issues related to physical disability and mental health – and not before time. This issue offers enormous hope that practitioners around the world are now giving greater attention to community empowerment and inclusion strategies and projects involving disabled people.
From the sixteen articles presented, we can see that a community development approach to addressing the needs (and ‘assets’) of people with disability around the world appears to be growing. This has been a neglected area of practice and policy development for far too long. We hope that these articles will educate and inspire us all to do more to support and empower the millions of people in all countries dealing with physical disability, invisible disabilities and mental health challenges, which can affect community development practitioners as well as the communities we work with.
The second reason why this is an important first for IACD, is that we are publishing almost half of the papers from former Soviet Union countries. In the past two years IACD has witnessed a growth in membership from practitioners living and working in countries of the former USSR. Many of those new members are working with disabled people. Here we have discovered a huge interest amongst practitioners in adopting community development approaches to tackling social exclusion and discrimination, in a context of previous ‘institutionalised’ approaches. And as a result IACD has also been working closely with the pan ‘Soviet Space’ network called Inclusive Practices, becoming one of the supporters of two international conferences focussing upon disability in 2018 and 2019.
As this issue comes out, we celebrate the International Day of People with Disabilities. The theme for the 2019 IDPD is ‘promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda’. This reminds us all of the need to focus more upon the empowerment of persons with disabilities for inclusive, equitable and sustainable development as envisaged in the 2030 Agenda.
Finally my thanks to all of the authors and translators and to Past IACD President Charlie McConnell for co-editing this issue.
Anastasia Matvievskaya
What’s in This Issue?
Practice Insights — Previous Issues
You can find all previous issues of Practice Insights here. We are currently working on translating these issues into multiple languages.
