Call for Contributions/Abstracts for the next issue of Practice Insights Magazine
“Community Development Approaches to Community Support and Community Care”

Practice Insights, the bi-annual publication of the International Association for Community Development (IACD), invites practitioners, researchers, and academics to contribute to its next issue, focusing on the interconnected themes of Community Development, Community Support and Community Care across diverse regions. This edition will explore a critical community development perspective on community support and community care, highlighting their critical role as investments in human well-being, social cohesion, and gender equality.

Community Development Approaches to Community Support and Community Care
Community support and Community care are integral to building resilient, inclusive societies a core concern for Community Development. Community support refers to the networks, structures, and resources available within a community to aid individuals and groups, both informally through social ties and formally through organizations and initiatives. Community Care, as part of this framework, emphasizes the relational nature of assistance, highlighting the roles of compassion, co-responsibility, and the essential, often undervalued, contributions of caregivers.

Community development is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development, human rights, economic opportunity, equality and social justice, through the organisation, education and empowerment of people within their communities, whether these be of locality, identity or interest, in urban and rural settings.

A community development perspective can offer a holistic approach to community support and community care addressing the needs of community members while fostering collective responsibility and well-being. This can encompass the comprehensive range of services and networks that span individual and community needs, from essential caregiving and personal support to community-wide programs that promote stability and inclusion.

Suggested Topics
We welcome contributions on a variety of themes within the realm of community support and care, including but not limited to:

• Community development approaches to reframing Community Support and Care as an Investment
Analyses of how community support and community care yield economic and social returns, with insights on their roles in building social cohesion, fostering green economies, and enhancing community resilience.
• Community Development approaches to Community Support and Community Care Systems
Examples of formal, informal, and hybrid systems, detailing their operations, adaptability, and impact on individual and community well-being.
• Critical Gender perspectives and Caregiving
Case study examples that illustrate gendered roles in caregiving and leadership, along with analyses of how gender dynamics influence caregiving responsibilities and opportunities within community care.
• Cultural and Contextual Influences Determining Community Support and Community Care
Exploration of how cultural values, social norms, and local contexts shape community support and care systems and how community development approaches can inform this, emphasizing the importance of co-responsibility among communities, caregivers, and the State.

Submission Guidelines
We invite contributors to submit a 500-word abstract by January 10th, 2025. The abstract should outline the intended topic, framing, and scope of the article. Abstracts will undergo an editorial review process led by Guest Editors Dominique Schlupkothen and Jörg Weber (CBM) and Managing Editor, Ciara Shanahan (IACD trustee), who will provide feedback to support alignment with the issue’s theme. Their respective emails are [email protected]; [email protected] and [email protected]

Authors of accepted abstracts will receive further guidelines and are invited to submit full articles of up to 1,500 words by March 30th, 2025.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and learning from your experiences with community development approaches to community support and care. Please share this call with your networks to help us reach a broad community of contributors!