IACD provides a wide range of services for members in order to promote the profession and to support continuing professional development. Community development practice needs to ensure the ways in which we seek to support communities is current or forward thinking.
IACD’s Training, Publications, and Professional Development Committee includes practitioners and community development trainers with years of experience in the field. Community development practitioners, agency managers, trainers, funders and policy advisers seek continuing professional development support, and in response IACD is expanding this area of support for members.
We provide this support to members and others through offering study trips, which we call Practice Exchanges, international and regional conferences, our magazine, Practice Insights and other publications, including our recent International Standards for Community Development Practice. The Training, Publications and Professional Development Committee is also currently looking at the whole area of course accreditation.
IACD’s International and National Relations Committee advocates for community development policies and practice at the United Nations and other international and regional bodies. For example we attend U.N. consultations, and have organised side event seminars, most recently at the U.N. High Level Political Forum on the Sustainable Development Goals. In 2015, the Board agreed that the SDGs would be the focus of our policy into practice priorities.
The International and National Relations Committee also leads on developing IACD’s relationships with national community development networks. Our first was agreed with the Community Development Society of the USA in 2001. We have a policy of always holding our international and regional conferences in partnership with national networks should they exist. Since 2015 the Board has introduced the role of Country Correspondent. These are IACD members who agree to act as news correspondents who will share what is going on in community development on the IACD members’ facebook site and help to promote membership. The first Country Correspondent was for China. We now have over twenty.
In 2015 we launched the findings of an international survey that attempted to map a) the number of qualifying/graduate courses around the world which ‘claimed’ to be teaching community development. Over 1000 programmes were identified. And b) the number of national community development networks. Around twenty were identified, clearly confirming that for the majority of countries community development practitioners, whatever their discipline, are not part of a national support framework that focuses upon community development. For the findings of the survey : Survey Results
IACD in collaboration with the American Community Development Society (CDS) and the Aotearoa Community Development Association (ACDA) have successfully created an online resource for Practitioners – The Global Community Development Exchange (GCDEX), an online repository of teaching and learning resources. You will find the GCDEX on the Resources Page of this website.