Community Learning Development Resource 500 – 02
EFFECTIVE COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION
IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES
SUMMARY
Ideas about how learning connects with and contributes to community development and successful participation by local people in community strategies – from the perspectives of learners and workers.
- For individuals – what learning might enable them to participate effectively in community development?
- Individual learner capacity building, individual empowerment and motivation – prompting contributions to collective activity and community development activity, moving individuals from apathy and reactivity, to pro-activity.
- Increased self-confidence and self-esteem to participate and contribute – to identify needs and to influence developments and outcomes.
- Skills to engage actively with others in regeneration – communication skills, problem solving skills, organisational and leadership skills.
- Feeling powerful and able to influence and shape regeneration outcomes.
- For workers – how might they support and encourage local people to participate in community development?
- Raising awareness with local people, of the community development strategies and the opportunities to determine their outcomes.
- Voice capturing and advocacy.
- Supporting people to build individual capacity – confidence and skills to
contribute and participate – to take ownership and lead local responses and actions.
- Enabling individual capacity to effectively contribute to collective capacity and social capital.
- Connecting own work and people, with the community strategy.
- Seeing what issues are significant in people’s lives and being prepared to look at how learning can help people to address them.
- Developing own skills to participate and contribute effectively to community strategies.
- Enabling people to contribute to the critical monitoring, evaluation and planning of community strategies.
- Developing the understanding and practice of collective and partnership working.
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
- Can we develop a set of principles, to underpin the successful engagement of people in community strategies?
- It is reported that failings of national and local community strategies include an inability to deliver significant success and changes at neighbourhood level, and low levels of participation by local people – what might the constraints and barriers be in such failing situations?