Community Development – Current Issues Series – serie

Business retention and expansion (BRE) is regarded as the most practical and accessible method for economic development at the city, town, or neighborhood scale. This comprehensive volume centers on the belief that BRE is the top responsibility for a community economic development official. BRE is an asset-based approach designed to systematically strengthen the connection between businesses and the community while encouraging each business to continue operations and expand in the community. It focuses on the community’s existing businesses instead of those it doesn’t have. This book illustrates many different facets of BRE, from big-picture and theory to lessons learned about BRE from practitioners and academics with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The authors demonstrate diverse ways of reaching out and responding to existing businesses. They explore several topics related to or at the very heart of BRE including: business clusters, entrepreneurship, community outcomes, business assistance, transportation systems, energy efficiency, business succession, and defining BRE success. These include research, program evaluation, and case studies. This book offers both theoretical and applied points of views, and will be of great interest to local practitioners, state/provincial officials, and students of economic development. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

This book is the outcome of a multiyear process of participatory meetings, individual and collective writings, and insightful criticisms sponsored by the Kettering Foundation regarding the intersection of community development and democratic practice. The collective outcome from these processes is a wide range of innovative articles at the forefront of thinking about the intersections of power, participation, and engagement in the realm of community practice. The authors highlight a range of case studies that vary by location, scale, and purpose. The book serves as a heuristic framework for ‘democratic community development’ and raises several related questions about how democracy, community, and the public are constituted, and what processes, end goals, methods, and tools are to be used to further democratic community development. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

Collective Impact is intended to help community leaders effectively engage participants in strategic planning initiatives and achieve desired results. It is a logical extension of, and builds on, earlier efforts that experienced difficulties helping groups implement actions identified in the planning processes. This book examines successful practices that apply Collective Impact principles to a variety of community development issues including reducing poverty, and similar topics. Contributing authors also examine techniques used in working with local groups to facilitate effective changes in their communities. The discussions focus on settings in which Collective Impact efforts are likely to succeed using a variety of case studies that vary by intent, purpose, and location. Discussions of involvement by community and campus partnerships, regional planning organizations, and other groups can affect the ways in which Collective Impact principles are applied and how well they work. The discussions conclude with transformational changes within Collective Impact, moving from the individual to the system and future directions for Collective Impact approaches. Practitioners and scholars alike will find the discussions of various approaches and outcomes using Collective Impact useful in designing future efforts to bring about community change.This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

This book highlights the experiences of 14 high poverty communities in the rural South that accepted the invitation to be part of the Turning the Tide on Poverty (Tide) initiative. While history would suggest that impoverished places have limited capacity to make good things happen, Tide demonstrated otherwise. This volume is a testament to the positive work that can be realized when people from all walks of life are accorded the opportunity to discuss, deliberate, and act on strategies designed to improve the lives of rural people and places in the South. The message is clear: when local residents are provided a safe space to weigh in on local issues and asked to give respectful consideration to the views of others in their community, they create pathways for spurring positive changes. Simply put, civic engagement propels people to do more for their community and instils in them a sense of hope for what can be accomplished when local people work together. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

While entrepreneurship is widely cited as playing a key role in economic development, job creation, and advances in well-being in capitalist nations, there has been an overwhelming focus on the firm, firm founders, and founders’ strategies and decision-making processes. Only more recently, the important link between communities and entrepreneurs has emerged as a new frontier in entrepreneurship research. This book brings the emerging nexus between community and entrepreneur to light by exploring the mutual impact that communities and entrepreneurs have on one another. It focuses on how entrepreneurship development can push beyond the traditional emphasis on economic growth: from enriching the local lifestyle to building self-sufficiency; from attracting new markets to rediscovering traditional work; from the highest tech enterprises to the most ancient crafts and trades. The authors cover a wide variety of topics including rural community entrepreneurship development and culture, innovation and regional development, community-based enterprise learning, and urban revitalization strategies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

Business retention and expansion (BRE) is regarded as the most practical and accessible method for economic development at the city, town, or neighborhood scale. This comprehensive volume centers on the belief that BRE is the top responsibility for a community economic development official. BRE is an asset-based approach designed to systematically strengthen the connection between businesses and the community while encouraging each business to continue operations and expand in the community. It focuses on the community’s existing businesses instead of those it doesn’t have. This book illustrates many different facets of BRE, from big-picture and theory to lessons learned about BRE from practitioners and academics with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The authors demonstrate diverse ways of reaching out and responding to existing businesses. They explore several topics related to or at the very heart of BRE including: business clusters, entrepreneurship, community outcomes, business assistance, transportation systems, energy efficiency, business succession, and defining BRE success. These include research, program evaluation, and case studies. This book offers both theoretical and applied points of views, and will be of great interest to local practitioners, state/provincial officials, and students of economic development. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

As the rates of chronic diseases, like diabetes, asthma and obesity skyrocket, research is showing that the built environment – the way our cities and towns are developed – contributes to the epidemic rates of these diseases. It is unlikely that those who planned and developed these places envisioned these situations. Public health, community development planning, and other fields influencing the built environment have operated in isolation for much of recent history, with the result being places that public health advocates have labelled, ‘designed for disease’. The sad irony of this is that planning and public health arose together, in response to the need to create health standards, zoning and building codes to combat the infectious diseases that were prevalent in the industrializing cities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. In recent years, the dramatic rise in chronic disease rates in cities and towns has begun to bring public health and planning back together to promote development pattern and policies facilitating physical activity and neighbourly interactions as antidotes. In this book, a number of such community development efforts are highlighted, bringing attention to the need to coordinate planning, community development and health policy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

The intersection of community development, tourism and planning is a fascinating one. Tourism has long been used as a development strategy, in both developed and developing countries, from the national to local levels. These approaches have typically focused on economic dimensions with decisions about tourism investments, policies and venues driven by these economic considerations. More recently, the conversation has shifted to include other aspects – social and environmental – to better reflect sustainable development concepts. Perhaps most importantly is the richer focus on the inclusion of stakeholders.An inclusionary, participatory approach is an essential ingredient of community development and this brings both fields even closer together. It reflects an approach aimed at building on strengths in communities, and fostering social capacity and capital. In this book, the dimensions of the role tourism plays in community development are explored. A panoply of perspectives are presented, tackling such questions as, can tourism heal? How can tourism development serve as a catalyst to overcome social injustices and cultural divides?This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

This book illustrates the ways in which communities can strengthen the links and set the stage for long-term partnerships between sustainable agriculture and sustainable rural community development initiatives. It provides lessons learned, first, from the community development literature that can help shape sustainable agriculture strategies, and second, from the sustainable agriculture literature that can prove useful in moulding sound and effective community development strategies.The threads that weave the chapters together is the commitment to a building and expanding the community capital resources that have important bearing on the sustainability of agriculture and the broader community of which it is a part. Certainly, the success of the agriculture/community partnerships is rooted in one critical ingredient – "social capital." To be effective over the long-term, sustainable development depends on a network of people, drawn from a wide array of interests, who have a strong trusting relationship with one another, and who are willing to work together in responding to the economic, environmental, and social challenges facing agriculture and community alike. At the same time, strategies that work to strengthen the stock of all seven types of community capitals are important to pursue. It is balanced investments in all seven types of community capitals that will contribute to the emergence of "community agency" -- the ability of local people to act in a proactive manner in managing, utilizing, and enhancing local resources. With the emergence of "community agency," an important step in the pursuit of a sustainable future for both agriculture and community is possible.This book was published as a special issue of Community Development.

The role of economic development in communities is multi-faceted, having an array of antecedents, impacts, and implications. This volume explores the relationships between economic development and community development, focusing on the aspects that impact communities such as social capital, participation, and business development. It discusses the need for aligning the goals of community betterment more closely with economic improvement and finding ways to enhance leadership and other resources. Including both current contributions and "classics," the evolution of the relationship between’ and roles of, the two kinds of development is explored.The articles in the volume present several theoretical perspectives of development. Most common among them are sustainable economic development and social capital theories. Utilizing these theories and data from various sources, the authors are able to suggest specific development strategies for improving community economic and quality of life outcomes. The volume offers an exploration of directions for future research, including the need for more theoretical and empirical work on the role of amenity development on rural community economic and quality-of- life outcomes. Practitioners of community and economic development, along with researchers and students will find this volume useful and relevant for both theory and application.This book is a compilation of articles published in the Journal of the Community Development Society.

The development of leadership capacities addresses a vital and continuing need in communities and organizations as they attempt to adapt to a wide range of social, economic, environmental, and political changes. Leadership development activities that focus on building new skills and fostering new ideas directly shape local and organizational capacity. At the organizational level, leadership is a valued resource as organizations are faced with challenges of limited resources, funding, and other capacities. Community leadership operates within a different domain; an environment with different dynamics, structures, and goals. Community leadership is distinctive in that leaders often do not have formal training or authority to dictate and facilitate change. Instead, community leaders must rely on informal networks of diverse citizens, each with a unique local capacity, as the basis for change.This book brings together classic and contemporary articles drawn from Community Development. Divided into two sections, the book begins with a range of seminal leadership theory and conceptualization pieces. These have been instrumental in shaping leadership development in a wide range of settings. Following the theory section, a variety of research and application chapters are presented. These chapters operationalize theory through applied research and programming, and provide replicable frameworks for future research and programs.This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

In celebration of cooperatives’ contributions to community development processes and outcomes worldwide, the United Nations designated 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Today, as in the past, cooperatives have proved effective in bringing people and organizations together to accomplish a broad array of goals related to fostering social and economic innovation, protecting communities against poor living and working conditions, and promoting a better quality of life. Analytically, as both a movement and as a business model, cooperatives hold much potential for generating the types of synergies, collaboration, and productive and social processes that enable community development to thrive in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. This collection of articles chronicles new developments in the ways in which cooperatives are used in a diverse array of community contexts. They offer insight as to what these changes mean, both empirically and theoretically, for community development in the decades to come.This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

Food has become an essential component in community development practice. Whether in reference to building a local or regional food system or addressing food insecurity, food has become a focus in community development approaches in many localities. Farmers markets, community gardens, farm-to-school programs, and other food-centered initiatives have been used to foster community development processes across a spectrum of desired outcomes. The surging interest in food for fostering community development draws attention to numerous applications, ranging from grassroots efforts to formal programs sponsored by the public or nonprofit sectors. These efforts are often in conjunction with local private businesses, helping create micro-businesses and supporting the small farm movement. Some regions are even considering economic development strategies of "food clusters" to promote speciality food businesses and supporting programs.This volume explores the relationships between food and community, and the various approaches for development through a selection of chapters illustrating a wide range of applications.This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

As the rates of chronic diseases, like diabetes, asthma and obesity skyrocket, research is showing that the built environment – the way our cities and towns are developed – contributes to the epidemic rates of these diseases. It is unlikely that those who planned and developed these places envisioned these situations. Public health, community development planning, and other fields influencing the built environment have operated in isolation for much of recent history, with the result being places that public health advocates have labelled, ‘designed for disease’. The sad irony of this is that planning and public health arose together, in response to the need to create health standards, zoning and building codes to combat the infectious diseases that were prevalent in the industrializing cities of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. In recent years, the dramatic rise in chronic disease rates in cities and towns has begun to bring public health and planning back together to promote development pattern and policies facilitating physical activity and neighbourly interactions as antidotes. In this book, a number of such community development efforts are highlighted, bringing attention to the need to coordinate planning, community development and health policy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

The intersection of community development, tourism and planning is a fascinating one. Tourism has long been used as a development strategy, in both developed and developing countries, from the national to local levels. These approaches have typically focused on economic dimensions with decisions about tourism investments, policies and venues driven by these economic considerations. More recently, the conversation has shifted to include other aspects – social and environmental – to better reflect sustainable development concepts. Perhaps most importantly is the richer focus on the inclusion of stakeholders.An inclusionary, participatory approach is an essential ingredient of community development and this brings both fields even closer together. It reflects an approach aimed at building on strengths in communities, and fostering social capacity and capital. In this book, the dimensions of the role tourism plays in community development are explored. A panoply of perspectives are presented, tackling such questions as, can tourism heal? How can tourism development serve as a catalyst to overcome social injustices and cultural divides?This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

This book brings together several systems-level approaches to the consideration of the interaction of livelihood choices, natural resource management and participatory action research on sustainable development. By focusing on these approaches to community change, the volume hopes to encourage readers to consider how they might adopt methods such as Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), Community Capitals Framework (CCF) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) in their own research, practice and teaching. Thus, this volume will engage readers in reflection about the importance of systems-level approaches that address poverty from the perspective of the poor, natural resource management that maintains the resource for future generations, and the engagement of local people in designing and implementing, and thus owning, strategies that address equity as well as economic security and the environment.This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

As the concept of community resilience moves from the margins of practice and theoretical research to more mainstream scholarship, critical issues of conceptualization and use emerge. This is particularly true at the intersection of community development practice and community resilience theory. This book teases out limitations with current conceptualizations of community resilience, offers enhanced and alternative conceptualizations, and presents compelling case studies of new conceptualizations in action. This book is a starting place for scholarly conversations about the role of community resilience in community development practice. The frameworks presented here, will continue to gain more support in academic and non-academic arenas as resilience rhetoric increases in popularity. However, it is crucial for community practitioners to use these frameworks to actively cultivate resilience in their communities by building adaptive capacity in systematic ways. To move the field of community resilience forward, it is critical to understand the nuances of context and conditions in communities and how broader conceptualizations of resilience account for and utilize context to build adaptive capacity. This book was originally published as a special issue in the journal Community Development.

As the concept of community resilience moves from the margins of practice and theoretical research to more mainstream scholarship, critical issues of conceptualization and use emerge. This is particularly true at the intersection of community development practice and community resilience theory. This book teases out limitations with current conceptualizations of community resilience, offers enhanced and alternative conceptualizations, and presents compelling case studies of new conceptualizations in action. This book is a starting place for scholarly conversations about the role of community resilience in community development practice. The frameworks presented here, will continue to gain more support in academic and non-academic arenas as resilience rhetoric increases in popularity. However, it is crucial for community practitioners to use these frameworks to actively cultivate resilience in their communities by building adaptive capacity in systematic ways. To move the field of community resilience forward, it is critical to understand the nuances of context and conditions in communities and how broader conceptualizations of resilience account for and utilize context to build adaptive capacity. This book was originally published as a special issue in the journal Community Development.

In celebration of cooperatives’ contributions to community development processes and outcomes worldwide, the United Nations designated 2012 as the Year of the Cooperative. Today, as in the past, cooperatives have proved effective in bringing people and organizations together to accomplish a broad array of goals related to fostering social and economic innovation, protecting communities against poor living and working conditions, and promoting a better quality of life. Analytically, as both a movement and as a business model, cooperatives hold much potential for generating the types of synergies, collaboration, and productive and social processes that enable community development to thrive in a variety of local, regional and global contexts. This collection of articles chronicles new developments in the ways in which cooperatives are used in a diverse array of community contexts. They offer insight as to what these changes mean, both empirically and theoretically, for community development in the decades to come.This book is a compilation of articles published in the journal Community Development.

The role of economic development in communities is multi-faceted, having an array of antecedents, impacts, and implications. This volume explores the relationships between economic development and community development, focusing on the aspects that impact communities such as social capital, participation, and business development. It discusses the need for aligning the goals of community betterment more closely with economic improvement and finding ways to enhance leadership and other resources. Including both current contributions and "classics," the evolution of the relationship between’ and roles of, the two kinds of development is explored.The articles in the volume present several theoretical perspectives of development. Most common among them are sustainable economic development and social capital theories. Utilizing these theories and data from various sources, the authors are able to suggest specific development strategies for improving community economic and quality of life outcomes. The volume offers an exploration of directions for future research, including the need for more theoretical and empirical work on the role of amenity development on rural community economic and quality-of- life outcomes. Practitioners of community and economic development, along with researchers and students will find this volume useful and relevant for both theory and application.This book is a compilation of articles published in the Journal of the Community Development Society.

This book brings together several systems-level approaches to the consideration of the interaction of livelihood choices, natural resource management and participatory action research on sustainable development. By focusing on these approaches to community change, the volume hopes to encourage readers to consider how they might adopt methods such as Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), Community Capitals Framework (CCF) and Participatory Action Research (PAR) in their own research, practice and teaching. Thus, this volume will engage readers in reflection about the importance of systems-level approaches that address poverty from the perspective of the poor, natural resource management that maintains the resource for future generations, and the engagement of local people in designing and implementing, and thus owning, strategies that address equity as well as economic security and the environment.This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

This book illustrates the ways in which communities can strengthen the links and set the stage for long-term partnerships between sustainable agriculture and sustainable rural community development initiatives. It provides lessons learned, first, from the community development literature that can help shape sustainable agriculture strategies, and second, from the sustainable agriculture literature that can prove useful in moulding sound and effective community development strategies.The threads that weave the chapters together is the commitment to a building and expanding the community capital resources that have important bearing on the sustainability of agriculture and the broader community of which it is a part. Certainly, the success of the agriculture/community partnerships is rooted in one critical ingredient – "social capital." To be effective over the long-term, sustainable development depends on a network of people, drawn from a wide array of interests, who have a strong trusting relationship with one another, and who are willing to work together in responding to the economic, environmental, and social challenges facing agriculture and community alike. At the same time, strategies that work to strengthen the stock of all seven types of community capitals are important to pursue. It is balanced investments in all seven types of community capitals that will contribute to the emergence of "community agency" -- the ability of local people to act in a proactive manner in managing, utilizing, and enhancing local resources. With the emergence of "community agency," an important step in the pursuit of a sustainable future for both agriculture and community is possible.This book was published as a special issue of Community Development.

Collective Impact is intended to help community leaders effectively engage participants in strategic planning initiatives and achieve desired results. It is a logical extension of, and builds on, earlier efforts that experienced difficulties helping groups implement actions identified in the planning processes. This book examines successful practices that apply Collective Impact principles to a variety of community development issues including reducing poverty, and similar topics. Contributing authors also examine techniques used in working with local groups to facilitate effective changes in their communities. The discussions focus on settings in which Collective Impact efforts are likely to succeed using a variety of case studies that vary by intent, purpose, and location. Discussions of involvement by community and campus partnerships, regional planning organizations, and other groups can affect the ways in which Collective Impact principles are applied and how well they work. The discussions conclude with transformational changes within Collective Impact, moving from the individual to the system and future directions for Collective Impact approaches. Practitioners and scholars alike will find the discussions of various approaches and outcomes using Collective Impact useful in designing future efforts to bring about community change.This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

While entrepreneurship is widely cited as playing a key role in economic development, job creation, and advances in well-being in capitalist nations, there has been an overwhelming focus on the firm, firm founders, and founders’ strategies and decision-making processes. Only more recently, the important link between communities and entrepreneurs has emerged as a new frontier in entrepreneurship research. This book brings the emerging nexus between community and entrepreneur to light by exploring the mutual impact that communities and entrepreneurs have on one another. It focuses on how entrepreneurship development can push beyond the traditional emphasis on economic growth: from enriching the local lifestyle to building self-sufficiency; from attracting new markets to rediscovering traditional work; from the highest tech enterprises to the most ancient crafts and trades. The authors cover a wide variety of topics including rural community entrepreneurship development and culture, innovation and regional development, community-based enterprise learning, and urban revitalization strategies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

This book highlights the experiences of 14 high poverty communities in the rural South that accepted the invitation to be part of the Turning the Tide on Poverty (Tide) initiative. While history would suggest that impoverished places have limited capacity to make good things happen, Tide demonstrated otherwise. This volume is a testament to the positive work that can be realized when people from all walks of life are accorded the opportunity to discuss, deliberate, and act on strategies designed to improve the lives of rural people and places in the South. The message is clear: when local residents are provided a safe space to weigh in on local issues and asked to give respectful consideration to the views of others in their community, they create pathways for spurring positive changes. Simply put, civic engagement propels people to do more for their community and instils in them a sense of hope for what can be accomplished when local people work together. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

Communities have practiced strategic planning for decades using a variety of tools and programs based on the initial Take Charge programs of the early 1990s. These efforts generated a large amount of research regarding their effectiveness, as well as ways to measure long-term outcomes and other related issues, in efforts to better understand the process of community change. This book provides contributions written by researchers and practitioners describing both visioning and other strategic planning efforts. The Great Recession challenged the future of many small and medium sized cities, especially in non-metropolitan areas, renewing the interests of community leaders and elected officials in finding innovative ways to revitalize their local employment base and economic opportunities. Having access to a collection of best practices and successful approaches can greatly assist these practitioners in selecting strategies and techniques for use in their community efforts. The material in this book is especially useful because it includes both methodologies as well as case studies of how and why various approaches used in alternative cultural settings have succeeded.This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

Finding innovative and useful measurement practices for community development projects is gaining in importance as policymakers increase the demands for accountability. This book examines some of the latest efforts to document the effectiveness of local development efforts. The types of documentation differ by types of project, jurisdiction, and country but they have a common focus of recognizing the importance of the Community Capitals framework. Public agencies in the past have often measured development successes by the number of jobs created and/or amount of private investment forthcoming. However, the impacts of community development reach much deeper than those indicators. Strengthening local decision-making capacity is a common component of development efforts as is engaging populations that, in the past, have not been active in decision-making. These and other considerations are explored in more detail by authors in this volume. Local policymakers and practitioners will be continually pressured to provide more documentation of outcomes and readers will gain considerable insights into alternative approaches that can be included in projects but can also see the common elements needed to create a solid measurement system. International insights are a special strength of the discussions in this book.This book was published as a special issue of Community Development.

The national recession forced many communities to examine new and innovative ways to promote local economic development, resulting in long-term community changes. New techniques and approaches were used to identify available opportunities and programs which could take advantage of development opportunities. A common theme among the contributions to this book is a focus on building leadership capacity, and several chapters discuss the successful practices which are aimed at bringing new leaders into local development efforts. Especially important are ways to identify youth and young adults, and designing programs that bring them into active leadership roles within community development efforts. On a broader scale, several authors present material regarding building local entrepreneurship capacity, and recognizing that entrepreneurs at different stages in their development have different training and support needs. The discussions in this book will help local policymakers and development practitioners better understand the various development techniques, and find ways to build capacity within their community, stimulating development. This information will be especially useful for groups interested in engaging youth and populations who, in the past, have not been especially active in discussions about community and economic development. This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

Increasingly, community leaders around the world face major natural and economic disasters that require them to find ways to rebuild both physical infrastructure and the local economy. Doing this effectively requires an understanding of how various parts of the community are interconnected, as well as information as to which revitalization approaches have succeeded in the past. Community investment in recovery is essential and, in some cases, may require local leaders to rethink how it can be financed and arranged. This book presents a conceptual framework based on the community capitals, and describes approaches that have succeeded in situations where local leaders have coordinated efforts to rebuild and revitalize local conditions. Contributions provide examples of successful approaches around the world, thus analysing potential strategies for addressing disasters of many different types in various cultural settings. In this way, the book provides insights into a variety of approaches based on applications of accepted community development theory and concepts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.