Leadership in Community Development

Defining Community Development

A group of people in a community reaching a decision to initiate a social action process (that is,
planned intervention) to change their economic, social, cultural, or environmental situation.

Collective Agency

• believe working together can make a difference

• organize to address their shared needs collectively

Community health nurses are becoming increasingly active in the leadership role, separate from leading
within the manager role mentioned earlier. The leadership role focuses on effecting change; thus, the
nurse becomes an agent of change.

 Management Vs Leadership

MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP
Tells Vision Sells It
Makes rules Breaks
Makes decision Facilitates Uses
Uses existing road New
Transactional Transformational
Likes stability Change
Plans details Sets Directions

Leadership in nursing

- Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to achieve a common goal

Development “In” vs. “Of” the Community

• Development in the community is principally concerned with building the economic or physical
infrastructure of a community.

• Development of the community is focused on building the human capacity to address local issues and
concerns. As such, it affects the structure of the community.

Three Approaches to Community Development

1. Technical Assistance

•Usually involves the delivery of programs of services to a local area by some agency or organization

• It is often a “top-down” approach that involves the use of experts

• The focus is mainly on the task to be performed

• Assumes that answers to community problems can be arrived at scientifically

•If residents wish to participate, they must study and understand a great deal of complex information

• Local citizens are defined as consumers of such development - not participants in it

• The most frequent employers of the technical assistance model is government

2. Conflict Approach

•Primary focus is upon the deliberate use or creation of confrontation by professional organizers

• The goal is to redistribute power

• A major organizing tool is to confront those forces seen as blocking efforts to solve problems
• In this approach, there is a deep suspicion of those who have formal community power

• This perspective assumes that power is never given away, that it must be taken.

• Goal is to build a people’s organization to allow those without power to gain it through direct action.
Their strength is in numbers -- people working collectively.

3. Self-Help Approach

• Emphasis is on process -- people within the community working together to arrive at group decisions
and taking actions to improve their community

• Based on the principle that people can collaborate in a community to provide important needs and
services

• The process is more important than any task or goal

• Want to institutionalize a process of change based on building community institutions and

strengthening community relationships, rather than to achieve any particular objective

Community vs. Economic Development

• Community development is much broader than economic development

• Unlike CD, economic development does not necessarily involve local citizen action, and it may not
result in an improvement in the quality of life

• If economic development is undertaken without much community involvement, then there is no

community development

• Economic development for community development has distinctive features that economic
development alone might not have

Examples of CD Efforts That Embody the Self-Help Approach

• Strengthening and expanding the pool of leaders at the local level

• Facilitating job training and retraining activities

• Enhancing the capacity of local government officials

• Providing needed information to help facilitate sound decision making (such as needs assessment,
surveys, socioeconomic data)