Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Community works are often confused with community-based work. The similarity is that they fall under the discipline of
community development approaches. To differentiate, community work requires the efforts of the people in greater or
larger degree whereas community-based work involves the community but in a smaller scale from what is essential in
community work.
Community development approaches are defined by the following:
1. Sustainabilty (long or short-term)
2. Area of concentration (local, national, global, and overseas)
3. Field or specializations (e.g., education advancement or religion affairs)
4. Objectives, vision, and mission (e.g., social security or rural domination with the use of kindness)
The categories listed are not guaranteed absolute, for community development works itself is still broad. So are the lists
that will be specified below as the different approaches to community development work, nonetheless, these are the
random, more specific lists of approaches.
5. Social justice and human rights approach focuses on the behavioral, cultural, ethnical, and social affairs as a
leading target for communal development in or outside the community. The concept of social justice involves
finding the optimum balance between people's joint responsibilities as a society and people's responsibilities as
individuals to contribute to a just society. Human rights provide an internationally agreed set of principles and
standards by which to assess inequality. The two concepts are correlated in a sense that human rights clearly
define and authorize what is globally and legally accepted from the various contexts on social justice.
6. Ecological or environmental approach targets crises as major focal point for developmental, radical alternatives
to address the natural make-up of the earth. The approach focuses on the ecological or environmental
protection and advancement.
7. Multi-method approach combines methods that will most likely ensure the progress and success of communal
work goals that are inherently unheard of. A multi-method approach crams more than one kind of approaches
into one-of-a-kind, hybrid-like approach, which has been unconsciously practiced today by many organizations.
Approaches in community work are vast and still growing. How the communities interpret the meaning of these
approaches is up to them. What is more important is how they express those interpretations into values that will lead to
outcomes to better the community and society.