Starting to get our teeth into this community development stuff.....

Two weeks, many  debates, much  networking and sharing and  no small amount of tea and coffee

What  counts as CD Activities? 

(ooh and lovely  lemon puffs) sees us well and truely  into the course. Progress has seen us establish a working definition of   community 'a group who form relationships over time by  interacting regularly around shared experiences which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons' and explore what  kind of activities counts as community development work (pictured right).   This led us to consider the definition of community  development work and we considered the definition provided by  Community  Development National Occupational Standards and found it to be helpful.

The definition of community  development work includes the important phrase 'value based' so we started in the last  session looking at  the values of community  development work.   We listed them as 'Inclusive, Participatory, Bottom Up, Collective Action, Capacity Building and Equality and Justice'.   An interesting debate followed as we interrogated the literature of the organisations in the community who promote themselves as developing communities for evidence of these values.   The discussion got pretty  radical and challenging  and I proposed that  we harness this energy  into a small piece of class research;

• Your task as students is to collect the views of three people in your community about the question 'What  do you  think about MMU's development in Birley Fields?'

Our session on Friday will consider the feedback and consider social research as a tool for community  development, how does it fit with the values of CD?

Finally I'm really  keen that people use the twitter  hash tag #mscdcwea to post  photos of things in their community  which we have been discussing.   I'll spend a little time on Friday  looking at  Twitter with the group. 

Please comment  below -  lets continue the debate on line between sessions.

Phill