How we work

What is Community Development?

Community Development uses a range of methods and activities to enable community, statutory and voluntary organisations to bring about improved health and well being. This approach aims to link local needs to strategic priorities.

What Can Community Development Do?

Community Development provides an investment in the local population's health by providing practical ways and solutions to:

• Support the delivery of health targets, e.g., reducing health inequalities
• Identification of community health concerns and solutions
• Influencing of commissioning decisions
• Provision of new patterns of services that are tailored and sensitive to community needs
• Improvement of community skills to enhance health
• Wider determinants associated with ill health (e.g., housing, employment, crime, disorder)

What Community Development is not:

• Quick. Community development is a long term process, focusing on people, their needs and aims. This long term approach is essential to ensure that changes are sustainable and long-lasting.

• A numbers game. If only five people turn up to the public meeting, these are the five people you start working with.

• Partnership working. Community development is the activity which enables many people to get to the partnership table in the first place.

• Consultation. Community development is much more than consulting on decisions already made.

• A cheap way of delivering services, demonstrating management efficiency or validating funding bids.

• The answer to everything.

How Can Community Development Be Used?

Community Development empowers local communities to articulate and take ownership over their own health needs. It encourages partnership working, long term involvement and participation between communities, service planners and providers through:

 

• Engagement with communities
• Advocating for improvements and facilitating access
• Developing networks
• Embedding health improvement and health promotion into communities
• Building relationships to develop community ownership
• Planning and delivering health projects with community members and community agencies
• Bringing about practical and meaningful changes to people's lives

Why is Community Development effective?

Community Development is effective because it:

• Works with people's local knowledge, community structures and networks
• Develops relationships and trust with partners at all levels
• Delivers health initiatives in partnership with communities
• Picks up concerns and feeds community views into strategic planning processes to create meaningful and practical changes
• Targets inequalities
• Places workers in a community setting

Are you interested in community development work?  Want to find out more?  Contact our Community Development Workers to discuss how Off The Record can help...