Community Development Process – Original material presented by Deborah Tootle

Brief Introduction

In the last seminar of this series, we focus on the process or the actions involved in community development. As a process for bringing change to a community, involved residents and facilitators need to be prepared to continue engaging and to handle problems as they arise. We have discussed the ideas of situational analysis and strategic planning in previous sessions. This session spends more time on these concepts by exploring the process that community developers should use to complete a community development effort. The main components covered today included: nominal group process, strategic planning, implementation, and conflict management.

Key Points

• Predict what elements of the community development process may produce conflict within the community and be prepared to discuss conflict directly and channel energy towards productive purposes.
• Stay focused on the implementation stage, many communities lose enthusiasm and energy during the planning phase. Distribute volunteers and resources between both stages to make sure the process will result in tangible changes in the community.
• Evaluate the planning and implementation process, this will allow everyone who is involved to get an objective look at the process, and what led to success/failure.
• Sometimes a program might fail if the intervention was not appropriate for the need and there was not earlier research done to see if it would work, there were too few resources devoted to the project to make it successful, or it was only partially implemented.

Translating these concepts into practice

• Just as a community developer needs to plan for all stages of a process: planning, implementation, and evaluation, the planning process needs to account for all stages of the project: planning, construction, maintenance.
• Community development should occur in stages. Staging changes in a community increases the potential that the process will be successful by allowing the community to continue to gather resources appropriate for each stage and slowly adjust to the changes that are occurring.
• The current macroeconomic climate makes it even more important that community members have an open discussion about the use of resources and to go ahead in stages.
• Conflict management requires a community developer to stay “aggressively neutral” and work with participants to resolve conflict. Conflict should not be ignored. The Southern Regional Rural Development Center produced information on conflict resolution found here.
• A community development process should never commit to an action or the use of a resource if the people or groups who control that resource or have the ability to do that action are not present.
• Keep your expectations realistic, during the entire community development process, especially as you evaluate the efforts of the process – remember that some changes in a community are harder to make than others and that it might take years of work to produce measurable differences among the community’s population.

This session concludes the Understanding Communities and Their Dynamics Training.

Community Situational Analysis – Original material presented by Lori Garkovich, University of Kentucky

Brief Overview –

A situational analysis can take many different forms and can offer a multitude of benefits to the community development process in a community. The analysis is a systematic method of gathering and delivering information to the community. A situational analysis might include: analyzing secondary data for trends, SWOT analysis, key informant interviews, focus groups, and network analysis.

Analyzing secondary data for trends: Examine the community and the county’s population, economic, income, and other trends in relationship to similar communities, all rural counties, or the state average using existing data sources.

SWOT analysis: An assessment of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats within a community. A commonly used technique for more details see:  http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/swot-analysis/main

Key Informant Interviews: key informants are people in leadership positions in multiple organizations in the community or those who know a lot about the community’s history and earlier community development efforts

Focus Groups: Conversations among small groups of invited people, the facilitator asks the group questions and encourages all members in the group to respond to one another and have a voice in the conversation.

Network Analysis: Diagrams of the working, organizational, and social relationships between people in a community.

Key Points

• Do not decide to do an analysis without a clear statement of purpose – define what information needs to be known and what needs to be done with the information
• Done properly, the analysis should lead to community conversations, be used by local planning/non-profits/governments to inform development conversations
• The analysis itself offers an opportunity to develop skills in a community – it gauges commitment from different organizations and leaders and offers an opportunity for community members to collaborate
• The analysis contains different levels of complexity, communities may need outside expertise or broad participation by various community members
• Some parts, especially network analysis and key informant interviews, address power norms for enacting change in a community by identifying people and groups who are the most influential and how they interact with others in the community.

Translating these concepts into practice, examples in Oregon:

• The posted resources contain more details about translating these concepts into practice. The Extension Service can help communities in Oregon.

•  Situational Analysis: Community Vitality Indicators Project – a  survey based comprehensive overview of a community’s progress towards a range of stated goals, completed by Tillamook and Wallowa counties. http://oregonexplorer.info/rural/CommunityVitality

Project Overview: http://r2r.rdiinc.org/pdfs/Community_Indicators_of_Vitality_Slides.pdf

•  Secondary Trends Analysis by Extension Community Economists – http://ruralstudies.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/presentation/pdf/DouglasCo10_28_10_OSU_med.pdf

A fuller description of the situational analysis is available from this Extension document by the University of Kentucky: Situation Analysis by Roger Rennekamp, Martha Nall and Julie Zimmerman

http://www2.ca.uky.edu/psd/Learning%20about%20PD/Situation%20Analysis.pdf

In the next session we will be discussing six strategies of economic development.

The eExtension Service in cooperation with the nation’s four Rural Development Centers is offering an online set of educational seminars titled: Understanding Communities and Their Dynamics. A number of Oregon Extension faculty members are participating in this training. This blog will serve as a site to continue the Oregon dialog around community development and offer local access to state specialists in this area.

Basic Introduction to Community – Original material presented by Steve Jeanetta, University of Missouri Extension

Brief Overview – Establishing a common ground

This session focused on establishing a common set of definitions, principles and goals. Practitioners should think of community development as the planned and organized process through which people and communities learn how they can help themselves. Within this definition is a potential point of conflict for Extension agents and others who are trying to do work in this area: do you understand the community, its diversity, and values well enough to effectively engage? One of the most critical elements of community development is that it is a process that empowers the community, builds capacity locally, and serves local needs and interests.

People have modeled many different ways of implementing community development – from a simple linear process to more complicated views of the world. What is most critical is that the effort to discuss the future of a community or talk about a particular issue be inclusive, equally accessible, and focus on respecting the comments of all participants.

Key Points       

• Community Development has a rich history as a practice for enacting change in communities.
• This approach to addressing community needs to be an inclusive process that empowers all local residents’ ideas and involvement.
• Community Development is a long-term strategy, there is no “right” way to enact change but the process takes time, consensus building among participants, and the community’s consideration of alternatives.
• Practitioners need to respect the community’s current state: their interest to work together and their history of creating dialog around a common future. Building these characteristics need to come first.

Translating these concepts into practice

• Community development is not always focused on a single community. Some issues that arise in a community are better addressed by the people interested in that issue from several communities.
• Increase the diversity of voices in the community’s decision-making processes.
  • Hold meetings in Spanish
  • Engage with the Ford Leaders in your community as a way to spread the word about community meetings
  • Contract with Rural Development Initiatives (RDI) to facilitate contentious discussions in the community
• Establish guidelines for participating. Americans have seen plenty of bad examples of how to take part in public conversations – especially in the last few years. The community development process must create a respectful space to talk about problems, and the opportunities and costs of proposed solutions.
  • Define accepted and unacceptable behaviors as a group
  • Enforce these behaviors – a moderate should step in and remind the group of the established guidelines
  • Take a break if the conversation gets too heated or ask to speak with a participant who is struggling to follow these guidelines privately
  • Ask participants to write down their thoughts first and then share their ideas one at a time

Next week we will be discussing some of the data communities can use during their conversations.