Relevance of community development methods

By Bill Staples

I have received comments from more than one colleague wondering whether ICA community development methods still have currency and application in today's world of mass awakenings, social media and globalization. From my experiences over the past seven years, my answer is a resounding YES!

As a full-time ToP facilitator and trainer for ICA Associates Inc. in Toronto, I was devoting less and less time to front-line community development work, which is one variation of human development. The reason - facilitating and training in the private and government sector was bringing in more income. Up until 2006, my community development work was limited to facilitating an occasional participatory strategic plan for a municipality or a public consultation on immigration or drug abuse for a city. Every couple of years I got to do some interesting work with a First Nation (the Canadian term for aboriginal communities). And we continued an annual five-day Community Development Intensive for practitioners. That would attract five to 10 people each year. For those who remember ICA’s International Training Institutes, a Community Development Intensive is like a three-week International Training Institute, boiled down to 5 days.

Everything shifted in 2006. Jane Stallman and Marty Roach asked me to do a Community Development Intensive in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco for 20 highly disadvantaged people. I became aware of my lack of commitment to human development and that it had become just a job. That realization made me ill. My experience in the Tenderloin reminded me of my human frailty and I emerged recommitted.

Since then, I have found that these tried-and-true ICA human development and community development methods still work. They were important in the training of 80 local community development practitioners in 13 Priority Neighborhoods in the City of Toronto during 2007-2009. They were sought out by 60 front-line workers and executive directors of non-profit agencies throughout Toronto. Practitioners from 15 First Nations in Alberta (a province larger than Kenya) wanted these methods and paid for them. Three government agencies in Canada paid for an in-house Community Development Intensive for their staff.

Beyond that, the South Korean government’s international development agency has held the Community Development Intensive course twice, one for front-line staff and another for the staff of non-profits. There seems to be no end to the need for what is promoted as community development training but is actually human development training. Every ICA has its story of how community and human development merge.

Some of our new young staff in Toronto wanted to know if our community development methods were relevant for collaborations and multi-stakeholder partnerships. My gut reaction was yes but I checked our recent files to see if clients were using those methods for collaborative purposes and with multi-stakeholders. Post training client implementation data is hard to come by but from comments made at a conference two years after the Priority Neighborhood work, it appeared that younger trainees use the methods that way. The methods were certainly designed for that purpose. Other 21st Century language of development includes entrepreneurship, social innovation, technology platforms, generational networks, intellectual property, global leadership, social capital and investment acceleration. For some people simply knowing the new language and having the confidence to use what it represents IS human development. For me, it must include the commitment to risk and the courage to act.

When you come right down to it, mass awakenings, the “spring” movements, social media and economic globalization eventually come from people figuring out how to work together for the sake of their families, neighborhoods,  regions, countries and the world. Everyone needs to know the key principles of development, how to grid territory, create a past, present and future story together, build a framework of support, do strategic and action planning and launch projects, implement small and large miracles, create sustainable systems, and evaluate, document and celebrate, and eventually share their work, expand it or replicate it, for the sake of future generations.

Bill Staples is the head of ICA Associates Inc, Toronto