Khargram
—  community development block  —
Khargram Location of Khargram in West Bengal and India
Coordinates	24°02′11″N 87°59′36″E / 24.0362700°N 87.9932710°E / 24.0362700; 87.9932710Coordinates: 24°02′11″N 87°59′36″E / 24.0362700°N 87.9932710°E / 24.0362700; 87.9932710
Country	India
State	West Bengal
District(s)	Murshidabad
Parliamentary constituency	Baharampur
Assembly constituency	Khargram
Population • Density	234,715 (2001[update]) • 620 /km2 (1,606 /sq mi)
Time zone	IST (UTC+05:30)
Area	378.80 square kilometres (146.26 sq mi)
Website	murshidbad.nic.in/

Khargram (community development block) (Bengali: খড়গ্রাম সমষ্টি উন্নয়ন ব্লক) is an administrative division in Kandi subdivision of Murshidabad district in the Indian state of West Bengal. Khargram police station serves this block. Headquarters of this block is at Nagar.^[1][2]

Geography[link]

Khargram is located at 24°02′11″N 87°59′36″E / 24.0362700°N 87.9932710°E / 24.0362700; 87.9932710

Khargram community development block has an area of 378.80 sq km.^[2]

Gram panchayats[link]

Gram panchayats in Khargram block/ panchayat samiti are: Balia, Eroali, Indrani, Jhilli, Joypur, Khargram, Kirtipur, Margram, Mohisar, Padamkandi, Parulia and Sadal.^[3]

Demographics[link]

As per 2001 census, Khargram block has a total population of 234,715, out of which 120,352 were males and 114,363 were females. Khargram block registered a population growth of 16.04 per cent during the 1991-2001 decade. Decadal growth for the district was 23.70 per cent.^[2] Decadal growth in West Bengal was 17.84 per cent.^[4]

References[link]

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Community development (CD) is a broad term applied to the practices and academic disciplines of civic leaders, activists, involved citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of local communities.

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills are often created through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.

Definitions[link]

There are complementary definitions of community development. Community Development Challenge report, which was produced by a working party comprising leading UK organizations in the field (including (Foundation Builders) Community Development Foundation, Community Development Exchange and the Federation of Community Development Learning) defines community development as:

"A set of values and practices which plays a special role in overcoming poverty and disadvantage, knitting society together at the grass roots and deepening democracy. There is a CD profession, defined by national occupational standards and a body of theory and experience going back the best part of a century. There are active citizens who use CD techniques on a voluntary basis, and there are also other professions and agencies which use a CD approach or some aspects of it."^[1]

Community Development Exchange defines community development as:

“both an occupation (such as a community development worker in a local authority) and a way of working with communities. Its key purpose is to build communities based on justice, equality and mutual respect.

Community development involves changing the relationships between ordinary people and people in positions of power, so that everyone can take part in the issues that affect their lives. It starts from the principle that within any community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience which, if used in creative ways, can be channeled into collective action to achieve the communities' desired goals.

Community development practitioners work alongside people in communities to help build relationships with key people and organizations and to identify common concerns. They create opportunities for the community to learn new skills and, by enabling people to act together, community development practitioners help to foster social inclusion and equality.^[2]

A number of different approaches to community development can be recognized, including: community economic development (CED); community capacity building; Social capital formation; political participatory development; nonviolent direct action; ecologically sustainable development; asset-based community development; faith-based community development; community practice social work; community-based participatory research (CBPR); Community Mobilization; community empowerment; community participation; participatory planning including community-based planning (CBP); community-driven development (CDD); and approaches to funding communities directly.

Education and the community-wide empowerment that increased educational opportunity creates, form a crucial component of community development and certainly for under-served communities that have limited general educational and professional training resources. Workforce development and the issues and challenges of crossing the Digital divide, and increasing community-wide levels of Digital inclusion have become crucially important in this and both for affordable access to computers and the Internet, and for training in how to use and maintain these resources.

Local communities that cannot connect and participate in the larger and increasingly global Online community are becoming increasingly marginalized because of that. So where Urban development with its focus on buildings and physical infrastructure was once viewed as a primary path forward to community development, development of computer and online infrastructure and access, and the community enablement they support have to become central areas of focus moving forward. This has become an area of active involvement for both public and private sector organizations including foundations and nonprofit organizations. In the United States, nonprofit organizations such as Per Scholas seek to “break the cycle of poverty by providing education, technology and economic opportunities to individuals, families and communities” as a path to development for the communities they serve.

The history of community development[link]

Community development has been a sometimes explicit and implicit goal of community people, aiming to achieve, through collective effort, a better life,that has occurred throughout history.

In the global North[link]

In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen (1771–1851), sought to create a more perfect community. At New Lanark and at later communities such as Oneida in the USA and the New Australia Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create utopian or intentional utopian communities, with mixed success.

In the United States in the 1960s, the term "community development" began to complement and generally replace the idea of urban renewal, which typically focused on physical development projects often at the expense of working-class communities. In the late 1960s, philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and government officials such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy took an interest in local nonprofit organizations—a pioneer was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn—that attempted to apply business and management skills to the social mission of uplifting low-income residents and their neighborhoods. Eventually such groups became known as "Community Development Corporations" or CDCs. Federal laws beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act provided a way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and other nonprofit organizations. National organizations such as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (founded in 1978 and now known as NeighborWorks America), the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (founded in 1980 and known as LISC), and the Enterprise Foundation (founded in 1981) have built extensive networks of affiliated local nonprofit organizations to which they help provide financing for countless physical and social development programs in urban and rural communities. The CDCs and similar organizations have been credited with starting the process that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner city areas such as the South Bronx in New York City.

Community development in Canada has roots in the development of co-operatives, credit unions and caisses populaires. The Antigonish Movement which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia, through the work of Doctor Moses Coady and Father James Tompkins, has been particularly influential in the subsequent expansion of community economic development work across Canada.

In the global South[link]

Community planning techniques drawing on the history of utopian movements became important in the 1920s and 1930s in East Africa, where Community Development proposals were seen as a way of helping local people improve their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.^{[citation needed]}

Mohondas K. Gandhi adopted African community development ideals as a basis of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian Swaraj movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence at village level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work of Vinoba Bhave in encouraging grassroots land reform, India under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted a mixed-economy approach, mixing elements of socialism and capitalism.During the fifties and sixties, India ran a massive community development programme with focus on rural development activities through government support. This was later expanded in scope and was called integrated rural development scheme [IRDP]. A large number of initiatives that can come under the community development umbrella have come up in recent years.

Community Development became a part of the Ujamaa Villages established in Tanzania by Julius Nyerere, where it had some success in assisting with the delivery of education services throughout rural areas, but has elsewhere met with mixed success. In the 1970s and 1980s, Community Development became a part of "Integrated Rural Development", a strategy promoted by United Nations Agencies and the World Bank. Central to these policies of community development were

• Adult Literacy Programs, drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the "Each One Teach One" adult literacy teaching method conceived by Frank Laubach.
• Youth and Women's Groups, following the work of the Serowe Brigades of Botswana, of Patrick van Rensburg.
• Development of Community Business Ventures and particularly cooperatives, in part drawn on the examples of José María Arizmendiarrieta and the Mondragon Cooperatives of the Basque Region of Spain
• Compensatory Education for those missing out in the formal education system, drawing on the work of Open Education as pioneered by Michael Young.
• Dissemination of Alternative Technologies, based upon the work of E. F. Schumacher as advocated in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people really mattered
• Village Nutrition Programs and Permaculture Projects, based upon the work of Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.
• Village Water Supply Programs

In the 1990s, following critiques of the mixed success of "top down" government programs, and drawing on the work of Robert Putnam, in the rediscovery of Social Capital, community development internationally became concerned with social capital formation. In particular the outstanding success of the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank, has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes around the world. This work was honoured by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

The "Human Scale Development" work of Right Livelihood Award winning Chilean economist Manfred Max Neef promotes the idea of development based upon fundamental human needs, which are considered to be limited, universal and invariant to all human beings (being a part of our human condition). He considers that poverty results from the failure to satisfy a particular human need, it is not just an absence of money. Whilst human needs are limited, Max Neef shows that the ways of satisfying human needs is potentially unlimited. Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: e.g., the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity. Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organizations; preventative medicine; meditation; educational games. '

See also[link]

• Community
• Community building
• Community art
• BetterTogether
• Community media
• Community film
• Community organizing
• Community practice
• Rural community development
• Urban regeneration
• Urbanism
• Community engagement
• Participatory planning

References[link]

1. ^ "Community Development Challenge Report". Produced by Community Development Foundation for Communities and Local Government. http://www.cdf.org.uk/SITE/UPLOAD/DOCUMENT/communitydevelopmentchallenge.pdf. Retrieved 2009-02-13. 
2. ^ "Definition of CD". Community Development Exchange. http://www.cdx.org.uk/community-development/what-community-development. Retrieved 2010-06-08. 

Further reading[link]

• Briggs, Xavier de Souza, and Elizabeth Mueller and Mercer Sullivan, From Neighborhood to Community: Evidence on the Social Effects of Community Development Corporation. Community Development Research Center, 1997.
• Ferguson, Ronald F. and William T. Dickens, eds., Urban Problems and Community Development. Brookings Institution Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8157-1875-6, ISBN 978-0-8157-1875-8
• Grogan, Paul and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival. Westview Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8133-3952-9, ISBN 978-0-8133-3952-8
• von Hoffman, Alexander, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods. Oxford University Press, 2003, Ppbck. ed., 2004. ISBN 0-19-517614-6, ISBN 978-0-19-517614-8

External links[link]

• The Citizen's Handbook
• CDX: the Community Development Exchange, a UK-wide independent membership organisation for community development.
• International Association for Community Development
• Shelterforce: the magazine for community development, affordable housing, and community building.
• Knowledgeplex: a news and information resource for the affordable housing and community development field.
• Sustainable Urban Development Resource Guide

A community of interest gathers at Stonehenge, England, for the summer solstice.

The term community has two distinct meanings: 1) A group of interacting people, living in some proximity (i.e., in space, time, or relationship). Community usually refers to a social unit larger than a household that shares common values and has social cohesion. The term can also refer to the national community or international community, and, 2) in biology, a community is a group of interacting living organisms sharing a populated environment. A community is a group or society, helping each other.

In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

Since the advent of the Internet, the concept of community has less geographical limitation, as people can now gather virtually in an online community and share common interests regardless of physical location. Prior to the internet, virtual communities (like social or academic organizations) were far more limited by the constraints of available communication and transportation technologies.

The word "community" is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, "with/together" + munus, "gift"), a broad term for fellowship or organized society.^[1] Some examples of community service is to help in church, tutoring, hospitals, etc.

Perspectives from various disciplines[link]

Sociology[link]

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v t e

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft[link]

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between two types of human association: Gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and Gesellschaft ("society" or "association"). In his 1887 work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies argued that Gemeinschaft is perceived to be a tighter and more cohesive social entity, due to the presence of a "unity of will."^[2] He added that family and kinship were the perfect expressions of Gemeinschaft, but that other shared characteristics, such as place or belief, could also result in Gemeinschaft. This paradigm of communal networks and shared social understanding has been applied to multiple cultures in many places throughout history.^[3] Gesellschaft, on the other hand, is a group in which the individuals who make up that group are motivated to take part in the group purely by self-interest. He also proposed that in the real world, no group was either pure Gemeinschaft or pure Gesellschaft, but, rather, a mixture of the two. )

Social capital[link]

If community exists, both freedom and security may exist as well. The community then takes on a life of its own, as people become free enough to share and secure enough to get along. The sense of connectedness and formation of social networks comprise what has become known as social capital.^[4]

Social capital is defined by Robert D. Putnam as "the collective value of all social networks and species (who people know) and the inclinations that arise from these works to do things for each other (norms of reciprocity)."^[5] Social capital in action can be seen in all sorts of groups, including neighbors keeping an eye on each others' homes. However, as Putnam notes in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), social capital has been falling in the United States. Putnam found that over the past 25 years, attendance at club meetings has fallen 58 percent, family dinners are down 33 percent, and having friends visit has fallen 45 percent.^[6]

The same patterns are also evident in many other western countries. Western cultures are thus said to be losing the spirit of community that once were found in institutions including churches and community centers. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg states in The Great Good Place that people need three places: 1) the home, 2) the office, and, 3) the community hangout or gathering place.^[7] With this philosophy in mind, many grassroots efforts such as The Project for Public Spaces are being started to create this "Third Place" in communities. They are taking form in independent bookstores, coffeehouses, local pubs, and through new and innovative means to create the social capital needed to foster the sense and spirit of community.^[8]

Psychology[link]

Community[link]

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis identify four elements of "sense of community": 1) membership, 2) influence, 3) integration and fulfillment of needs, and 4) shared emotional connection. They give the following example of the interplay between these factors:

Someone puts an announcement on the dormitory bulletin board about the formation of an intramural dormitory basketball team. People attend the organizational meeting as strangers out of their individual needs (integration and fulfillment of needs). The team is bound by place of residence (membership boundaries are set) and spends time together in practice (the contact hypothesis). They play a game and win (successful shared valent event). While playing, members exert energy on behalf of the team (personal investment in the group). As the team continues to win, team members become recognized and congratulated (gaining honor and status for being members), Influencing new members to join and continue to do the same. Someone suggests that they all buy matching shirts and shoes (common symbols) and they do so (influence).^[9]

To what extent do participants in joint activities experience a sense of community?

A Sense of Community Index (SCI) has been developed by Chavis and colleagues and revised and adapted by others. Although originally designed to assess sense of community in neighborhoods, the index has been adapted for use in schools, the workplace, and a variety of types of communities.^[10]

Studies conducted by the APPA show substantial evidence that young adults who feel a sense of belonging in a community, particularly small communities, develop fewer psychiatric and depressive disorders than those who do not have the feeling of love and belonging.^{[citation needed]}

Anthropology[link]

Cultural (or social) anthropology has traditionally looked at community through the lens of ethnographic fieldwork and ethnography continues to be an important methodology for study of modern communities. Other anthropological approaches that deal with various aspects of community include cross-cultural studies and the anthropology of religion. Cultures in modern society are also studied in the fields of urban anthropology, ethnic studies, ecological anthropology, and psychological anthropology. Since the 1990s, internet communities have increasingly been the subject of research in the emerging field of cyber anthropology.

Archaeology[link]

Archaeological studies of social communities. The term “community” is used in two ways in archaeology, paralleling usage in other areas. The first is an informal definition of community as a place where people used to live. In this sense it is synonymous with the concept of an ancient settlement, whether a hamlet, village, town, or city. The second meaning is similar to the usage of the term in other social sciences: a community is a group of people living near one another who interact socially. Social interaction on a small scale can be difficult to identify with archaeological data. Most reconstructions of social communities by archaeologists rely on the principle that social interaction is conditioned by physical distance. Therefore a small village settlement likely constituted a social community, and spatial subdivisions of cities and other large settlements may have formed communities. Archaeologists typically use similarities in material culture—from house types to styles of pottery—to reconstruct communities in the past. This is based on the assumption that people or households will share more similarities in the types and styles of their material goods with other members of a social community than they will with outsiders.^[11]

Social philosophy[link]

Communitarianism[link]

Communitarianism as a group of related but distinct philosophies (or ideologies) began in the late 20th century, opposing classical liberalism and capitalism while advocating phenomena such as civil society. Not necessarily hostile to social liberalism, communitarianism rather has a different emphasis, shifting the focus of interest toward communities and societies and away from the individual. The question of priority, whether for the individual or community, must be determined in dealing with pressing ethical questions about a variety of social issues, such as health care, abortion, multiculturalism, and hate speech. Gad Barzilai has critically examined both liberalism and communitarianism and has developed the theory of critical communitarianism. Barzilai has explicated how non-ruling communities are constructing legal cultures while interacting with various facets of political power. Being venues of identity construction justifies collective protections of communities in law, while the boundaries with other communities, states, and global forces should be sensitive to preservation of various cultures. Gad Barzilai has accordingly offered how to protect human rights, individual rights, and multiculturalism in inter-communal context that allows to generating cultural relativism.

Business and communications[link]

Organizational communication[link]

Effective communication practices in group and organizational settings are very important to the formation and maintenance of communities. The ways that ideas and values are communicated within communities are important to the induction of new members, the formulation of agendas, the selection of leaders and many other aspects. Organizational communication is the study of how people communicate within an organizational context and the influences and interactions within organizational structures. Group members depend on the flow of communication to establish their own identity within these structures and learn to function in the group setting. Although organizational communication, as a field of study, is usually geared toward companies and business groups, these may also be seen as communities. The principles of organizational communication can also be applied to other types of communities.

Ecology[link]

In ecology, a community is an assemblage of populations of different species, interacting with one another. Community ecology is the branch of ecology that studies interactions between and among species. It considers how such interactions, along with interactions between species and the abiotic environment, affect community structure and species richness, diversity and patterns of abundance. Species interact in three ways: competition, predation and mutualism. Competition typically results in a double negative—that is both species lose in the interaction. Predation is a win/lose situation with one species winning. Mutualism, on the other hand, involves both species cooperating in some way, with both winning.

Interdisciplinary perspectives[link]

Socialization[link]

Lewes Bonfire Night procession commemorating 17 Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake from 1555 to 1557.

The process of learning to adopt the behavior patterns of the community is called socialization. The most fertile time of socialization is usually the early stages of life, during which individuals develop the skills and knowledge and learn the roles necessary to function within their culture and social environment.^[12] For some psychologists, especially those in the psychodynamic tradition, the most important period of socialization is between the ages of one and ten. But socialization also includes adults moving into a significantly different environment, where they must learn a new set of behaviors.^[13]

Socialization is influenced primarily by the family, through which children first learn community norms. Other important influences include schools, peer groups, people, mass media, the workplace, and government. The degree to which the norms of a particular society or community are adopted determines one's willingness to engage with others. The norms of tolerance, reciprocity, and trust are important "habits of the heart," as de Tocqueville put it, in an individual's involvement in community.^[14]

Community development[link]

Community development, often linked with Community Work or Community Planning, is often formally conducted by non-government organisations (NGOs), universities or government agencies to progress the social well-being of local, regional and, sometimes, national communities. Less formal efforts, called community building or community organizing, seek to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities.^[15] These skills often assist in building political power through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community development practitioners must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions.

Formal programs conducted by universities are often used to build a knowledge base to drive curricula in sociology and community studies. The General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University are examples of national community development in the United States. In The United Kingdom, Oxford University has led in providing extensive research in the field through its Community Development Journal,^[16] used worldwide by sociologists and community development practitioners.

At the intersection between community development and community building are a number of programs and organizations with community development tools. One example of this is the program of the Asset Based Community Development Institute of Northwestern University. The institute makes available downloadable tools^[17] to assess community assets and make connections between non-profit groups and other organizations that can help in community building. The Institute focuses on helping communities develop by "mobilizing neighborhood assets" — building from the inside out rather than the outside in.^[18]

Community building and organizing[link]

The anti-war affinity group "Collateral Damage" protesting the Iraq war

In The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, Scott Peck argues that the almost accidental sense of community that exists at times of crisis can be consciously built. Peck believes that conscious community building is a process of deliberate design based on the knowledge and application of certain rules.^[19] He states that this process goes through four stages:^[20]

1. Chaos: When people move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves. This stage places great demands upon the facilitator for greater leadership and organization, but Peck believes that "organizations are not communities", and this pressure should be resisted.
2. Emptiness: This stage moves beyond the attempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to us all as human beings. Out of this emptiness comes
3. True community: the process of deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community. This stage Peck believes can only be described as "glory" and reflects a deep yearning in every human soul for compassionate understanding from one's fellows.

More recently Peck remarked that building a sense of community is easy but maintaining this sense of community is difficult in the modern world.^[21] Community building can use a wide variety of practices, ranging from simple events such as potlucks and small book clubs to larger–scale efforts such as mass festivals and construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside contractors.

Community building that is geared toward citizen action is usually termed "community organizing."^[22] In these cases, organized community groups seek accountability from elected officials and increased direct representation within decision-making bodies. Where good-faith negotiations fail, these constituency-led organizations seek to pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics. The ARISE Detroit! coalition and the Toronto Public Space Committee are examples of activist networks committed to shielding local communities from government and corporate domination and inordinate influence.

Community organizing is sometimes focused on more than just resolving specific issues. Organizing often means building a widely accessible power structure, often with the end goal of distributing power equally throughout the community. Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are open and democratic in governance. Such groups facilitate and encourage consensus decision-making with a focus on the general health of the community rather than a specific interest group. The three basic types of community organizing are grassroots organizing, coalition building, and "institution-based community organizing," (also called "broad-based community organizing," an example of which is faith-based community organizing, or "congregation-based community organizing").^[23]

If communities are developed based on something they share in common, whether that be location or values, then one challenge for developing communities is how to incorporate individuality and differences. Indeed, as Rebekah Nathan suggests in her book, My Freshman Year, we are actually drawn to developing communities totally based on sameness, despite stated commitments to diversity, such as those found on university websites. Nathan states that certain commonalities allow college students to cohere: “What holds students together, really, is age, pop culture, a handful of (recent) historical events, and getting a degree” (qtd. In Barrios 229). Universities may try to create community through all freshman reads, freshman seminars, and school pride; however, Nathan argues students will only form communities based on the attributes, such as age and pop culture, that they bring with them to college. Nathan’s point, then, is that people come to college and don't expand their social horizons and cultural tolerance, which can prevent the development of your social community. (Barrios, Barclay. Emerging: Conetmporary Readings for Writers. New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2010.)

Community currencies[link]

Some communities have developed their own "Local Exchange Trading Systems" (LETS)^[24] and local currencies, such as the Ithaca Hours system,^[25] to encourage economic growth and an enhanced sense of community. Community Currencies have recently proven valuable in meeting the needs of people living in various South American nations, particularly Argentina, that recently suffered as a result of the collapse of the Argentinian national currency.^[26]

Community service[link]

Community service is usually performed in connection with a nonprofit organization, but it may also be undertaken under the auspices of government, one or more businesses, or by individuals. It is typically unpaid and voluntary. However, it can be part of alternative sentencing approaches in a justice system and it can be required by educational institutions.

Types of community[link]

Participants in Diana Leafe Christian's "Heart of a Healthy Community" seminar circle during an afternoon session at O.U.R. Ecovillage

A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed; one such breakdown is:

1. Geographic communities: range from the local neighbourhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These refer to communities of location.
2. Communities of culture: range from the local clique, sub-culture, ethnic group, religious, multicultural or pluralistic civilisation, or the global community cultures of today. They may be included as communities of need or identity, such as disabled persons, or frail aged people.
3. Community organizations: range from informal family or kinship networks, to more formal incorporated associations, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations at a small, national or international scale.

Communities are nested; one community can contain another—for example a geographic community may contain a number of ethnic communities.^[27]

Location[link]

Possibly the most common usage of the word "community" indicates a large group living in close proximity. Examples of local community include:

• A municipality is an administrative local area generally composed of a clearly defined territory and commonly referring to a town or village.

Wakefield, Ma. is an example of a small town which constitutes a local community.

Although large cities are also municipalities, they are often thought of as a collection of communities, due to their diversity.

• A neighborhood is a geographically localized community, often within a larger city or suburb.
• A planned community is one that was designed from scratch and grew up more or less following the plan. Several of the world's capital cities are planned cities, notably Washington, D.C., in the United States, Canberra in Australia, and Brasília in Brazil. It was also common during the European colonization of the Americas to build according to a plan either on fresh ground or on the ruins of earlier Amerindian cities.

Identity[link]

In some contexts, "community" indicates a group of people with a common identity other than location. Members often interact regularly. Common examples in everyday usage include:

• A "professional community" is a group of people with the same or related occupations. Some of those members may join a professional society, making a more defined and formalized group. These are also sometimes known as communities of practice.
• A virtual community is a group of people primarily or initially communicating or interacting with each other by means of information technologies, typically over the Internet, rather than in person. These may be either communities of interest, practice or communion. Research interest is evolving in the motivations for contributing to online communities.

Overlaps[link]

Some communities share both location and other attributes. Members choose to live near each other because of one or more common interests.

• A retirement community is designated and at least usually designed for retirees and seniors—often restricted to those over a certain age, such as 56. It differs from a retirement home, which is a single building or small complex, by having a number of autonomous households.
• An intentional community is a deliberate residential community with a much higher degree of social communication than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political or spiritual vision and share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include Amish villages, ashrams, cohousing, communes, ecovillages, housing cooperatives, kibbutzim, and land trusts.

Special nature of human community[link]

Definitions of community as "organisms inhabiting a common environment and interacting with one another,"^[28] while scientifically accurate, do not convey the richness, diversity and complexity of human communities. Their classification, likewise is almost never precise. Untidy as it may be, community is vital for humans.^{[citation needed]} M. Scott Peck expresses this in the following way: "There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community."^[29]

See also[link]

Community portal

• Wikipedia books: Community
• Community theatre
• Outline of community

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Barzilai, Gad. 2003. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage

— 2000. What is globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Canuto, Marcello A. and Jason Yaeger, eds. (2000) The Archaeology of Communities. Routledge, New York.
• Chavis, D.M., Hogge, J.H., McMillan, D.W., & Wandersman, A. 1986. "Sense of community through Brunswick's lens: A first look." Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 24-40.
• Chipuer, H. M., & Pretty, G. M. H. (1999). A review of the Sense of Community Index: Current uses, factor structure, reliability, and further development. Journal of Community Psychology, 27(6), 643-658.
• Christensen, K., et al. (2003). Encyclopedia of Community. 4 volumes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Cohen, A. P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge: New York.
• Durkheim, Émile. 1950 [1895] The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by S. A. Solovay and J. H. Mueller. New York: The Free Press.
• Cox, F., J. Erlich, J. Rothman, and J. Tropman. 1970. Strategies of Community Organization: A Book of Readings. Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock Publishers.
• Effland, R. 1998. The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations Mesa Community College.
• Giddens, A. 1999. “Risk and Responsibility” Modern Law Review 62(1): 1-10.
• Lenski, G. 1974. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. New York: McGraw- Hill, Inc.
• Long, D.A., & Perkins, D.D. (2003). Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Sense of Community Index and Development of a Brief SCI. Journal of Community Psychology, 31, 279-296.
• McMillan, D.W., & Chavis, D.M. 1986. "Sense of community: A definition and theory." American Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6-23.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communauté désœuvrée - philosophical questioning of the concept of community and the possibility of encountering a non-subjective concept of it
• Newman, D. 2005. Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, Chapter 5. "Building Identity: Socialization" Pine Forge Press. Retrieved: 2006-08-05.
• Peck, M.S. 1987. The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-84858-9
• Perkins, D.D., Florin, P., Rich, R.C., Wandersman, A. & Chavis, D.M. (1990). Participation and the social and physical environment of residential blocks: Crime and community context. American Journal of Community Psychology, 18, 83-115.
• Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster
• Sarason, S.B. 1974. The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a community psychology. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

— 1986. "Commentary: The emergence of a conceptual center." Journal of Community Psychology, 14, 405-407.

• Smith, M. K. 2001. Community. Encyclopedia of informal education. Last updated: January 28, 2005. Retrieved: 2006-07-15.
• Tönnies, F. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Fues's Verlag, 2nd ed. 1912, 8th edition, Leipzig: Buske, 1935; translated in 1957 as Community and Society. ISBN 0-88738-750-0

External links[link]

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Introduction to Sociology

Look up development in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Development may refer to:

Land use[link]

• Green development, a concept that includes consideration of community-wide or regional environmental implications
• Land development, altering the landscape in any number of ways
• Mixed-use development, the practice of allowing more than one type of use in a building or set of buildings
• Real estate development, a business encompassing activities from renovation to the purchase of raw land
• Subdivision (land), or a development, a piece of land divided from a larger portion for sale or further development
• Urban planning, or development, integrates land use planning and transportation planning to improve communities
• Transit-oriented development, a mixed-use residential or commercial area designed to maximize access to public transport

Science and technology[link]

• Artificial development, an area of computer science and engineering
• Development (differential geometry), the process of rolling one surface over another
• Development (journal), an academic journal in developmental biology
• Development (topology), a countable collection of open coverings
• Developmental biology, the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop
• Drug development, the entire process of bringing a new drug or device to the market
• Embryogenesis, or development, the process by which the embryo is formed
• Energy development, the effort to provide sufficient primary energy sources
• Human development (biology), the process of growing to maturity
  • Prenatal development, the process in which a human embryo or fetus gestates during pregnancy
  • Child development, the biological, psychological, and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the end of adolescence
  • Youth development, the process through which adolescents acquire the cognitive, social, and emotional skills and abilities required to navigate life
• Neural development, the processes that generate, shape, and reshape the nervous system
• Photographic development, the chemical means by which exposed photographic film or paper is processed to produce a visible image
• Research and development, work aiming to increase knowledge
• Software development, the development of a software product
• Tooth development or odontogenesis
• Web development, work involved in developing a web site

Social science[link]

• Development studies, social science which addresses issues of concern to developing countries
• Development geography, geography with reference to the standard of living and quality of life of human inhabitants
• Developmental psychology, the scientific study of systematic psychological, emotional, and perception changes over life spans
• Community development, the practices and academic disciplines to improve various aspects of local communities
• Sociocultural evolution, how cultures and societies have changed over time
• Economic development, the economic aspect of social change
• Human development (humanity), an international and economic development paradigm
• Human development theory, a theory that merges older ideas from ecological economics, sustainable development, welfare economics, and feminist economics
• Rural development, actions and initiatives taken to improve the standard of living in non-Urban neighborhoods, countryside, and remote villages
• Social development, processes of change in societies
• Sustainable development, a pattern of resources use, that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment

International and regional[link]

• Regional development, the provision of aid and other assistance to regions which are less economically developed
  • Multilateral development bank
  • European Development Fund, an instrument for European Community aid
  • Development aid, the provision of assistance to developing countries
• Economic development, the sustained, concerted effort of policymakers and community to promote the standard of living and economic health in a specific area
• Human Development Index, used to rank countries by level of "human development"
• International development, the development of greater quality of life for humans

Business and professional[link]

• Business development, a process of growing a business
• Career development, which as several meanings
• Corporate development, a position in a business
• Development & Commerce Bank (now called RHB Bank)
• Fundraising, soliciting voluntary contributions to an organization or prospective organization
• Training and development, organizational activity aimed at bettering the performance of individuals and groups in organizational settings
• Leadership development, activities that enhances the quality of leadership within an individual or organization
• New product development, the complete process of bringing a new product to market
• Organization development, a conceptual, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and viability
• Personal development or self-help
• Professional development, skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement

Culture[link]

• Video game development, a creative process of developing a video game
• Development (album), a 2002 nu-metal album by musical group Nonpoint
• Musical development, a compositional process

Other[link]

• Characterisation including character development
• Develop, term used in Chess
• Development of doctrine, a term used by John Henry Newman to describe Catholic teachings
• Development hell, media industry term for when a project is stuck in development
• Development of religion, the various stages in the evolution of any particular religion or religious system
• Driver development program is a program used by racing teams to develop younger drivers
• Components of the "development" phase in film making include film finance and film budgeting

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Look up Block, Blocks, block, blocked, or blocks in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Block may refer to:

Administrative subdivisions[link]

• A city block, the smallest area that is surrounded by streets
• Block (country subdivision), term used in many South Asian countries

Objects[link]

• A large concrete masonry unit
• A solid piece of a hard substance, such as wood, upon which persons are beheaded, e.g.: The charges that led Sir Walter Raleigh to the block in 1618.
• Tower block, a high rise multi-unit building
• Block (sailing), a single or multiple pulley used on sailboats
• Cylinder block, the main part of an internal combustion engine
• Toy block, one of a set of wooden or plastic pieces of various shapes
• Unit block a type of standardized wooden toy block for children
• Freewheel, a set of rear sprockets that attaches to a hub on the rear wheel
• Wood block a small piece of slit drum made from a single piece of wood and used as a percussion instrument
• Hat block a wooden block carved into the shape of a hat by a craftsman known as a block shaper
• Postage stamp block, an attached group of postage stamps

Science[link]

• Block (periodic table)
• Block (extraction of petroleum), a sub-division of an underground reservoir
• Block (meteorology), large-scale patterns in the atmospheric pressure field
• Block (geology), is a geologic zone or geologic province

Sports[link]

• Blocking (American football), when a player obstructs another player's path
• Block (basketball), when a defensive player legally deflects a shot
• Blocking (martial arts), a defensive technique in the martial arts
• Starting blocks, devices used by sprinters to assist in preventing their feet from slipping as they break into a run

Transport[link]

• A way of controlling train movement in railway signalling

Technology[link]

• Block (data storage), the practice of storing electronic data in equally-sized units
• Block-level element in the HTML markup language
• Block (telecommunications), a unit of data transmission
• Block (programming), a group of declarations and statements treated as a unit
• Block (Internet), technical measures to restrict users' access to certain internet resources
• Boom Blox, a 2008 video game for the Wii console from EA, previously known as Blocks
• Blocks (C language extension), an extension to the C programming language designed to support parallel programming
• Non-blocking (disambiguation), for computers running multiple programs at once, it is important for no single task waiting for completion of an operation to indefinitely block the processing of any other task
• Unicode block, a named range of codepoints in Unicode
• Block elements, a class of Box-drawing characters
• Block Number (aircraft), a method of differentiating between groups of aircraft of the same type that have minor modifications

Mathematics[link]

• Aschbacher block of a finite group
• Block design, a kind of set system in combinatorial mathematics
• Block (permutation group theory)
• Block of a ring, a centrally primitive idempotent or the ideal it generates
• Block in modular representation theory
• In graph theory, a maximally 2-connected subgraph or a bridge with its endvertices
• Blocks are the elements of a block matrix

Music[link]

• Block (musician), also known as Jamie Block, a New York City based anti-folk musician
• Block Entertainment, a record label
• Blocks Recording Club, a record label
• Block musical form
• Wood block, a small piece of slit drum made from a single piece of wood and used as a percussion instrument

Film[link]

• Blocked, a 2006 horror film directed by James E. Roberts

Broadcasting[link]

• Program block, the result of a programming strategy in broadcasting

People[link]

• Francesca Lia Block (born 1962), American writer
• Herbert Lawrence Block, commonly known as Herblock, American political cartoonist
• Lawrence Block (born 1938), American crime writer
• Malú Block (1904–1989), born María Luisa Cabrera, Mexican artist
• Mark Block, American political strategist
• Walter Block (born 1941), American economist, author

See also[link]

• All pages beginning with "Block"
• All pages with titles containing "Block"
• Blocking (disambiguation)
• Blockade (disambiguation)
• Blockbuster (disambiguation)
• Bloc (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.