Notes:
Please note that there are a couple of chronological inaccuracies in the paper. One relates to when FCWTG was founded as a national organisation. It dates back to 1977 as the FCWTG, and started receiving funding from the Home Office in the early eighties.
It was some members of FCWTG, in partnership with people from other organisations, who set up SCCD in the late eighties.
ACW dissolved itself around 3 years ago. It gave FCDL ‘the task’ to continue the
Community Work Skills manual and some residual funding to help us do it. We produced one in 2009, edited by Val Harris. Similarly, ACW gave CDX ‘the task’ to incorporate the
ACW bulletin into the CDX one.
We have informed Gary of these and he will make any necessary revisions in the forthcoming book.
1
Where is community development going? I think we can only answer that by asking where has it come from? And where is it now? Having just completed a book, with colleagues, on the history of community development on the UK from
1950 to 2010, it seems to me there is much we can learn from the CD’s history which should shape our responses to current and future policy and political change. So I want to reflect on these past issues which will point to issues for the future.
CD began to emerge as a recognisable paid activity in the UK in the 1950s, legitimised by the UN which defined it in 1953 as ‘a movement to promote better living for the whole community, with active participation and if possible on the initiative of the community.’ Generally, the practice of CD was then seen as taking place in the socalled ‘developing’ countries, many then emerging from colonial rule. In the colonies, however, CD
– badged then as adult education or rural extension - was as much a means of controlling local populations as of liberating them.
The origins of UKCD from the 1950s lie in three tendencies, each underpinned by a set of values, skills and a body of knowledge. These overlapped or, in some cases, were in conflict. The first lay in the continuing interests of ‘community developers’, returning from newly-independent countries, particularly in Africa,
Asia and the Caribbean, wanting to apply their practice to the rapidly changing social and economic fabric of post-war Britain. Secondly, the need, recognised
1
This is a highly condensed summary of the Editorial Introduction in Community Development in the UK ,
1950-2010, edited by Gary Craig, Marjorie Mayo, Keith Popple, Mae Shaw and Marilyn Taylor, to be published in 2011 by Policy Press.

by governments, for some form of social development in New Towns and housing estates, built to replace Britain’s slums and war-damaged cities. Thirdly, the growing awareness of CD and community organising in the USA, reflected in emerging American literature.
Early UK literature was thus dominated by writing from post-colonial returnees and the USA
– the latter either from a rural extension tradition in poor agricultural communities or a more radical
– albeit pluralist - community organising practice, developing within the USA’s (largely black) inner cities, exemplified by Alinsky’s writing. Students taking the early UK community development courses were offered a strange reading list, with virtually no indigenous literature at all, or, for those proposing to work overseas in what was becoming known as social development, a heavy dose of post-colonial practice. This changed in the 1960s, as observers of early UK practice began to draw together lessons learnt from this practice. A struggle then developed for the identity of UKCD.
This struggle took various forms: one was the debate which sought to distance community development
– through the emergent Association of Community
Workers - from the practice of social work and its own professional body, the
British Association of Social Workers. Ironically, much early writing about neighbourhood community work and the training and skills required for it emerged from the National Institute of Social Work. For many community workers, a paradox emerged: if community development was about empowering local communities, effectively ‘working the community developer out of a job’, how could it lay claim to a continuing professional practice which with its mystifying entry requirements, codes of ethics, training requirements and so on, sought to distance itself from the communities it was developing. ACW of course continues today as one focal point for debate and discussion but it has successfully avoided becoming a professional organisation in the tradition of, say, law, social work and medicine.
In 1968, the government had established a national youth volunteer organisation, then known as the Young Volunteer Force Foundation (YVFF), sending small teams to deprived communities throughout the UK to ‘harness the energies of young people through voluntary service.’ Many of these young workers rapidly came to the view that such social work-oriented voluntary service would not sustainably address the problems they were facing and turned to CD as a more appropriate form of practice. Local volunteer projects were transformed into CD projects, many of them creating a degree of irritation at both central and local government levels for raising questions about the nature and origins of deprivation. Ironically, with the Coalition’s Big Society approach, we may now see the reverse, with CD approaches transformed into volunteer projects, and a consequent undermining of CD itself.
YVFF became the Community Projects Foundation, now CDF. Increasingly subject to strong government control through its funding streams and terms of

reference, it has become more clearly positioned as a delivery agent for government policy rather than as a sponsor of autonomous CD activity. By the late 1980s, various pressures – including concern that CDF was becoming too close to government and a recognition that ‘expertise’ lay throughout the field of practice and shouldn’t be represented by one national body - led to the creation of the-then Standing Conference of Community Development (now CDX ), with
FCTWG
– now FCDL – following soon after. There is now a range of organisations each active in managing and supporting independent community development initiatives including BASSAC, the Urban Forum, the Development
Trusts Association and Community Matters. I think, in passing, we must all be sceptical about the current enquiry into the future of CD sponsored by CDF as it could legitimise one view of CD, a view which government would then adapt to its own purposes. I encourage you all to engage critically with the enquiry.
The second highly symbolic, struggle took place on the Editorial Board of the
Community Development Journal (CDJ), the major international journal reflecting the theory and practice of CD. The CDJ emerged in 1965 from a newsletter circulated amongst those colonial ‘returnees’ and was dominated by their perspectives until the early 1970s when an increasing number of those with experience predominantly in UK urban settings joined the Board. By the late
1970s this latter grouping emerged as a dominant force on the Editorial Board and the-then editor and Board Chair both resigned in short order. From that point, the CDJ set out to operate as a truly international journal, reflecting practice across the world, both North and South, including a substantial volume of material which reflected ways in which community development was being used in a ‘Southern’ context, to provide a voice for the poor and dispossessed against new ruling elites.
The third contest followed the emergence of the influential writing of the National
Community Development Project. An influential caucus of CDP workers developed what came to be known as the ‘structural analysis’ of the decline of inner city areas, pointing to industrial disinvestment and the rundown of public services as the major reason for poverty and deprivation in these areas, rather than, as government would have had people believe, the fecklessness of inner city residents. This ideological contest has present resonances. The CDP analysis – and its implications for community development practice - was taken further by a number of later writings such as In and Against the State and The
Local State . For many CD workers wedded to a neighbourhood approach, this structural analysis was seen either as a betrayal of what they were doing or, even worse, as completely negating their years of hard work on and off housing estates and in inner city areas. This response was, however, a misreading of the
CDP’s writings and of CDP workers’ own practice. Virtually every one of the total of 100+ workers on the local CDP projects was engaged in some form of neighbourhood work: their point was that without an understanding of the structural causes of decline, neighbourhood work could be misdirected and ineffective. They argued instead for the need for alliances, across

neighbourhoods, between community activists and trades unions, between women’s groups and what had historically been male-dominated organisations, and across ethnic divides, in order to develop effective political action at local level, a need which remains as strong today. It was, hardly surprisingly, scarcely popular with government. Equally unsurprisingly, government never again embarked on national programmes of well-funded CD giving project workers such a degree of autonomy, without, as with the New Labour New Deal for
Communities (NDC) programme, having a substantial degree of control over local projects if and when ‘the natives became restless’.
This analysis, whilst limited in some respects, should continue to influence practice at a time when public expenditure cuts of an unprecedented nature are being proposed, when government now uses the term ‘community development’ to badge a range of activities which have little to do with the empowerment of local communities. CD, as its history shows, has always had an ambiguous nature. Properly focused and resourced CD can make a vital contribution to informing ongoing arguments about purposes and values, which keeps its practice sharp and relevant to changing policy contexts. Conversely, beware the government-funded Greeks bearing gifts.
CD now is not only a practice, involving skills, a knowledge base, and a strong value base. It is also politically a goal, self-evidently the socially just development of communities; this overarching goal should override the different interests at work in defining what this is all about and why it matters. There has never, in truth, been a ‘golden age’ of CD although there have been times when practice has been less pressured by ideological confusion – as it is now - to clarify its boundaries. It is thus perhaps better to see CD as an ‘embodied argument’, a continuing search for new forms of social and political expression, within a participatory paradigm, in the light of new forms of political and social control. But we must understand that CD fundamentally is not a neutral intervention but ideologically contested.
One critical problem for CD practice has been that those writing about – and practising - CD have struggled over the past fifty years even to define what
‘community’ means in practice. Paradoxically, whilst these debates continue, the context of CD practice has also changed in part to reflect these differing understandings, whether of national or transnational geography, identity or issue.
One example of this confusion was the New Labour view of community, a communitarianinspired view characterised by ‘conformity, conditionality and moral prescription’, driven by top-down policy solutions rather than through democratic dialogue from within communities themselves. Government
– learning from the experience of CDP – hasn’t responded to agendas set from below, or allowed political space for alternative explanations of inner city decline and poverty but shaped policy programmes from above, for (rather than with ) communities. This has enormous implications for CD practice since it effectively

places government-sponsored CD in collision with the value base of CD as historically understood by those practising it.
The concept of CD has itself therefore been used
– or abused - to cover a range of differing understandings of practice and outcome. In the late 1980s/early
1990s, many governments a nd international organisations ‘re-discovered’ CD, whilst not labelling it as such. The World Bank viewed community participation as a means for ensuring that Third World Development projects ‘reached the poorest in the most efficient and cost-effective way, sharing costs as well as benefits, through the promotion of selfhelp’. Their programmes, better known for fiscal conservatism than for political and social risk-taking, frequently led, however, to the undermining of local community social and economic structures whilst appearing to advocate the importance of ‘community’. Does this sound familiar in the present context? The UN Development Programme commented that it had ‘people’s participation as its special focus.’ These international agencies and national governments, driving the process of structural adjustment, too often failed to give effective attention to social justice. For example they demonstrated little concern with the dignity and humanity of the poorest, with their right to participate in decisions which affect them or with mutuality and equality, principles which underpin the philosophy and practice of CD as understood by practice-based organisations such as CDX, FCDL and the IACD.
These contested understandings represent one of the dominant and continuing themes in the history of UKCD. Nevertheless, attempts continue to be made to defend CD practice from the linguistic and ideological confusion surrounding it.
For example, see the wide-ranging definition of CD – later known as the
Budapest Declaration - agreed at a conference convened in 2004 by a group of
CD organisations from thirty countries. At the same time, contradictory messages from government continue to be reflected in present debates. The official document sponsored by New Labour ’s Department of Communities and Local
Government, The Community Development Challenge is a prominent example: it sets out a vision apparently agreed both by the DCLG and by representatives of national CD organisations which flies in the face of actual government practice.
The implied warm consensus is however contradicted by governments’ past record; so, on those few occasions that government directly funded major CD programmes, it rapidly moved to control or even close them down, once the challenges posed by community empowerment became apparent. Look for example at the NDC, New Labour’s flagship programmes, where communities were allegedly to be empowered to take more control of the processes and policies affecting them. The literature emerging from this heavily funded programme suggests that, despite a stated objective of ‘putting the community
“at the heart” of the initiative’, in those cases where communities have organised to demand greater control of policy and strategies affecting their communities, pressure has been brought to bear for them to stay ‘on message’; at the same time, a ‘bottom-up’ approach was undermined by monitoring and measuring requirements which crowded out the ‘community’ contribution. Such

programmes were increasingly managed fr om the ‘top-down’ with financial management in particular ensuring that local community voices were marginalised. This highlights the contradictions inherent in the role of the community worker, expected to support communities to have an autonomous voice even where that voice may articulate messages unwelcome to those with formal authority.
The state’s relationship with CD has always been an ambiguous one. During the early 1980s, largely as a result of Thatcherite policies, the occupation of CD was put under severe pressure and the number of professional CD workers appears to have reduced substantially. The picture was, however, increasingly confused as many posts
– including within local authorities - were created which had the term ‘community’ in their title, a substantial number of them being short-term poorlypaid jobs within the growing ‘makework’ sector funded by organisations such as the Manpower Services Commission. One response from within CD, was for community workers to pursue the values and practice of CD from within other organisational and occupational settings. This undoubtedly contributed strongly within these other settings to a growing awareness of ways in which CD approach might inform better practice, particularly where there was a genuine desire to involve local communities in shaping policy formation and service delivery. At the same time, many local authorities became interested in the potential of CD to help manage their local difficulties, as indeed, later on did the
NHS and other organisations. Paul Waddington at the time noted however that the state would always need community workers, or someone like them, to help manage the tensions inherent in society
– or more properly – in the most deprived or politically least manageable
– areas. Maybe this is where Cameron’s community organisers will come to be seen as maintaining this tradition.
However, locally-funded CD has also been equally a site of contestation over values, methods and goals. This also caused continuing confusion about the goals of CD as the term ‘community’ became attached to a huge variety of jobs, many of which have turned out to have had little to do with the values of community development.
In recent years, community work has grown again as a profession, measured by the number of workers with this kind of designation for their role. This was a consequence in part of apparently increased governmental commitment
– albeit, restricted in the pursuit of top –down agendas and at most times rather shallow – to the values of participation and empowerment. ‘Community’ is everywhere used now badge to give political legitimacy to programmes but as one commentator warned many years ago, it is often no more than a ‘spray-on additive’ with little political or financial substance underpinning it. As Marj Mayo has noted, although spaces have been opened up for community activists to become more engaged as a result of investment in these various ‘community development’ programmes, there remain, at best, ambiguities and contradictions about the values and motives actually underpinning the community programmes, particularly those sponsored by the state, targeted on their communities. The consensus within government is, increasingly, not about neighbourhood

democracy but neighbourhood management, perhaps most obvious in the New
Labour emphasis on community cohesion – seemingly continued by the 2010
Coalition Government - which seeks to manage those communities creating the greatest difficulties for government in the recent past. This emphasis is used to obscure the structural causes of poverty and deprivation, especially amongst minority communities: the issue of deprivation has effectively become racialised
Faced recently with an apparently recent huge rise in the number of CD workers, it is clearly important to understand what is going on. Glen et al.
’s (2004) survey collected data from 3,000 (self-defined) community workers. The Community
Development Challenge , suggested that there might be as many as 20,000 community workers in the UK including many who use CD approaches as part of another job. This figure raises other troubling questions about present CD practice, questions which seem unlikely to be resolved by the Coalition
Government’s call for a new cadre of community organisers to be created. These issues include the short-term nature of many posts, the low salaries and status attached to them, the lack of training of many community workers, and the fact that almost one-third of workers were supervised by someone with no experience in community work. Analysis of the CDX survey data also suggested a considerable anxiety within the profession that a quarter of all community workers were appointed to posts where neither experience, qualifications nor training were required. The sustainability of community development at project level and as a profession remained then and now a major concern. So too does the extent to which CD values are not incorporated into the mainstream thinking of employing organisations. In short, CD can be picked up and dropped as political mood takes governments and, when used by government, is structured in such a way that it supports its own wider political, social and economic goals rather than allowing the voice of local deprived communities to influence policy development. Thus a ‘community’ approach in adult education might be used by government to enhance employability in the context of a lowwage ‘flexible’ labour market, rather than education being seen as a liberational tool in the tradition of Freire. This changing picture was captured by Pitchford in his interviews with community workers, comparing practice in the 1970s with that of the 2000s, where ‘community development [was felt to have] moved away from, what were felt by many to be idealistic goals in the 1970s of reducing poverty and inequalities … [and] … replaced by a more ‘realistic’ focus on involvement within participation structures to influence the quality and delivery of public services.
Many of these issues about CD as a profession were reflected again in the 2009
CDF survey of workers.
This all suggests considerable and probably increasing confusion about the tasks facing community development, also reflected within contemporary discussion, creating a potential dilution in the professional/occupational focus of CD. The ageing of the CD profession was another area of emergent concern. Those with training and qualifications appeared to be those at the older end of the age spectrum suggesting that many of those coming into new and short-term posts

have no particular occupational or training commitment to professional CD.
Compared with the 1970s, there is now little formal training for CD, a disturbing situation at a time when there may be a new ‘wave’ of people described as community workers let loose in ‘the community’. On the other hand, a variety of innovative schemes have been developed for training and learning for both activists and paid workers.
The issue of the effectiveness of CD is also one which is increasingly reflected in recent literature. This emphases process and outcome in strong distinction to the
Treasury-inspired focus on numerical inputs and outputs; the latter remained prominent in the NDC where the final evaluation noted that ‘it has sometimes been difficult for NDC partnerships to balance the desire to involve local residents with the need to meet milestones and delivery targets.’ The NDC evaluation also observed that communities tended to be the site of contestation as much as consensus, again an insight derived from many earlier years of CD theory and practice.
A strong theoretical base is important for preserving the distinctive identity of community development; yet there remains a relative paucity of theoretical material about UK CD and this weakens its ability to dev elop a strong ‘race’ or gender analysis, for example. Increasing attention needs to be focussed on work with specific population groups such as Black and Minority communities as the population of the UK becomes increasingly diverse and, in some cities, ‘superdiverse’. This is a need also highlighted by the growth of social movements from the 1990s, based far more on autonomous collective action than on the interventions of paid workers.
The need for a clear analysis of what CD is about is even more considerable at a time when its theory, values and practice are in danger of becoming ever more compromised. In the context again of significant public expenditure cuts, CD risks becoming enmeshed in strategies to manage the growing shortfall in public service provision – inviting communities to participate in ‘pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps’. We need to focus in particular the gap between rhetoric and reality, basing an analysis on values. The context for this talk is one where
CD has moved in and out of fashion, has been promoted or undermined by the actions of successive governments, whilst found seemingly in a wide variety of organisational contexts, remaining the subject of increasingly confused debates about its ‘true’ meaning, yet apparently enjoying something of a revival. We need to be clear about the reasons for these contradictions particularly perhaps providing guidance for new recruits to the profession in what is increasingly a bewildering time.
There are continuities in these debates – most of all about the ambivalent and frequently hostile relationship between community development and the state, and the latter’s attempt to use CD as a tool to ‘manage’ urban deprivation and dissent; about the parameters of practice and the boundaries between that

practice and related activities such as self-help; the need carefully to interrogate the language of community initiatives to ensure that CD values are adhered to; and key changes – in status, in policy context, in the availability of literature, in the changing ‘ownership’ of community development, public understanding of its role, and in the freedom to act, which characterise the development of CD practice over the past sixty years.
New contexts for CD are bound to emerge in the next years, particularly perhaps in relation to the environment, work in rural communities and perhaps in relation to faith-based communities. Faith-based organisations in general have made an increasingly important contribution to CD work in the past years, a trend highlighted in a recent book on migrant workers in London which shows how newly-arriving migrants tend to gravitate more to faith-based groups rather than to political parties, trades unions and to community groups, as their post-war ancestors would have done. More work needs to be done on asset-based community development, and to sharpen up on questions of ethics. In the next years, we will all doubtless also identify work reflecting different understandings of community in a globalised world, new sites of struggle, new issues to be addressed.
At an historic moment in UK political life, one which might represent a key milestone in the history of British CD, with a radical Coalition Government embarking on a series of policies which may indeed change the face of the country if carried through, it is foolish to predict where CD may be going.
However, if we learn anything from its history, it is of a practice which reflects a commitment to the need for ordinary people to have more control over the policies and services which affect their lives, in ways which are more rooted in their own experience and expertise than simply through the mediation of an increasingly distant, unresponsive and corrupt parliamentary system
– and which will continue to adapt to the changing political climate in which it operates – whilst retaining and reviewing those values that support a process of real empowerment in the pursuit of social justice.