Challenges and Paradoxes in Community Development

This essay discusses the challenges and paradoxes faced by community practitioners in developing communities. It covers topics such as social change, power relations, and social cohesion.

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Essay writing
Essay
6/12/2018
Student Name

1 | P a g e Essay writing
The development of the community is important for the growth of the country. Development
of Community is a long-term value-based approach which aims to address the imbalance in
power and bring about the changes found in the social equality, justice, and inclusion of the
society. People living in the community acts on the influencing the policies affecting society
and people living there with varied culture. This process encourages the individual personally
to collaborate and identify the demands and needs. However, there are several problems in
every country but the community is the one who fights with that and gets a solution for the
same. For one community development is locally based and yet part of national
programming. For another, while community development workers include the topics of
social change, power relation configuration, social cohesion (Meier 2012, 28).
The developer of the community is usually affected by the individuals who want wants to
enhance their own lives, communities and society as a whole. There are many paradoxes and
challenges faced by the community practitioners. These paradoxes and dilemmas create
numerous difficulties. One of the difficulties is that the outcome may not be known in
advance. The activity done by the individual will affect the society in such a way which is not
known in advance to anyone. This means that we may not have made the right observations
or measurements at the beginning of the service process to know whether there is any change
in the course of the delivery of service or development of community (Fenwick, Nerland and
Jensen 2012, 13).
The specific outcomes which the community wants to achieve may differ in the values the
community holds. All communities have different values based on the different culture taught
to them. These different values can lead to the different judgments about the specific
outcomes to be achieved. The community developer or practitioner thought to do the same in
all the area but it cannot be possible to do so as there are different cultures and values are
there.

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Other paradoxes that the practitioners are facing are the issue relating to the attitude of the
individual. The attitude and beliefs of the individual in the community are also one of the
paradox and challenge in developing the community as a whole. The basic problem lies with
that if community developer wants to solve the problem of the society other problem will
raise without solving the one issue. The community developer tries to solve the problem
related to the society, economy and political issues lie in the community. These problems can
be faced by anyone in the society due to vicious circle followed in the community (Matarrita,
David and Brennan 2012, 305).
The challenges faced in the developing a community is the integration of activities and
human beings in the society. Settlements in the human beings are the areas of inequality,
segregation and exclusion. Despite the government best efforts, the housing and service
interventions for the poor have been continued to the form the legacy in the country
(Schneider, Rasband, and Eliceiri 2012, 671).
The needs and wants of the individual in the society are different according to their own
needs and requirements, so it will become too difficult for the practitioner to sustain the
community for a long period of time. For example, a person wants to develop a garden for the
children to play and grow whereas the other practitioners may recommend having a hospital
in that area so that the maximum people can get the treatment there. So this is the paradox,
the society and community is facing (Christens 2012, 554)
The requirement of both the things have equal importance in their place but deciding which
thing to implement is difficult. This is a real challenge in the society to do and perform.
Another paradox which can be understands through example that it is difficult to show the
cause and effect relationship between the families, friends, neighbourhood, work teams and
communities. The balance between the work life and social life is impossible to do. It is

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impossible to judge whether the client is getting the outcome because of service, or because
of the support of the family members or it is a support from neighbours (Muthuri, Moon and
Idemudia 2012, 381).
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that developing the community is a challenge
as well as a paradox for the practitioners who try to develop the society. The developing of
community is a long-term concept which cannot be completed anytime by any individual as it
is a never-ending circle. The development of society and community is done and had the real
positive impact or negative impacts too. It will depend on the nature and way of
understanding the change in the society by the developer. The community developer is
regularly confronted by the paradoxes and challenges and it will remain the same.

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Reference
Christens, Brian D. 2012. "Targeting empowerment in community development: A
community psychology approach to enhancing local power and well-
being." Community Development Journal 47(4): 538-554.
Fenwick, Tara, Monika Nerland, and Karen Jensen. 2012. "Sociomaterial approaches to
conceptualising professional learning and practice." Journal of education and
work 25(1): 1-13.
Matarrita-Cascante, David, and Mark A. Brennan. 2012 "Conceptualizing community
development in the twenty-first century." Community Development 43(3): 293-305.
Meier, Ken. 2012. "Community college mission in historical perspective." In Understanding
community colleges, pp. 23-38. Oxon: Routledge.
Muthuri, Judy N., Jeremy Moon, and Uwafiokun Idemudia. 2012. "Corporate innovation and
sustainable community development in developing countries." Business &
Society 51(3): 355-381.
Schneider, Caroline A., Wayne S. Rasband, and Kevin W. Eliceiri. 2012. "NIH Image to
ImageJ: 25 years of image analysis." Nature methods 9(7): 671.