Community Essay: Exploring Perspectives, Challenges, and Youth Role

This essay critically examines the concept of community, drawing on learning, personal reflection, and the author's experiences. It begins by defining community from a systems perspective, highlighting its various components and functions, using examples like transportation, education, and healthcare. The essay emphasizes the crucial role of youth in shaping the future of the community, referencing the Albemarle report's focus on youth services. It contrasts past and present community structures, noting the impact of social changes like family mobility and media exposure on community life, and discusses key activities in community development such as association, training, and challenges. The author explores Bauman's perspective on community, emphasizing the importance of responsibility and security, while also addressing the challenges of commercial interests, social discrimination, and the need for reformation, particularly in youth services. The essay concludes by underscoring the individual and stakeholder responsibilities in community development, particularly the role of youth, policymakers, and various institutions in fostering a better future. The essay also includes references to support the arguments made.

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25 Feb 2019
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Based on the learning, the system perspective definition of community states that it comprises of
various parts having specialized functions, interest, operating responsibilities with certain
liabilities to meet the community requirement. To explain this, example can be considered from
routine life such as transportation facility aims to moving people and products, school provides
education, employment at enterprise focuses on economics, and healthcare agencies allied
services for betterment of life. Within the community, parents and families play a crucial role in
navigating the learning and implementation of suitable culture for lifelong conducts. Youth in
this context is considered as the most important face that shapes the future of community. The
reason is linked to the fact that youth acquire competencies, values, social skills, and attitude that
will carry forward for successful adult and community process.
In the discussion of civil society, the Albemarle report focuses on the youth services in England
and Wales (Edwards, 2005). It is learned that in past, neighborhoods, schools and policy
developers have extended and enhanced their focus for the positive development and support of
young people. This includes policy measures that can take responsibility for safety, wellbeing,
and guidance in positive direction. In contrary, the social forces have changed the landscape of
community life and expectations for youth, which weakened the informal community support.
For example, high rate of family mobility, increased anonymity among neighborhood, extended
heterogeneous culture at school and office, and extensive exposure of media. The negative
consequences on the community life, from this perspective, can be found from increased
involvement in violence, high crime rate, extensive abuse of drugs and alcohol, poverty, and
disorganization among neighborhood. Overall, the concern of several nations in the present
decade is now focusing on raising community generation that contain responsible adults, skilled
and competent people, and worthy opinion towards life.
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The service consideration for the community development aims at three key activities which
includes: association, training, and challenge. Within the scope of association, the community
members must be encouraged to come into groups. They have the responsibility of specific tasks,
and the choice will be of individual interest. In the community structure, the counseling
opportunity should be provided at school level that can meet the basic problems of life. For
instance the educational support such as ethical values, sexual education, learning and adopting
competencies, and adjustment to the world of work must be supported at school level.
Furthermore, the neighborhood responsibility is to provide association in relation to marriage,
homemaking, and full adult responsibility. The overall benefit of these measures is that it will
provide a sense of discipline and responsibilities which in turn can fulfill the community
requirements. The scope of training, is to provide suggestions and instructions, coaching for
specific activities, and demonstrating the improvement for requisite competencies. These
measures are also aimed to fulfil the objective community needs and responsibilities. Note that,
these specifications also includes the preparation for adult life such as anticipation for
community needs, requirement of communication skills, persuasion for betterment of life, social
provision for maintaining public affairs, and employment. Lastly, the scope of challenges include
sympathetic encouragement of community members to capture their enthusiasm and shoot
optimum development with respect to quality of mind and body.
In my opinion, the present structure of community is containing varieties of differences than that
of the past. For example, new schools and housing include standard of physical provision,
television play a key role in accustoming and attracting people to their surroundings, and a
majority of commercial interest recognizes the attraction of community members. The argument
nowadays are not focusing on building strong relationship and aligning the liberal attitude
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toward the well-being of community; rather it was focusing on acquiring expensive materials and
aligning to commercial taste, in competition to each other. In this context, the reformation is
required in the direction of “developing youth service council”. The objective here should be
focused on developing values and principles among the youth such that the future of community
can have high level of integrity, prosperity, and good will for the betterment of life.
According to the author Bauman (2013), community is defined as a term that can return a
positive feeling with reference to “having a community”, “to be in a community”, and “for a
community”. The community gives a positive return because of the feelings and pleasure
contained within. However according to the author, community members are pleased with
respect to, not the kind of pleasure they are having, but because of the experience of missing
certain portion of pleasure from life. In my opinion, community is the platform that helps the life
to adopt culture, learn from their surroundings, and implement those learnings with
responsibilities and activities. With the development of technology and science, life today is
becoming more artificial. The reason is associated with the luxury and desire of achievement,
which also brings negative emotion, hatred, revenge, and ultimately leading to various sorts of
danger. In brief, this can also be referred as loss of paradise; however the community life is still
hoping to find feverish ways of attainment for “Life Paradise”. As discussed in the previous
section, community Life require association, training, and challenges. This also suggested that
there is a price to be paid, in conjunction for the privilege of being within community.
Considering the previous philosophy, the community gives a sense of responsibilities such that
the youth can attain competency and contribute to the development of society. In this manner,
the community promises for security. However, in the present time, there exist competition for
commercial interest, success desire due to low space availability of opportunities and high
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population factor, and social discriminations as well as challenges such as abuse and violence.
Ultimately these factors deprive us of freedom as well as right of being yourself. Note that
security and freedom are two important criteria that have high values to be balanced and
reconcile for the betterment of community. In my opinion, it is difficult for separating the
community life and individual perspective, thereby separating the opportunities as well as
hurdles of life. The best possible option here is to stock for the existing opportunities and
overcoming the challenges by learning from previous errors and mistakes.
In addition to this, it is also worth to argue that the development of community lies within the
hand of individuals as well as the stakeholders having the responsibility for promoting.
Particularly, the youth and associated service should be responsible for people of all age groups
and their requirements. Government, policy makers, and community activities must use their
power in appropriate direction to avoid discrimination, providing equal opportunities, and
investing in social issues. Similarly the local authorities responsible for education, healthcare,
financial services, and other voluntary institutions must contribute according to their level for the
betterment of society.
In summary, this essay critically explores the concept of community that was learned and
compared with the self-reflection. Additionally, the ideas about community were related and
resonated to personal experience, where arguments are provided from past and current structure
of community. The content not only focus is on the individual requirements and responsibilities
but also illustrate the role of policymakers administrative authority to the concept of community.
Overall, it is learned that youth have the key responsibility to shape the community, overcome
the existing challenges and building a suitable future perspective.
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References:
Bauman, Z. (2013). Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. John Wiley & Sons.
Edwards, M. (2005). Civil Society-the encyclopedia of informal education.
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