Neighbourhood Houses in Australia are community place-based organisations that provide education, support services, and develop responses to local issues with local communities. The practices within Neighbourhood Houses are informed by community development. Yet knowledge, understanding and practices of community development vary across the…

Montclair Cares About Schools (MCAS) is a citizen-activist group in Montclair, New Jersey, that used Facebook, emails, and online petitions to inform and organize citizens on local educational policy issues. Emerging in response to a new superintendent's plans to reshape Montclair schools with new teacher evaluations, administrative hires, and…

In this article, we focus on narrative practices in adult education in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), and reflect on a current project in a multicultural neighbourhood that is socially and economically marked by poverty and where turbulence and conflict are rife amongst local inhabitants. While adult education aims to energize the…

Youth occupy a unique place in democratic society. They must primarily rely on others to speak on their behalf as decisions are made about the allocation of resources within and across various youth-serving institutions. Advocacy organizations comprise crucial representational assets for all youth, but America's poorest children and youth…

This report was written out of a recognition that there has been little effort to systematically examine the value to anchor institutions of engaging in significant community investment. In the absence of such research, the authors believe that institutions tend to overestimate the costs and risks and underappreciate the potential benefits. In…

This publication presents in-depth profiles of six high-performing partnerships funded by the Partnership for a Nation of Learners (PNL) and short profiles of the remaining grantees. The partnerships illustrate a range of examples of how museums, libraries, public broadcasters, and other vital community organizations can collaborate to address…

Research at the University of Leeds has evaluated how well changes to healthcare proposed in the Government White Paper "Valuing People" (Department of Health 2001) were being implemented in one locality and their impact on people with learning disabilities. The project had a developmental aspect and incorporated two workshops over the…

Describes the long-term effort to build leadership and strengthen the movement for economic justice. The effort involved working with community organizations and unions already organized around a local issue to link local issues with global economics. The focus on economic justice work led to working with groups that had been marginalized under…

Poverty and unemployment aren't spread evenly across cities or regions, but rather are concentrated in disinvested urban neighborhoods and rural communities around the country. These communities are home to the nation's most vulnerable children and families. Despite some signs of improvement in economic conditions for families in the United…

Discusses various aspects of community work in Australia: national context, consensus politics, early community work, literature and training, current trends in Australian community work, localist programs, and community work politics. (CT)

Results are presented of a survey of 20 community radio organizations operating in Canada. For each of the 20 agencies, information is provided relating to: (1) the name and address of the organization; (2) the name and population of the community served; (3) the station's call letters, frequency, and power; (4) the date of the station's license;…

A political movement which overemphasizes the local community is likely to be counterproductive to progressive social changes. The growth and development of localism, contained in such concepts as community control and self-determination, can lead to intra-neigborhood political battles rather than to organization against wider social forces.…

British local authority and decision making procedures are described for community developers. Included are potential ways of influencing the authority system, and problems and areas of weakness that may be encountered in dealing with the system. (ABM)

Explores possible relationships between the mass media of communication and social problems by three-way comparisons between the incidence of social problems suggested in media portrayals, conceptions of the incidence of these problems held by the public, and the relative frequency of such problems reflected in statistics accumulated by official…

The author examines the process by which the formally-structured outgrowths of social movements become part of local power systems. Although social movements often start out in opposition to local power systems, they sometimes merge with those systems in order to operate effectively and to accomplish significant change in the distribution of…