Last week, I blogged, “Community development precedes economic development.” Thanks for the positive feedback on that idea. But that sentence raises another question for some of you:

What is community development?

There really isn’t an easy answer to that question. There are many definitions of community development (CD).

The United Nationals has offered a succinct, practical definition. It lacks the nuance of other definitions but gets to the heart of the matter:

A process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems.

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offers a slightly more specific definition:

Community development activities build stronger and more resilient communities through an ongoing process of identifying and addressing needs, assets, and priority investments.

The National Association for Community Development Extension Professionals (NACDEP) that debated the definition of CD for two years before, in 2017, endorsing a global definition of community development presented by the International Association for Community Development (IACD) in 2016 and supported by the Community Development Society (CDS), which has since adopted a different description of community development and its principles.

The definition is not perfect and it is fairly academic, but I’d argue it is an appropriate approximation of our work as community development professionals.

Global Definition of Community Development:

Community development is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, equality, economic opportunity and social justice, through the organization, education and empowerment of people within their communities, whether these be of locality, identity or interest, in urban and rural settings.

The NACDEP committee included a statement clarifying what Extension community development professionals do, and that statement fits well with the UN definition.

Statement of Extension professionals’ role in community development:

Community Resources & Economic Development (CRED) Extension Professionals work WITH communities to support activities that encourage broad participation and result in social, environmental, and/or economic improvement as defined by the community.

Thinking about the idea of community development preceding economic development, the next logical question is probably, “What is economic development?” Or leadership development? Or Civic engagement? There are definitions of each of those topics, certainly. Whether you consider them separate spheres from community development or subsets of an overarching CD framework probably depends on your framework for engaging in these topics and local needs.

The U.N. and HUD definitions of community development made no mention of the economy (and only a tangential reference to leadership). Economic development is often defined in relationship to nations, especially “under-developed nations.” It is possible to completely separate economic development from community development—but it is not possible to divorce economic development from CD within Extension’s CD framework.

Extension economic development is really Community Economic Development (CED). (Conveniently, my title is actually Associate Professor & Extension Economist – Community Economic Development, which represents what my colleagues and I do).

Blakely and Milano define Community Economic Development and provide some context:

“Community economic development is a branch of local economic development. Community economic development is based on two essential notions. First, the community or neighborhood should be the focal point for developing human, social, and physical resources. Second, the indigenous resources, particularly human and organizational, must be the base for any development activity. In the community, economic development the idea is to build new wealth from the basic local resources by repositioning these assets as attractors of capital. This can be accomplished by re-using local building to incubate local artists and entrepreneurs and other related strategies that restore pride and give local people more economic power to control their own economic destiny.” – E.J. Blakely, R.J. Milano, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

There are clear parallels to the statement of Extension professionals’ role in the Blakely and Milano definition of CED. This CED definition, along with the global CD definition, also demonstrates why community development needs to precede economic development. Community economic development is intertwined with the development of local leadership, government capacity, placemaking, and other aspects of CD.