Social Service Worker

social service worker, social services, human services, social work

Community Development Requires Research

Successful community programs are developed based on understanding the community first. As a community developer, you research the community's strengths and weaknesses, identify the opportunities and threats, and develop programs and projects based on your research analysis.

Using a research-based approach in community development is critical for success.

What will you be researching?

  • the community: describing the features (physical, man-made) and infrastructure
  • the population and demographics: describing age groups, income, education, employment
  • the services or assets: agencies, organizations, non-profits, government services
  • the issue: research studies, social policy, government direction
  • the funding opportunities: where will the $$ come from

What knowledge, skills, and abilities do you need?

  • critical thinking
  • creativity
  • persuasive
  • evaluation
  • communication
  • persistence

 

Approaches to Community Development

The preferred approach to community development is to research and create the community profile that you evaluate to identify the gap or opportunity.

Flowchart of community development research. Researching strengths (assets) & weaknesses (gaps) first

More commonly, you know about multiple needs. You research those needs by developing a community profile and select the need that you can develop a project or program to support.

Flowchart how research commonly done. Know about multiple needs and then choose 1

Additional Resources for Community Development


Do you need to consider the UN's Sustainable Development Goals? Looking for additional research? Review the targets, indicators, and main thrust of the goal to develop search terms.

Presenting the PechaKucha Way

PechaKucha is a presentation that is almost entirely image based.

It is based on 20 slides each displayed for 20 seconds - 20 X 20.

Check out this page on presentations for tips on preparing, image sources, and more.

Here are a couple of sites that describe this presentation style and give you lots of examples to view.

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