Social enterprises in rural community development

Social enterprises are hybrid organizational forms that combine characteristics of for-profit businesses and community sector organizations. This article explores how rural communities may use social enterprises to progress local development agendas across both economic and social domains. Drawing on qualitative case studies of three social enterprises in rural North West Tasmania, this article explores the role of social enterprises in local development processes. The case study social enterprises, despite differences in size, structure, mission and age, are strongly embedded in their local places and local communities. As deeply contextualized development actors, these social enterprises mobilize multiple resources and assets to achieve a range of local development outcomes, including but not limited to social capital

Circles of care : should community development redefine the practice of palliative care?

Specialist palliative care, within hospices in particular, has historically led and set the standard for caring for patients at end of life. The focus of this care has been mostly for patients with cancer. More recently, health and social care services have been developing equality of care for all patients approaching end of life. This has mostly been done in the context of a service delivery approach to care whereby services have become increasingly expert in identifying health and social care need and meeting this need with professional services. This model of patient centred care, with the impeccable assessment and treatment of physical, social, psychological and spiritual need, predominantly worked very well for the latter part of the 20th century. Over the last 13 years, however, there have been several international examples of community development approaches to end of life care. The patient centred model of care has limitations when there is a fundamental lack of integrated community policy, development and resourcing. Within this article, we propose a model of care which identifies a person with an illness at the centre of a network which includes inner and outer networks, communities and service delivery organisations. All of these are underpinned by policy development, supporting the overall structure. Adoption of this model would allow individuals, communities, service delivery organisations and policy makers to work together to provide end of life care that enhances value and meaning for people at end of life, both patients and communities alike.

DIY media architecture: Open and participatory approaches to community engagement

Media architecture’s combination of the digital and the physical can trigger, enhance, and amplify urban experiences. In this paper, we examine how to bring about and foster more open and participatory approaches to engage communities through media architecture by identifying novel ways to put some of the creative process into the hands of laypeople. We review technical, spatial, and social aspects of DIY phenomena with a view to better understand maker cultures, communities, and practices. We synthesise our findings and ask if and how media architects as a community of practice can encourage the ‘open-sourcing’ of information and tools allowing laypeople to not only participate but become active instigators of change in their own right. We argue that enabling true DIY practices in media architecture may increase citizen control. Seeking design strategies that foster DIY approaches, we propose five areas for further work and investigation. The paper begs many questions indicating ample room for further research into DIY Media Architecture.

Locating Indigenous Australia within community development practice : clients, consumers or change makers?

The philosophical promise of community development to “resource and empower people so that they can collectively control their own destinies” (Kenny 1996:104) is no doubt alluring to Indigenous Australia. Given the historical and contemporary experiences of colonial control and surveillance of Aboriginal bodies, alongside the continuing experiences of socio-economic disadvantage, community development reaffirms the aspirational goal of Indigenous Australians for self-determination. Self-determination as a national policy agenda for Indigenous Australians emerged in the 1970s and saw the establishment of a wide range of Aboriginal community-controlled services (Tsey et al 2012). Sullivan (2010:4) argues that the Aboriginal community controlled service sector during this time has, and continues to be, instrumental to advancing the plight of Indigenous Australians both materially and politically. Yet community development and self-determination remain highly problematic and contested in how they manifest in Indigenous social policy agendas and in practice (Hollinsworth 1996; Martin 2003; McCausland 2005; Moreton-Robinson 2009). Moreton-Robinson (2009:68) argues that a central theme underpinning these tensions is a reading of Indigeneity in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, behaviours, cultures, and communities are pathologised as “dysfunctional” thus enabling assertions that Indigenous people are incapable of managing their own affairs. This discourse distracts us from the “strategies and tactics of patriarchal white sovereignty” that inhibit the “state’s earlier policy of self-determination” (Moreton-Robinson 2009:68). We acknowledge the irony of community development espoused by Ramirez above (1990), that the least resourced are expected to be most resourceful.; however, we wish to interrogate the processes that inhibit Indigenous participation and control of our own affairs rather than further interrogate Aboriginal minds as uneducated, incapable and/or impaired...

Community development and community resilience: An integrative approach

Throughout history, communities and civilizations have sought to enhance the quality of community life and the well-being of its people. However, more recently there has been greater interest in attending to the details of community development by capitalizing on the improved ability to capture community well-being and successes scientifically. That interest invites greater attention to the development of indicators that can quantify those qualities of life that lead to strong and healthy communities. The selection of meaningful indicators is dependent upon several factors including a process that stimulates meaningful involvement of community stakeholders, but the single most important is the identification of an underlying model to guide the work. Indicators do not have meaning in themselves. For these measures to provide a coherent assessment of the community, an integrative approach to understanding what constitutes a healthy and strong community in a dynamic environment is required. A resilience perspective serves that purpose and provides a framework that is broad, neutral, and conceptually strong enough to structure development of significant sets of indicators. Exemplary community indicator processes across the nation, particularly recent efforts in the Phoenix, Arizona region, provide evidence supporting the value of indicator development for community building.

On the tying of aid to tariff reform

This paper considers the welfare effects of foreign aid that is tied to changes in the recipient's tariff. By constructing a three-country model with tariffs, and by allowing for changes both in the amount of aid and in the tariff rates, we are able to consider the welfare implications of two different rules of aid conditionality: (i) a rule which leaves the donor's welfare unchanged, and (ii) a rule which leaves the recipient government's total revenue unchanged. It is shown that the tying of aid to a tariff reform can, inter alia, be used to ensure Pareto improvement.

Prioritization of candidate cancer genes-an aid to oncogenomic studies

The development of techniques for oncogenomic analyses such as array comparative genomic hybridization, messenger RNA expression arrays and mutational screens have come to the fore in modern cancer research. Studies utilizing these techniques are able to highlight panels of genes that are altered in cancer. However, these candidate cancer genes must then be scrutinized to reveal whether they contribute to oncogenesis or are coincidental and non-causative. We present a computational method for the prioritization of candidate (i) proto-oncogenes and (ii) tumour suppressor genes from oncogenomic experiments. We constructed computational classifiers using different combinations of sequence and functional data including sequence conservation, protein domains and interactions, and regulatory data. We found that these classifiers are able to distinguish between known cancer genes and other human genes. Furthermore, the classifiers also discriminate candidate cancer genes from a recent mutational screen from other human genes. We provide a web-based facility through which cancer biologists may access our results and we propose computational cancer gene classification as a useful method of prioritizing candidate cancer genes identified in oncogenomic studies.

The effects of spring-neap tide on the phytoplankton community development in the Jiaozhou Bay, China

The development of the phytoplankton community was studied in the Jiaozhou Bay during the spring to neap tide in August 2001, through three cruises and a 15 d continuous observation. This investigation indicates that diatom cell abundance increased sharply following the end of a spring tide, from 9 cells/cm(3) to a peak of 94 cells/cm(3). The dominant species composition and abundance show a quick species sequence from spring to neap tide, and the dominant species at the start phase is Skeletomena costatum, then changes to Chaetoceros curvisetus, finally it changes to Eucampia zodiacus. Silicate concentration increases during spring tide, as a result of nutrient replenishment from the water-sediment interface, its initial average concentration in neap tide is 1.39 mumol/dm(3) and reached the peak average concentration of 8.40 mumol/dm(3) in spring tide. But the nitrogen concentration dropped due to dilution by the low nitrogen seawater from the Huanghai Sea, its initial average concentration in neap tide is 67 mumol/dm(3) and decreased to the average concentration of 54 mumol/dm(3) in spring tide. The degree of silicon limitation was decreased and phytoplankton, especially diatoms, responds immediately after nutrient replenishment in the water column. Skeletonmea costatum, as one of the dominant species in the Jiaozhou Bay, shows a quicker response to nutrient availability than Eucampia zodiacus and Chaetoceros curvisetus. It is proposed that dominant species composition and water column stability synchronously determine the development of phytoplankton summer blooms in the Raozhou bay.

Towards a person-centred ‘culture’: the use of community development approaches in the Independent Youth Counselling Service in West Belfast

This paper is drawn from a qualitative study of clients, counsellors and the supervisors views of the value and impact of the Independent Youth Counselling Service (IYCS) in West Belfast. Data collection combined semi-structured interviews, focus groups and an open-ended questionnaire. The findings indicate the significance of factors above and beyond the person-centred counselling experience, in maximising the potential for growth and development for clients and counsellors. This holistic approach to counselling service provision employs a body of community development processes, which collectively combine to embed the counselling service in a complementary principled approach. This paper explores how these community development features bolster the counselling experience to promote a culture of person-centeredness, thereby increasing the empowerment of the client.

Housing Rural Communities: Connecting Rural Dwellings to Rural Development in Ireland

This paper explores the interaction between rural development policy and spatial planning policies for rural housing within the context of the island of Ireland. It draws on research commissioned by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive for a high level review of its rural housing policy. The paper highlights issues of wider relevance comprising a strained relationship between rural communities and rural planning, and argues for the adoption of cultural, environmental and community values within the rural planning policy arena.

Civil Society Aid to Post-Communist Countries

A major debate within foreign aid literature is whether civil society can be ‘purchased’ through outside assistance.We test this proposition by exploring the influence of aid provided by the United States Agency for International
Development on post-communist civil rights environments. A review of research critical of international assistance highlights the risk of unsustainability, polarization and dependence among recipient civic organizations.We argue that
a more effective stimulant is socio-economic growth, which stimulates committed constituencies, higher citizen expectations and pressure on the state to protect civil freedoms. Using cross-sectional, time-series data from 27
post-communist countries, we find no evidence that aid independently promotes stronger civil rights environments but that economic growth produces substantial improvements. Further, any aid effectiveness appears to be conditional on economic strength.We conclude that developmental organizations should reassess how and where civil society aid is targeted.

Finance, social economics and community development

The last three decades have seen social enterprises in the United Kingdom pushed to the forefront of welfare delivery, workfare and area-based regeneration. For critics, this is repositioning the sector around a neoliberal politics that privileges marketization, state roll-back and disciplining community groups to become more self-reliant. Successive governments have developed bespoke products, fiscal instruments and intermediaries to enable and extend the social finance market. Such assemblages are critical to roll-out tactics, but they are also necessary and useful for more reformist understandings of economic alterity. The issue is not social finance itself but how it is used, which inevitably entangles social enterprises in a form of legitimation crises between the need to satisfy financial returns and at the same time keep community interests on board. This paper argues that social finance, how it is used, politically domesticated and achieves re-distributional outcomes is a necessary component of counter-hegemonic strategies. Such assemblages are as important to radical community development as they are to neoliberalism and the analysis concludes by highlighting the need to develop a better understanding of finance, the ethics of its use and tactical compromises in scaling it as an alternative to public and private markets.

Community Recreation and Leisure Activities in Adults with Developmental Disabilities who have Recently Relocated to Community-based Residences in Ontario

In 2009, the Ontario Government closed the last three remaining large-scale institutions for people with Developmental Disabilities (DD). The purpose of this study is to examine the community-based recreation and leisure activities of 87 adults with DD who have recently moved into the community. Study 1 provided a descriptive insight into the community recreation and leisure activities, and revealed that people with DD engage in low levels of community activities, however are reported to have the desire to engage more often. Staff reported that people with DD do not have the opportunities to engage in their preferable activities. Study 2 investigated the prbspective predictors of the number and frequency of community, recreation and leisure activities and found that a higher level of functioning predicted a greater number of community activities ([beta] = .26, P < .05), while both a higher level of functioning ([beta] = .38,p < .001) and greater preference ([beta] = .23. p < .05) predicted more frequent access to community activities. Future research and the implications of the findings for clinical practice and policy development were discussed.

museology and community development in the XXI Century

Each time more, museology professionals are confronted with terms such as community, social inequality, social inclusion and development in their quotidian. Be it in conferences, publications or museum programmes, these are increasingly recurrent terms which, in great part, translate the dynamics of a relationship between museology and community development that has been constructed since the late 60’s. Although it is not new, such relationship has gone through a major bloom in the early 90’s and arrives today as an emerging priority within the world of museology. A first glance on the subject reveals that very different approaches and forms of action share the efforts in endowing museology with a role in community development today. In addition, despite of its growing popularity, it seems to be some misunderstandings on what the work with community development requires and truly signifies, as can be pointed out in a number of assertions originated from the field of museology. Accompanying such a plural environment, discussions and disagreements about to what extend museology is able to claim a role in social change also mark its affairs with community development. People are faced, indeed, with a rather polemic and intricate scenario. To a great extend, language barriers hinder the exchange of information on current initiatives and previous experiences, as well as on the development of concepts, approaches and proposals. Lack of better interactions among the groups of museology professionals and social actors who carry out different works with community development also contributes to making the potential of museology as a resource for development more difficult to be visualised.

The Maré Museum: an integrated project of community development

The Maré Museum, founded on 8 May 2006, arose from the desire of the inhabitants of the community to have a place of memory, a place that is immersed in the past and looks to the future, a place that reflects on this community, on their conditions and identities and on their territorial and cultural diversity. The intention of the Maré Museum is to break with the tradition that the experiences to be recollected and the places of memory to be remembered are those elected by the official version, the "winner" version of the story that restricts the representations of history and memory of large portions of the population. The Maré Museum, as a pioneer initiative in the city scene, proposed to expand the museological concept, so that it is not restricted to intellectual social groups and cultural spaces that are not accessible to the general population. The museum has established recognition that the slum is a place of memory and so has initiated a museographic reading of the Mare community. ..