I received an email from Paul King, who had downloaded my ebook, “Community Development is Dead: Long Live Community Development”. See below if you would like to download the ebook. In his email he offers a few reflections on community development in his experience. I reproduce it here with his permission.
Paul King’s E-mail
I downloaded your ebook out of curiosity, because I am engaged both politically and ecclesiastically in forms of community development – though not necessarily along your lines.
When training in 1960/61 to be an education officer in the Colonial Civil Service I was introduced to TR Batten (see the comments), whom you refer to a little. The context then was encouragement and facilitating community development both in rural life based on subsistence farming and in urban areas made up of people who had come to town in search of a better life – sometimes finding it, sometimes not. A grotesque feature of the urban areas was that social welfare was financed in part through profits from ‘beer halls- crude sheds for the dispensing of ‘cibuku’.
Because I was actually appointed to teach French in the country’s leading high school for African men and boys, I did not refer again to Batten.
My second brush with community development was in Stoke on Trent 1970-75 when, as a Methodist minister, I found myself collaborating to some degree with the post-Seebohm social workers and with an over-elaborate good neighbour scheme. This was at the end of the pits and pots culture which has now largely evaporated, I think.
Now, In Chesterfield in retirement I am both Secretary of Christians Together for Chesterfield and Membership officer of the local Liberal Democrats, where the sustaining and fostering of community relations comes under both my hats. Chesterfield is a fairly neighbourly place, dating from the same pits and pots culture of 1970 Stoke, but its bourgeois estates are not strong on community except where a fellow I know in the Libdems is running a Facebook for his estate and has 90 members.
So I am not much use to you, I fear, with your interest more in community development in economic terms. But have you met the Sheffield Local Renewable Energy people? They sound to be barking up the same tree as you.
Why Not Share Your Story?
It’s great to receive emails like this and if you have similar stories to share, please comment on this post. Or if you would like to publish a guest post, to share your story, please let me know.