Understanding Community Challenges, Common Topics, and Concepts for Your Locale

Published: June 16, 2023

Community volunteer work, and even serving as an elected official, can be incredibly satisfying or intensely frustrating. To increase your chances of rewarding participation, you will need to learn about selected challenges, common topic, and concepts that are relevant to the particular situation of your neighborhood or town.

This division of the website is huge, but I know that most of you will only need to know a fraction of this material.  I have tried to organize it so you can pick and choose.  Just do not underestimate how much you need to know to be a wise leader in your community.

two women at community meeting

Not everyone needs to understand the following subject matter areas, but if you do, just below are the photo links to the entry pages for economic development, redevelopment, crime prevention, sprawl, sustainability on this website. These might be related to either your challenges or your strengths. 

I decided to keep the sustainability topics section very brief, not out of any disregard for the importance of this subject matter for interested neighborhoods, but simply because there is so much good information available that motivated communities will find plenty of general material.

Topics in This Section: Economic Development -- Crime Prevention -- Sustainability Issues for Neighborhoods -- Redevelopment -- Impact of Sprawl -- Definition of Community Development -- Purpose of Community Development -- Community Development Principles -- Racial Equity and Community Development -- Public Health and Community Development -- Regenerative Design -- Ask a Question or See Answers About Planning and Community Development Terms 

crime prevention 150Crime Prevention
redev 2 150Redevelopment
new economic dev 150Economic Development
sustainable dev practices 2 150Sustainability Topics
sub sprawl 2 150Suburban Sprawl

Now for Some Concepts You May Need to Absorb

If you are to avoid demoralizing blunders and see the greatest possible gains in return for your hard work in the community, you might need to master some or most of the concepts described below.  Unlike the heading just above,  these big concepts are standalone pages. 

Some of you may not be accustomed to the term community development. Well, as a spoiler alert, if you were to open the page shown below as "definition of community development," you would find that my definition is expansive to say the least. So if you find the language offputting, just substitute whatever term feels comfortable for you.  

One other note is that under the Planning and Community Development Terms item, where we invite you the reader to ask a question about a term you encounter that you don't understand, you are going to find people asking about both big ideas and smaller concepts and programs, as well as some acronyms. All this is welcome.

But since we have some  big ideas sandwiched among others,  it may take a while to digest all of this.  Give yourself that permission.

def of CD 2 150Definition of Community Development
purpose of CD 3 150Purpose of Community Development
community dev principles water towerCommunity Development Principles
racial equity 150Racial Equity and Community Development
public health and CD 150Public Health and Community Development
regenerative design 150Regenerative Design
planning terms 2 150Planning and Community Development Terms
  1. Community Development
    2.  › Community Challenges, Common Topics & Concept

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