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 topics, and concepts that are relevant to the particular situation of your neighborhood or town.
This division of the website is huge, but most of you will only need to know a small 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.
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
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.
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