Community development is a structured intervention that gives communities greater control over the conditions that affect their lives. Community development is what every developing country strives for and any country that wants to develop its economy must invest in community development.
Community development works at the level of local groups and organisations rather than with individuals or families. The range of local groups and organisations representing communities at local level constitutes the community sector. "Community development is a skilled process and part of its approach is the belief that communities cannot be helped unless they themselves agree to this process.
Community development has to look both ways: not only at how the community is working at the grass roots, but also at how responsive key institutions are to the needs of local
communities".
A Good community development is an action that helps people to recognise and develop their ability and potential and organise themselves to respond to problems and needs which they share. It supports the establishment of strong communities that control them and use assets to promote social justice and help improve the quality of community life of its people. It also enables community and public agencies to work together to improve the quality of thier government.
The youths are the driving force of development in any developing country, because they are easily influenced by external factors and western civilization. And so they are major stakeholders in driving developmental goals. Youths they say, are the leaders of tomorrow, and so they are the driving force of any social change.
There are several ways through which youths can contribute to the development of their various communities. For youths to lead community development, they have to;
§ First lead themselves; that is having the right orientation about the community and about leadership and taking responsibility for their actions. Youth leadership development pathways can contribute to efforts to push the youth development field to incorporate social-justice based values into its vision for youths and communities.
§ Develop soft and professional skills that will push them into the field to integrate new kinds of skills and preparation to fit into the existing frameworks to provide youths with the tools that they need to transform youth-serving systems and societal institutions, and to address inequity. This will also put them on the platform to compete healthily.
§ They have to embrace knowledge and adopt new views and practices concerning youths and the role they play.
§ Respect and preserve the values upon which the community was founded.
§ They have to seek wisdom from the founders of the community to achieve this.
Youths have to be integrated into the community's priority setting, problem solving, and decision making. More leadership roles for youth within the field is central not just to creating quality programs, settings, systems, and community, but a society that truely values and invests in young people. Without youth participation and leadership, we cannot achieve good outcomes for all young people.
There are serious issues we need to address: the achievement gap, criminal activities among young people, obesity, increasing poverty, and reduced local, state, and national budgets. In this time of scarce resources and growing challenges, it is ever more critical to allocate resources towards not just youth development, but specifically youth leadership development and to ensure that we are targeting those resources towards youths from communities where these resources are sorely needed.
Additionally, practitioners working on the Inside and Outside must begin dialogues and identify places where their agenda overlap, rather than compete. These conversations will surely reveal common goals and produce new and creative strategies to strengthen our efforts to transform youth-serving institutions, programs and communities, in order to achieve good outcomes for all young people.
So many anti social Vices are been carried out by frustrated youths of which majority of them have gone through a lot, trying to make ends meet after their wide search for Jobs, of which a good number of them are graduates from different higher institutions.
Youths as we also know are the bedrock for societal development. They have got fresh minds, which if given the opportuinty to brainstorm, they would do so with very positive results. With the world gradually turning into a Global village, the need for young people to drive change is becoming more and more necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment