Approaches
to Community Development and Mobilization
The involvement
of community members in addressing health priorities is often
viewed as a single, standardized strategy, described by 'catch-all'
terms such as 'community organizing' or 'community mobilization'.
But in reality, health promoters
and other change agents have used a wide range of approaches to
working with communities. A number of conceptual frameworks have
been developed in recognition of this fact.
Perhaps the
most influential framework illustrating the various approaches
to community involvement is Rothman's categorization of community
organization into three distinct models (Rothman and Tropman,
1987):
Social
Planning is a task-oriented method that stresses rational
problem solving, usually by an outside party, to address community
concerns. Outside change agents gather facts about community
problems and recommend the most appropriate responses.
Locality
Development is a more process-oriented approach that attempts
to build a sense of group identity and community. Community
workers organize a broad cross-section of people into small
task-oriented groups to identify and resolve shared problems.
Social
Action, a more participatory approach, is both task and
process-oriented. While increasing the problem-solving ability
of the community, social action also seeks to address imbalances
of power between marginalized and dominant segments of the community.
Building social
support among a group of new mothers, for example, would be most
closely linked to the locality development model even if it incorporated
aspects of social planning. Similarly, an effort to advocate against
government cutbacks to income support programs would fall under
the category of social action, even though a more cohesive community
- a key objective of locality development - could emerge as an
outcome.
Rothman notes
that while none of these approaches are mutually exclusive, most
community organization strategies typically fall within one of
the three categories (Rothman and Tropman, 1987).
