The importance of local community development support
/Note: this section relates to q3 and q10 in the DM2 consultation
SCDC works at the interface between communities and public bodies and provides a level of much-needed support for approaches ranging from community engagement to community-led action planning.
Across all our work over the past 10-15 years we have heard time and time again that although enabling legislation is heading in the right direction for community empowerment, the workforce in terms of community development practitioners (whether in the public, voluntary or independent sectors) has been thinned out to such an extent that it is extremely difficult to provide equity of access to effective support, particularly for disadvantaged and marginalised communities to benefit from the legislation.
Therefore, we would like to see actions aimed at increasing capacity building and support for disadvantaged and marginalised communities so that they are in a position to benefit from any new legislation.
Community development support is an integral part of a preventative approach. However, as with all preventative ways of working, this needs to be protected in order for it not to be pushed down the priority list when services are under strain from increased demand and reduced budgets.
Community development support should be available to community anchor organisations or local decision-making bodies; however, it is important that this does not take away support available for other community organisations and communities. We refer to the role of CLD plans in the bullet point below as a means of identifying where community development support is needed. Whatever method is used to identify need, community development support should be available to meet this.
A requirement for local community capacity building plans to support the process should be included in the Local Democracy Bill. Community learning and development (CLD) plans are already required to identify unmet need, although many CLD plans are not doing this. These plans should therefore have an enhanced statutory support role under new local democratic arrangements, highlighting what support is required to ensure disadvantaged and marginalised communities can participate in local democracy/governance and how this support will be provided.
Requirements to have, and resources available to support, local community development teams, such as those based in local authorities, to identify and support groups in disadvantaged and marginalised communities to engage and be empowered. Community development support can equally come from the third sector or from the independent sector. What is important is that it is resourced independently from front line services so that it is protected and given the priority it requires.
This should include supporting communities to secure funds for their own autonomous community development support. This should be appropriately skilled and be viewed as being of equal importance to project-based staff.
Capacity building of public sector bodies to understand and support community development, community-led approaches, participation and co-production. This includes capacity building to understand and effectively use any new legislation for improving democracy as well as pre-existing legislation such as the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act. Given that public sector training and development budgets have been reduced significantly over time to make service savings, this should in part consist of a funded national programme that public sector staff can tap into.
