Community Development:
Transformative Leadership as a Foundation

Assignment 1: A Personal Narrative

Kimberley A. Ilott

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Athabasca University

MAIS603 Community Development

Dr. Angela Specht

October 2022

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Abstract

In this personal narrative, I reflect on community development with the aim of articulating a personalized philosophy that is underpinned by values and practices. I review the concept of community development and how I see myself in the concept.  As key component of community development is transformative leadership, I highlight transformative leader qualities and how as a transformative leader, or agent for change, I use communications to achieve success.  Lastly, through connecting the community development concept with transformative leadership, I articulate my personal community development leadership philosophy and associated values.

 

Community Development: Personal Narrative Reflection

Introduction

Community development. A straightforward political concept, or so I thought. Community leaders, in a geographic location, spending public money on development projects that better a community, although sometimes the definition of ‘betterment’ is contentious and or debatable. That was my understanding of the term community development prior to embarking on this course.  I had not given the concept much thought prior to this course; however, through in-depth learnings of the theoretical concept, principles, social values, and practices of community development, I have gained an understanding of how change agents impact outcomes through community change initiatives. Community development is a complex concept that has many applications, but I have been able to connect the concept to my everyday through the various course learnings and further readings. Reflecting on these connections, I discuss how my knowledge has grown to understand that community development is multi-faceted and often has community change agents impacting outcomes through transformative leadership based on trust and effective communication. I apply this gained knowledge to my daily life and make connections that solidify my understanding of how I participate in community development in my career and personal life.

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Concept of Community Development

As I was researching and reading through the materials in the first half of the course, it was evident that the definitions of community, development, and community development are  largely theoretical and subjective, dependent upon the individual involved and their personal feelings, passions, and socio-economic status to name a few. As with any theoretical concept, the challenge is how to put theory into practice. Campfens (1999) identified common principles and social values that underpin the practice of community development; these seven underpinnings revolve around the mobilization of peoples at all levels of society toward targeted areas of society that suffer from economic, social, political, or equality gaps.

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Individualistic practical applications of commonly accepted applied principles, social values, or frameworks, which underpin the concept of community development, can provide an abundance of practical examples that contribute to the challenge of identifying widely accepted standard definitions of community, development, and community development. When I think about community development and the like terms, I, too, do not have a standard, widely accepted, definition. Community, development, and community development are multi-layered, multi-faceted, highly volatile, highly emotional, and are often very personally driven.

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I appreciated Bradshaw’s (2008) suggestion that a definition of community should take into consideration groupings of people who are connected by some common denominator, but which is not necessarily by location. When I think of Bradshaw’s suggestion and apply it to my reality, I immediately think of my children’s school community (parents, students, teachers), my husband’s professional community (transit operators), and my professional community (BC Public Service employee). As a public servant I follow a set of corporate values that lead to a shared identify as a member of the BC Public Service. The Government of British Columbia (2022) tethers the BC Public Service to these values in the hope that the shared sense of identity and common set of core values will guide public servants in their careers and interactions with the B.C. public that they serve:

1. Integrity: to perform with integrity is to uphold the Standards of Conduct for the BC Public Service and to make the individual choice to do what is right as a professional public servant. 

2. Curiosity: if we need the courage to innovate, we also need the curiosity to find alternatives to the status quo. Approaching work with curiosity means seeking better ways to achieve goals, pursue opportunities to learn and develop, welcome ideas from others, and be willing to learn from failures as well as successes. 

3. Service: serving the needs, interests, and expectations of the people of British Columbia and their communities efficiently is the priority for all of us in the BC Public Service. Showing commitment to service includes creating positive outcomes for citizens, working collaboratively across government, valuing different viewpoints, and placing organizational objectives ahead of personal goals. 

4. Passion: being passionate means you are motivated to apply the best of yourself to achieve goals, taking pride in your work in service to the public, seeing ideas and people succeed, as well as being a positive influence for others. 

5. Teamwork: having a commitment to collaboration through building trust by respecting the contributions of others, encouraging new ideas, contributing to larger goals and positive engagement, as well as depending on supporting others and shared knowledge.

6. Accountability: being more open to taking thoughtful risks while maintaining responsibility and accountability to the people we serve. Demonstrating the setting of clear goals and measuring success, staying focused on the outcomes the government is attempting to achieve, taking responsibility for decisions and completing tasks, being consistently proactive in decisions, and showing the persistence and tenacity to overcome obstacles. 

7. Courage: approaching work with the courage to adapt, change and innovate, taking thoughtful risks in generating and implementing ideas. Empowering others to take initiative in uncertain times.

 

When I think about community development, I’m drawn back to the above core values. As a member of the BC Public Service, I have a duty to act with integrity and accountability, while having courage to bring a passion and curiosity each day to my add value to teamwork, the organization, and the public that I serve.

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Transformative Leadership

Transformative change often equates to a substantial, complex, and broad scope and scale. This type of change can be more difficult to implement, has far reaching affects, and usually has interdependencies. Transformative change also has significant personal impacts, requiring people to gain new skills, knowledge, or behaviours; this shift in skill, knowledge, and or behaviour can lead to impacts on a person’s values, assumptions, beliefs, or personal life.

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Taking the above into consideration, transformative leaders must understand the impacts of an initiative and ensure that any attempt to create community capacity is in alignment with the readiness of the community, or rather, the people. Understanding people-centered change through the identification of the core values of the ‘community’ (the term used with Bradshaw’s suggested definition of community in mind) and acknowledging how those values affect community movement toward an ideal goal or situation.

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Drawing upon my learnings about Bradshaw’s concept of community, transformative leaders understand that communities can be affected by the scope and scale (defined geographically, technically, functionally, organizationally, economically, or politically) of a change as well as the degree of personal impact (impacts on a community’s role, beliefs, authority, responsibilities, controls, relationships, competencies, personal lives, or autonomy, among others) that a change may have.  Transformative leaders, who desire to be a community change agent, need to be able to incite community capacity by ensuring that community readiness is aligned with community development timelines.

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Communication as a Change Management Tool

When collaborating or partnering with other community interests (public, private, or voluntary), community change agents and collaborators should be working toward a common goal, having the capacity themselves to apply time, effort, and energy in moving the masses toward an end goal or deliverable. Community change agents can stir up community capacity through communications that unsettle the status quo followed by reshaping and resetting expectations and practices toward the common goal. When community change agents are congruent with community capacity, momentum is created and people are engaged, or ‘onboard’, with the change.

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Those who are implementing, or championing, community change understand that change is messy and assessing community readiness can be difficult. Communication that is frequent, targeted, and transparent is key to implementing a successful change or initiative.  Communication must also be either transactional (ability for simultaneous and instantaneous feedback via conversations, with no discrimination between sender and receiver) or interactional (ability for delayed feedback via multiple channels or vehicles); the targeted community must be able to feel involved, and heard, to feel engaged with and have a sense of ownership over the community change.  Transformational leaders understand that people-centred initiatives or changes are often emotionally driven and reaction to these initiatives or changes are not linear, rational, or predictable; strong responses, for good or bad, to community change is normal and should be expected. When levels of ambiguity and stress are high, followers need to trust their leaders. Leaders need to be direct, truthful, and meet commitments; taking advantage of every opportunity to offer degrees of control to the community to preserve connections with others and to reinforce elements of character (personal impacts) throughout the change initiative or process.

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In my work as a change agent in my leadership position in the BC Public Service, I developed a communications as a change management graphic to provide colleagues with a visual representation of the cyclical nature of leadership communications.

Figure 1: Visual Representation of Communications as a Change Management Tool

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 1 is intended to articulate visually to leaders and change agents how to effectively use communications to manage change, taking into consideration stakeholder feedback.  To interpret the cyclical Figure 1, change agents:

1. Start with Stakeholder Assessment.

2. Move to Communications and Change Management (CCM) Activity Planning. 

3. Progress to CCM Activity Drafting as per the planned activity schedule.

4. At this point, agents may want to obtain feedback through Stakeholder Consultation.

5. With feedback obtained, agents can iterate the plan from stakeholder Feedback Consolidation, moving back through the left loop.  OR

6. With feedback obtained, agents can provide the draft CCM activity through to Leadership for Governance Review. 

7. Agents then Iterate the draft stemming from governance review. 

8. Followed by Actioning or Distributing the final version.

9. Stakeholder Response, from the actioning or distributing, can push agents and their initiatives in three directions. 

10. Back into the left loop to Feedback Consolidation. OR

11. Through the right loop to the end point of our loop, the Intended or Targeted Outcome. OR

12. Back into the right loop to governance review, iteration, and re-distribution.

 

Importantly, users of Figure 1 should understand that the graphic insinuates a continual improvement process as it provides a snapshot of where a community grouping are during a specific change initiative. By giving stakeholders the ability to provide feedback, change agents ensure that they are congruent with community capacity, momentum is created, engagement is garnered, buy-in is present, and initiatives are successful. While I developed and use this visual in my professional career in an organizational setting, it could easily apply to any community development initiative and the agent that is leading the movement to a common goal.

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Philosophy and Values

My personal motto is ‘work hard, be kind, stay humble, and amazing things will happen’; these words guide me in my brightest, and darkest, moments. These words also surmise my thoughts on community development. Transformative leaders work hard at implementing change by acting as a community change agent, their kindness and humility inciting community capacity, leading to significant and impactful community development (change).

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The theoretical concept definition of community development that most resonated with me was Bradshaw’s (2008) suggestion that when thinking about community, it “should be done so in the terms of groupings of people connected by solidarity, shared identity, or a set of norms, but not necessarily by location”.  There are a lot of theoretical views of community and community development, the challenge is the practical application of these viewpoints. As a public servant, and someone who likes incremental measurable steps, I appreciated Collier’s (Athabasca University, 2022) community development working practice characteristics, many of which tie into my personal motto. Motivation, skill, theoretical analysis, risk comfortability, ethical stance, maturation, judgement, and self-awareness are all potential traits of a strong leader, and in the instance of community development, a transformative leader or agent of community change.  These traits help leaders build trusted foundational relationships with stakeholders; these foundational relationships pave the way for the enablement of community capacity. As a leader in the BC Public Service, I can attest to Collier’s working practice characteristics ability to assist with forming foundational relationships built on trust. In my career, these foundational relationships have been a main driver in my ability to incite community capacity, or rather, my ability to gain acceptance and ‘buy-in’ from colleagues, partners, and stakeholders on new organizational initiatives. As mentioned in my week three forum post, in my opinion, when comparing against my gained experience, the ability to measure success, the ability to focus on outcomes, the ability to proactively make decisions, and having the perseverance to overcome obstacles, should all be considered key competencies of a leader championing a community change initiative.

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A passion that is not reflected in my personal motto is my desire to add value to peoples’ lives, the most frequent environment where I put this passion into practice is in my career. When watching The Canadian CED Network’s YouTube (2018) video, containing the Neechi Principles, it reminded me of my own passion for adding value to peoples’ lives; the eleven principles are:

1. Use of locally produced goods and services

2. Production of goods and services for local use

3. Local reinvestment of profits

4. Long-term employment of residents

5. Local skill development

6. Local decision-making

7. Public Health

8. Physical Environment

9. Neighbourhood stability 

10. Human dignity

11. Support for other CED initiatives

 

While the Neechi Principles are applied on a much larger scale and often in a community economic development situation, they are intended to harness peoples’ passions into actionable polices, procedures, or impactful changes. Learning of the principles was the catalyst for my thinking of how I could take my passion for adding value to peoples lives in my career and apply my passion in other community related instances. I appreciate how these principles are a compass for community development purposes, and a great guidance tool if a person is attempting to give back to a local environment or larger cause.

 

Conclusion

When reflecting on the concept of community development, I realized that prior to course learning, my default definition was rather static, community development was purely development initiatives in a geographic location funded by taxpayer dollars. I understand now how narrow my understanding of community development was. It cannot be defined by dollars on spreadsheet and a geographic location, nor is it a nebulous theoretical term. Rather it’s a concept that fosters dialogue about a particular situation or topic, bringing together groupings of people to be the catalyst for social change.

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Through reading Campfens (1999) common principles and social values that underpin community development, Bradshaw’s (2008) suggested defining of community by groupings of people, Collier’s working practice characteristics and competencies, as well as the Neechi Principles, it is evident that community development and its like terms are complex, multi-faceted concepts that can be highly subjective, highly emotional, and highly personal to those involved. Being able to apply my learnings from the first half of the course, Campfens, Bradshaw, Collier, and The Canadian CED Network, has solidified the complexity of community development and how ingrained the concept is in our everyday activities, careers, and personal lives.

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References

Athabasca University. (2022). Part II Week 3: Community Development as Four Sets of Practice and Discipline. MAIS 603 Community Development. https://mais.lms.athabascau.ca/mod/book/view.php?id=60814&chapterid=42451

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Bradshaw, T. (2008). The Post-Place Community: Contributions to the Debate about the Definition of Community, Community Development, 39:1, 5-16, DOI: 10.1080/15575330809489738

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Campfens, H. (1999). Community Development around the World: Practice, Theory, Research, Training. University of Toronto Press.

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Government of British Columbia. (2020). BC Public Service Corporate Values. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/careers-myhr/about-the-bc-public-service/ethics-standards-of-conduct/corporate-values

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Ilott, K. (2022, August 14). Assignment: Personal Narrative Reflection. Unit 5. MAIS601: Making Sense of Theory in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Athabasca University.

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The Canadian CED Network. (2018). The Inclusive Economy: Stories of CED in Manitoba. YouTube. https://drr2.lib.athabascau.ca/index.php?c=node&m=detail&n=64467