Understanding ground‐up community development from a practice perspective

Abstract

This article offers a practice perspective on Community Development from the ground up regarding health and well-being. It advocates for a departure from traditional Community Engagement approaches, arguing that they fall short of relocating authority to communities as influential health producers. The author affirms that Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approaches are preferable Community Engagement practices, as they offer more authentic pathways toward community-centred population health and wellbeing. The article concludes that once effective ground-up community development has been initiated supplementary efforts at reform and relief are more likely to have desired and sustained impact. K E Y W O R D S public health, relationships, well-being 'For you know only a heap of broken images' . T. S. Elliot, 'The Waste Land' 1 1 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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