Community Capacity Building: Lessons from Adult Learning in Australia

Across multiple disciplines concerned with community development, there is growing interest in the phenomenon of community capacity building. Activities, resources, and support assist in strengthening the abilities and skills of individuals and groups to take action and to lead the development of their own communities. This book uniquely brings community capacity building to life through the personal involvement of academic staff in the community as active partners helping to create new knowledge. Community Capacity Building is a valuable resource that presents the latest research into the social and educational issues involved, and it offers new insights into effective strategies and outcomes for both specific and global communities. Through experiences in Australia - and drawing on examples of good practice internationally (including the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, and New Zealand) - the book's contributors, themselves a mixture of academic researchers and community members, examine in great breadth and depth how regional and rural communities sustain themselves for equitable and prosperous futures and how community members and university academics can create useful knowledge together. Community Capacity Building presents strategies that work in specific contexts, and identifies ways those strategies can be applied equally effectively for different communities and contexts. It includes case studies of positive change informed by the latest scholarship in the field.