For over sixty five years, the International Association for Community Development (IACD) has been supporting community development practitioners around the world. Community development is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline concerned with the organisation, education and empowerment of people within their communities. IACD is the only global multi-disciplinary network for those who work in this field.

We are accredited with the U.N. and have members across the world. If you are a development agency manager, funder, fieldwork practitioner, academic, student or volunteer community activist and would like to connect with other community developers around the world, this is the network for you.

Adopting a new Global Definition for Community Development

Following a global mapping exercise of graduate community development training programs in 2015, we were concerned that community development was being understood differently in many areas. In light of this, the Board decided to produce IACD’s own understanding of it as a multi-disciplinary profession. This was approved by members in 2016:

Community Development is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity, equality, and social justice, through the organisation, education, and empowerment of people within their communities, whether these be of locality, identity, or interest, in urban and rural settings.

Check out what’s going on in community development worldwide at: Read more at https://www.iacdglobal.org