Community Development

Building strong and vibrant communities by:

• enabling community and government capacity building
• strengthening community economic development
• developing effective and collaborative land use management approaches and policies

Community Development
Cooperative Extension is well positioned to work with citizens and communities in building strong, vibrant and sustainable communities. While the language to describe our community development work may be differenct that it was a century ago, there is a long history of working with communities.

To develop the capacities of Extension professionals to work effectively in the area of community development, the Foundation of Practice document was developed and consists of three major components.

1) Understanding Communities and their Dynamics
2) Developing Successful Community Initiative
3) Areas of Specialization and Emphasis

The full document is available at the NACDEP website www.nacdep.net

The Cornell Community and Rural Development Institute (CaRDI) works to strengthen and support New York's local communities and citizens. CaRDI serves as a point of entry to Cornell University's resources and expertise in community development and local governance, and provides outreach to community leaders, educators, elected officials and citizens interested in the vitality of their communities.

Want to Know More?

The CaRDI Communique is an electronic newsletter about news and events in the Community & Economic Vitality arena. To susbcribe to the newsletter please contact Linda Warner at llw2@cornell.edu