Effective Working with Rural Communities

- Seizing the Opportunities

by James Derounian

with contributions by Malcolm Moseley, Elisabeth Skinner and Rhys Taylor

Rural community development is the process of deliberate change engineered at local level. This book gives practical advice about achieving constructive change for practitioners in the British countryside: social and community workers, church workers, health professionals, teachers, doctors, local and national governmental agencies, voluntary sector bodies such as Citizens Advice Bureaux and community councils, and anyone else committed to collaborative action. Many students during their training in Rural Studies in higher or adult education will find pointers to a worthwhile career in the countryside. Parish councillors and villagers themselves will be helped by this book to understand the workings of their communities, to recognize who wields power in their localities and how to exert influence.

Contents: Rural Lifestyles; Internal Agents and Structures; External Agents and Structures; Key Themes of Rural Community Development; Rural Community Development - Tools of the Trade; Sheepscombe - a Gloucestershire Village Dissected (Elisabeth Skinner); Parish Appraisals (Malcolm Moseley); Rural Action for the Environment - a Review (Rhys Taylor); Village Schools and Community Development; Area-based Community Development (Malcolm Moseley); Rural Community Development - Looking Forward. Appendices, Bibliography, Index.

The Authors: At the time this book was prepared, James Derounian was a Senior Lecturer in Countryside Planning at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education (now the University of Gloucestershire). He had previously been a rural community worker in Devon for six years and in Northumberland for a further eight years. Malcolm Moseley had been a Dean of Faculty at the University of East Anglia, and Director of ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England) before becoming a Reader in Rural Community Development at Cheltenham. Elisabeth Skinner led the Local Policy programmes at Cheltenham, particularly for and about rural parish councils. Rhys Taylor had worked as a community council field worker in Somerset and for ACRE. He now lives and works in New Zealand.

Date of publication: 01/01/1998.
ISBN: 978 185341 106 9 (paperback only).
Pages: 168. Dimensions: A5 - 210 x 148 mm.
Price: £12.99