OEA 306 : COMMUNITY EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT --- THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF TANZANIA.

COMMUNITY   DEVELOPMENT. Part of a series on Community Concepts Sense of community Social capital Perspectives Community psychology Community studies Types Community of interest Community of practice Community of place Development Community development Community organizing See also Outline Community portal WikiProject Community v t e Community development (CD) is a broad term given to the practices of civic activists, involved citizens and professionals to build stronger and more resilient local communities. Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own communities. These skills are often created through the formation of large social groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within the context of larger social institutions. There are a myriad of job titles for CD workers and their employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental organisations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies. Since the nineteen seventies the prefix word ‘community’ has also been adopted by several other occupations from the police and health workers to planners and architects, who work with more disadvantaged groups and communities and have been influenced by CD approaches. CD practitioners have over many years developed a range of skills and approaches for working within local communities and in particular with disadvantaged people. These include less formal educational methods, community organising and group work skills. Since the nineteen sixties and seventies through the various anti poverty programmes in both developed and developing countries, CD practitioners have been influenced by structural analyses as to the causes of disadvantage and poverty i.e. inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, land etc. and especially political power and the need to mobilise people power to affect social change. Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Friere and his focus upon this work also being about politicising the poor. Other key people who have influenced this field are Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) and EF Schumacher (Small is Beautiful). The UK currently hosts the main international body representing community development, the International Association for Community Development. IACD was started in the USA in 1953, moved to Belgium in the seventies and to the UK (Scotland) in 1998. Community development as a term has taken off widely in anglophone countries i.e. the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand and other countries in the Commonwealth. It is also used in some countries in eastern Europe with active CD associations in Hungary and Romania. The International Community Development Journal, published by Oxford University Press, and set up in 1967 has been the major forum for research and dissemination of international CD theory and practice. Community development approaches are recognised internationally. These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organisations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and EU. Contents 1 Definitions 1.1 In the global North 1.2 In the global South 2 See also 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External links Definitions There are complementary definitions of community development. Community Development Challenge report, which was produced by a working party comprising leading UK organizations in the field (including (Foundation Builders) Community Development Foundation, Community Development Exchange and the Federation for Community Development Learning) defines community development as: "A set of values and practices which plays a special role in overcoming poverty and disadvantage, knitting society together at the grass roots and deepening democracy. There is a CD profession, defined by national occupational standards and a body of theory and experience going back the best part of a century. There are active citizens who use CD techniques on a voluntary basis, and there are also other professions and agencies which use a CD approach or some aspects of it."[1] Community Development Exchange defines community development as: “both an occupation (such as a community development worker in a local authority) and a way of working with communities. Its key purpose is to build communities based on justice, equality and mutual respect. Community development involves changing the relationships between ordinary people and people in positions of power, so that everyone can take part in the issues that affect their lives. It starts from the principle that within any community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience which, if used in creative ways, can be channeled into collective action to achieve the communities' desired goals. Community development practitioners work alongside people in communities to help build relationships with key people and organizations and to identify common concerns. They create opportunities for the community to learn new skills and, by enabling people to act together, community development practitioners help to foster social inclusion and equality.[2] A number of different approaches to community development can be recognized, including: community economic development (CED); community capacity building; Social capital formation; political participatory development; nonviolent direct action; ecologically sustainable development; asset-based community development; faith-based community development; community practice social work; community-based participatory research (CBPR); Community Mobilization; community empowerment; community participation; participatory planning including community-based planning (CBP); community-driven development (CDD); and approaches to funding communities directly. Education and the community-wide empowerment that increased educational opportunity creates, form a crucial component of community development and certainly for under-served communities that have limited general educational and professional training resources. Workforce development and the issues and challenges of crossing the Digital divide, and increasing community-wide levels of Digital inclusion have become crucially important in this and both for affordable access to computers and the Internet, and for training in how to use and maintain these resources. Local communities that cannot connect and participate in the larger and increasingly global Online community are becoming increasingly marginalized because of that. So where Urban development with its focus on buildings and physical infrastructure was once viewed as a primary path forward to community development, development of computer and online infrastructure and access, and the community enablement they support have to become central areas of focus moving forward. This has become an area of active involvement for both public and private sector organizations including foundations and nonprofit organizations. In the United States, nonprofit organizations such as Per Scholas seek to “break the cycle of poverty by providing education, technology and economic opportunities to individuals, families and communities” as a path to development for the communities they serve. In the global North In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen (1771–1851), sought to create a more perfect community. At New Lanark and at later communities such as Oneida in the USA and the New Australia Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create utopian or intentional utopian communities, with mixed success. In the United States in the 1960s, the term "community development" began to complement and generally replace the idea of urban renewal, which typically focused on physical development projects often at the expense of working-class communities. In the late 1960s, philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and government officials such as Senator Robert F. Kennedy took an interest in local nonprofit organizations—a pioneer was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn—that attempted to apply business and management skills to the social mission of uplifting low-income residents and their neighborhoods. Eventually such groups became known as "Community Development Corporations" or CDCs. Federal laws beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act provided a way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and other nonprofit organizations. National organizations such as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (founded in 1978 and now known as NeighborWorks America), the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (founded in 1980 and known as LISC), and the Enterprise Foundation (founded in 1981) have built extensive networks of affiliated local nonprofit organizations to which they help provide financing for countless physical and social development programs in urban and rural communities. The CDCs and similar organizations have been credited with starting the process that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner city areas such as the South Bronx in New York City. In the UK Community development has had two main traditions. The first was as an approach for preparing for the independence of countries from the former British Empire in the 50's and 60's. Domestically it first came into public prominence with the Labour Government's anti deprivation programmes of the latter sixties and seventies. The main example of this being the CDP (Community Development Programme), which piloted local area based community development. This influenced a number of largely urban local authorities, in particular in Scotland with Strathclyde Region's major community development programme (the largest at the time in Europe). The Gulbenkian Foundation was a key funder of commissions and reports which influenced the development of CD in the UK from the latter sixties to the 80's. This included recommending that there be a national institute or centre for community development, able to support practice and to advise government and local authorities on policy. This was formally set up in 1991 as the Community Development Foundation. In 2004 the Carnegie UK Trust established a Commission of Inquiry into the future of rural community development examining such issues as land reform and climate change. Carnegie funded over sixty rural community development action research projects across the UK and Ireland and national and international communities of practice to exchange experiences. This included the International Association for Community Development. In 1999 a UK wide organisation responsible for setting professional training standards for all education and development practitioners working within local communities was established and recognised by the Labour Government. This organisation was called PAULO - the National Training Organisation for Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire). It was formally recognised by David Blunket, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. Its first chair was Charlie McConnell, the Chief Executive of the Scottish Community Education Council, who had played a lead role in bringing together a range of occupational interests under a single national training standards body, including community education, community development and development education. The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the NTO for Social Care. The Community Learning and Development NTO represented all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK. The term ‘community learning and development’ was adopted to acknowledge that all of these occupations worked primarily within local communities, and that this work encompassed not just providing less formal learning support but also a concern for the wider holistic development of those communities – socio economically, environmentally, culturally and politically. By bringing together these occupational groups this created for the first time a single recognised employment sector of nearly 300,000 full and part-time paid staff within the UK, approximately 10% of these staff being full-time. The NTO continued to recognise the range of different occupations within it, for example specialists who work primarily with young people, but all agreed that they shared a core set of professional approaches to their work. In 2002 the NTO became part of a wider Sector Skills Council for lifelong learning. Community development in Canada has roots in the development of co-operatives, credit unions and caisses populaires. The Antigonish Movement which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia, through the work of Doctor Moses Coady and Father James Tompkins, has been particularly influential in the subsequent expansion of community economic development work across Canada... In the global South Community planning techniques drawing on the history of utopian movements became important in the 1920s and 1930s in East Africa, where Community Development proposals were seen as a way of helping local people improve their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.[citation needed] Mohondas K. Gandhi adopted African community development ideals as a basis of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian Swaraj movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence at village level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work of Vinoba Bhave in encouraging grassroots land reform, India under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted a mixed-economy approach, mixing elements of socialism and capitalism.During the fifties and sixties, India ran a massive community development programme with focus on rural development activities through government support. This was later expanded in scope and was called integrated rural development scheme [IRDP]. A large number of initiatives that can come under the community development umbrella have come up in recent years. Community Development became a part of the Ujamaa Villages established in Tanzania by Julius Nyerere, where it had some success in assisting with the delivery of education services throughout rural areas, but has elsewhere met with mixed success. In the 1970s and 1980s, Community Development became a part of "Integrated Rural Development", a strategy promoted by United Nations Agencies and the World Bank. Central to these policies of community development were Adult Literacy Programs, drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the "Each One Teach One" adult literacy teaching method conceived by Frank Laubach. Youth and Women's Groups, following the work of the Serowe Brigades of Botswana, of Patrick van Rensburg. Development of Community Business Ventures and particularly cooperatives, in part drawn on the examples of José María Arizmendiarrieta and the Mondragon Cooperatives of the Basque Region of Spain Compensatory Education for those missing out in the formal education system, drawing on the work of Open Education as pioneered by Michael Young. Dissemination of Alternative Technologies, based upon the work of E. F. Schumacher as advocated in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people really mattered Village Nutrition Programs and Permaculture Projects, based upon the work of Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Village Water Supply Programs In the 1990s, following critiques of the mixed success of "top down" government programs, and drawing on the work of Robert Putnam, in the rediscovery of Social Capital, community development internationally became concerned with social capital formation. In particular the outstanding success of the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank, has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes around the world. This work was honoured by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The "Human Scale Development" work of Right Livelihood Award winning Chilean economist Manfred Max Neef promotes the idea of development based upon fundamental human needs, which are considered to be limited, universal and invariant to all human beings (being a part of our human condition). He considers that poverty results from the failure to satisfy a particular human need, it is not just an absence of money. Whilst human needs are limited, Max Neef shows that the ways of satisfying human needs is potentially unlimited. Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers, pseudosatisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers. Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need, in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: e.g., the arms race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys subsistence, participation, affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates; commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes with understanding, creativity and identity. Synergic satisfiers, on the other hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other areas: some examples are breast-feeding; self-managed production; popular education; democratic community organizations; preventative medicine; meditation; educational games.                             COMMUNITY   EDUCATION

Community education, also known as Community-based education or Community learning & development refers to an organization's programs to promote learning and social development work with individuals and groups in their communities using a range of formal and informal methods. A common defining feature is that programmes and activities are developed in dialogue with communities and participants. The purpose of community learning and development is to develop the capacity of individuals and groups of all ages through their actions, the capacity of communities, to improve their quality of life. Central to this is their ability to participate in democratic processes.^[1]
Community education encompasses all those occupations and approaches that are concerned with running education and development programmes within local communities, rather than within educational institutions such as schools, colleges and universities. The latter is known as the formal education system, whereas community education is sometimes called informal education. It has long been critical of aspects of the formal education system for failing large sections of the population in all countries and had a particular concern for taking learning and development opportunities out to socio-economically disadvantaged individuals and poorer areas, although it can be provided more broadly.
There are a myriad of job titles and employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental organisations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies. Schools, colleges and universities may also support community learning and development through outreach work within communities. The community schools movement has been a strong proponent of this since the nineteen sixties. Some universities and colleges have run outreach adult education programmes within local communities for decades. Since the nineteen seventies the prefix word ‘community’ has also been adopted by several other occupations from youth workers and health workers to planners and architects, who work with more disadvantaged groups and communities and have been influenced by community education and community development approaches.
Community educators have over many years developed a range of skills and approaches for working within local communities and in particular with disadvantaged people. These include less formal educational methods, community organising and group work skills. Since the nineteen sixties and seventies through the various anti poverty programmes in both developed and developing countries, practitioners have been influenced by structural analyses as to the causes of disadvantage and poverty i.e. inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, land etc. and especially political power and the need to mobilise people power to affect social change. Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Friere and his focus upon this work also being about politicising the poor.
In the history of community education and community learning and development, the UK has played a significant role in hosting the two main international bodies representing community education and community development. These being the International Community Education Association, which was for many years based at the Community Education Development Centre based in Coventry UK. ICEA and CEDC have now closed, and the International Association for Community Development, which still has its HQ in Scotland. In the 1990s there was some thought as to whether these two bodies might merge. The term community learning and development has not taken off widely in other countries. Although community learning and development approaches are recognised internationally. These methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social, economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such organisations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and EU.

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (April 2012)

Community education/community learning and development in the UK.
In the UK the term community learning and development has now been widely adopted as describing a discrete employment sector of occupations concered with outreach education and development work in local communities. In 1999 a UK wide organisation responsible for setting professional training standards for education and development practitioners working within local communities was established. This organisation was called PAULO - the National Training Organisation for Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire). It was formally recognised by David Blunket, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment in the New Labour Government in January 1999. It brought together a range of occupational interests under a single national training standards body, these being, adult education, youth work, community development and development education. The inclusion of community development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would join the NTO for Social Care.
The Community Learning and Development NTO represented all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of the UK. This was the first time that the informal education occupations across the UK had ever come together with the common purpose of creating a publicly recognised occupational sector, in the way that school teachers or college lecturers had long been publicly and officially recognised.
The term ‘community learning and development’ was adopted to acknowledge that all of these occupations worked primarily within local communities, and that this work encompassed not just providing less formal learning support but also a concern for the wider holistic development of those communities – socio economically, environmentally, culturally and politically. In effect this brought together for the first time two traditions. The former group of occupations – adult educators, youth workers and community education workers had tended to focus upon the provision of informal education support for individuals and groups within communities. They had always seen their work as being educational. The latter group – community workers, community development workers and development educators had tended to focus upon the socio-economic and environmental development of those communities. Both sets of occupations recognised that they shared very similar values, knowledge base and skill sets and that what brought them together was a common commitment to supporting learning and social action.
By bringing together these occupational groups this created for the first time a single recognised employment sector of nearly 300,000 full and part-time paid staff within the UK, approximately 10% of these staff being full-time. The NTO continued to recognise the range of different occupations within it, for example specialists who work primarily with young people, but all agreed that they shared a core set of professional approaches to their work.
In 2002 the New Labour Government announced that it wished to cluster NTOs, of which there were over 50 covering a wide range of occupations across the UK labour market, under a smaller number of what they called Sector Skills Councils. A Sector Skills Council was formed called the Lifelong Learning UK Sector Skills Council. PAULO became one of five discrete pillars within LLUK, the others being the former NTOs for Further Education, for Universities, for Library and information Services and for Work Based Education. Over nearly a decade LLUK did a large amount of labour market mapping, as well as setting standards for the professional training of people working in the CLD area and generally promoted the identity of this sector across wider UK public policies and the public, non governmental and private sector employers.
All Sector Skills Councils in the UK including LLUK were abolished by the Conservative/Liberal coalition Government in 2011 and at the time of writing it is uncertain as to whether a single body representing the professional community learning and development sector will be sustained. The Community and Youth Workers Union which is part of the Unite Union in the UK played the lead role in improving employee’s conditions across the sector but never succeeded in representing all employees within the CLD sector and is not widely represented across all parts of the UK.
The Scottish Government has continued to recognise community learning and development as a discrete employment sector, and has for over a decade supported CLD training for people wishing to work professionally in this area. There is a team of HMI (Her Majesties Inspectors) to inspect the quality of delivery by employers. In 2007 the Scottish Government established a Scottish Standards Council for Community Learning and Development. This organisation overseas quality standards in the professional training of staff working in this field, including the validation and endorsement of professional training courses and is introducing a professional registration scheme for such qualified practitioners. It has continued much of the work of the former LLUK as it operated in Scotland.
At the present time similar CLD Standards Councils have not been set up in other parts of the UK and it does appear that the sector outside Scotland is once again becoming more fragmented. Unlike the formal education sector there is virtually no legislation in the UK underpinning the need to provide and fund community learning and development. Consequently it has been vulnerable to cuts in public expenditure due to the recession, particularly projects that were seen as too radical.

Contents

• 1 National Priorities
• 2 Principles & Competences
• 3 Wisconsin Model
• 4 Role of the Professional
  • 4.1 Qualifications
• 5 Participatory Democracy
  • 5.1 Youth Participation
• 6 See also
• 7 References
• 8 External links
• 9 Further reading

National Priorities

Three national priorities have been developed for community learning and development in Scotland:
Achievement through learning for adults
Raising standards of achievement in learning for adults through community-based lifelong learning opportunities incorporating the core skills of literacy, numeracy, communications, working with others, problem solving and information communications technology (ICT).
Achievement through learning for young people
Engaging with young people to facilitate their personal, social and educational development and enable them to gain a voice, influence and place in society.
Achievement through building community capacity
Building community capacity and influence by enabling people to develop the confidence, understanding and skills required to influence decision making and service delivery.

Principles & Competences

Competent CLD workers will ensure that their work supports social change and social justice and is based on the values of CLD. Their approach is collaborative, anti-discriminatory and equalities-focused and they work with diverse individuals, communities of place or interest when this is or is not appropriate. Central to their practice is challenging discrimination and its consequences and working with individuals and communities to shape learning and development activities that enhance quality of life and sphere of influence. They have good interpersonal and listening skills and their practice demonstrates that they value and respect the knowledge, experience and aspirations of those involved.^[2]
The Scottish Government have introduced the following set of principles of which community learning and development related activities should be based on:

1. Empowerment - increasing the ability of individuals and groups to influence issues that affect them and their communities;
2. Participation - supporting people to take part in decision making;
3. Inclusion, equality of opportunity and anti-discrimination - recognising that some people may need additional support to overcome the barriers they face;
4. Self-determination - supporting the right of people to make their own choices; and
5. Partnership - recognising that many agencies can contribute to CLD to ensure resources are used effectively.

Wisconsin Model

A philosophical base for developing Community Education programs is provided through the five components of the Wisconsin Model of Community Education. The model provides a process framework for local school districts to implement or strengthen community education.^[3] A set of Community Education Principles was developed by Larry Horyna and Larry Decker for the National Coalition for Community Education in 1991 ^[4] These include:

1. Self-determination: Local people are in the best position to identify community needs and wants. Parents, as children's first and most important teachers, have both a right and a responsibility to be involved in their children's education.
2. Self-help: People are best served when their capacity to help themselves is encouraged and enhanced. When people assume ever-increasing responsibility for their own well being, they acquire independence rather than dependence.
3. Leadership Development: The identification, development, and use of the leadership capacities of local citizens are prerequisites for ongoing self-help and community improvement efforts.
4. Localization: Services, programs, events, and other community involvement opportunities that are brought closest to where people live have the greatest potential for a high level of public participation. Whenever possible, these activities should be decentralized to locations of easy public access.
5. Integrated Delivery of Services: Organizations and agencies that operate for the public good can use their limited resources, meet their own goals, and better serve the public by establishing close working relationships with other organizations and agencies with related purposes.
6. Maximum Use of Resources: The physical, financial, and human resources of every community should be interconnected and used to their fullest if the diverse needs and interests of the community are to be met.
7. Inclusiveness: The segregation or isolation of people by age, income, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or other factors inhibits the full development of the community. Community programs, activities, and services, should involve the broadest possible cross section of community residents.
8. Responsiveness: Public institutions have a responsibility to develop programs and services that respond to the continually changing needs and interests of their constituents.
9. Lifelong Learning: Learning begins are birth and continues until death. Formal and informal learning opportunities should be available to residents of all ages in a wide variety of community settings.

Role of the Professional

The role of a community learning and development professional depends somewhat on the career path followed. For example, someone working with young people may have different priorities than someone working with adults; however, the outcomes are very similar in a sense that both will be aiming to promote a more socially just and equal society. Community learning and development is a vast field of work and the range of job categories is wide and may include the following: Youth Information Worker, Detached Youth Worker, Community Arts Worker, Community Capacity Worker, Local Authority Community Planning Officer, etc.
Community learning and development workers should see themselves as working with people, rather than for them. Empathy is crucial to understanding the issues faced by those they work with and it is important that they engage in a way that does not intimidate people or place the worker in a position of looking down on those they work with.
The role of a Community learning and development worker is largely different to the role of a formal educator such as a teacher. Community learning and development workers do not follow a curriculum, as they allow the people they work with to form their own way of learning and each individual is believed to have the ability to reach their full potential in life. A community learning and development approach is arguably a more effective way of learning as every individual has their own unique way to learn and community learning and development workers look for the best possible method that suits the individual. Community learning and development approaches are gradually being adopted in schools to some extent and many other agencies and using a community learning and development approach in their work.

Qualifications

Professional community educators or community learning and development workers usually hold a professional degree in community education or community learning and development, depending on the course offered at the university from which they graduate. In Scotland, qualifications may be Approved by the Standards Council for Community Learning and Development. This means that the course has been assessed by a group of peers - an Approval Panel. The course must have a practice element totalling 40% of the course to gain Approval. More details on the Approval Process and a list of Approved qualifications are available on the Standards Council website www.cldstandardscouncil.org.uk In order to gain entrance to this course, a history of voluntary work is usually desirable.
Many of those working in the field of community learning and development will be doing so voluntarily. These people are usually encouraged to complete a work-place based alternative to the full-time degree course. Others in paid positions may hold qualifications relevant to the field. These people will also be encouraged to study for a degree in community education.
Some university institutions offer post-graduate degrees in community education such as MA, MSc, PGDip, PGCert, etc.

Participatory Democracy

Youth Participation

In countries where democratic governments exist, people are encouraged to vote for someone to represent them. In today's society there is a dwindling interest in politics from our younger generation and this could have a negative effect on our democracy and political system in years to come. Community learning and development has the potential to encourage young people to become more interested in politics and helping them influence decisions that affect their lives.
In many parts of the world, youth parliament-style organisations have been set up to allow young people to debate issues that affect them and others in their community. Young people engage with these organisations voluntarily and are sometimes elected using a democratic system of voting. Young people are at the heart of these organisations and are usually involved in the management and development. The majority of these organisations are facilitated and staffed by workers trained in community learning and development; however, staff role is mainly to facilitate and be supportive but not intrusive.
These organisations allow young people to gain a voice, influence decision makers who affect their lives and provide them with a sense of self-worth and a place in society.
In the United Kingdom, examples of these organisations include the United Kingdom Youth Parliament (UKYP); in Scotland, the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP); in Wales the Children & Young People's Assembly for Wales; and in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Youth Forum.

See also

Youth Bank Community Development Lifelong Learning