ABSTRACT
Community development is a social product, and as such it evolves as society, culture and the economy changes. Over the following hundred years or so, community development slowly developed an unequal symbiotic relationship with public policy. Sometimes government has promoted community development, and other times it has ignored it. In a time of austerity budgets, community development activity has been seriously defunded. Ideologically, many people are fixed on community development being closely connected to the state and state funding. Sometimes, this is because it is what people know, for others it is that the state should provide, and community development is really an arm of the state to do this. For community development to have a viable future it needs to reinvent how it organizes itself. Community development needs to do the following: community development workers/organizations need to: Whether community development can rise to these challenges remains to be seen.
