ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on women, community, and development. It argues that social work practice and social work curricula need to recognize and incorporate both community practice as well as women's perspectives and contributions. The chapter provides a historical overview of women's contributions to community practice and the need to restructure education to focus on women as community leaders and as facilitators in organizing, planning, development, and change processes. It presents feminist applications of community practice and aims to emphasize community-based participatory research that can reflect women's perspectives as a major part of the empowerment focus of community practice. The chapter describes the community practice models and their feminist application. Social workers working with international organizations in community development have generally followed and been associated with the evolution of community development models as they have emerged in the past fifty years. The most community development model, and one that has provided a framework welcoming women's voices, is sustainable development.
