We all know the parable, where several people wearing blindfolds feel different parts of an elephant and come away with: “a snake!” from the trunk, “a wall!” from its side, “a rope!” from its tail. Without putting each part together, they don’t conceive of the full elephant. In community development, we tend to zero in on our largest urban areas and overlook communities in the rest of the geographies. When the broad strokes of our stereotypes paint over the nuances and variety of communities, what strategies do we miss in our portrait of community development?

Even our industry terminology prefers urban communities – city planning. Urbanism. In the original research, practitioners highlighted a dominant narrative of a prototypical community for community development, suggesting that community development practices operate most successfully in dense, urban areas. And yet the lack of focus on certain communities causes uneven resource distribution and reinforces stereotypes about suburban, rural, and tribal communities – that disproportionately leave behind non-urban communities of color. The invisibilization of tribal nations and indigenous communities, whether on reservations or in urban centers. That only wealthy people live in the suburbs, despite increasing rates of poverty. It limits our collective imagination of what might be possible – that we must place landfills and prisons in rural communities of color.

What can happen to our practice when we include every community rather than brushing over them? What more could we as a community development sector learn if we fully embraced the strengths and innovations of these overlooked communities – and celebrated and resourced them? As Vanessa Roanhorse writes,

In this issue, we have gathered just a few voices from these communities that we often overlook – from manufactured home communities in coastal Maine to indigenous communities reclaiming land that would have otherwise been yet another prison in rural Appalachia; from financing institutions fueling solar power in Puerto Rico to sustainable land practices in Hawaii.

Because one thing is for sure – community development is happening in all communities, whether we are naming it (and resourcing it) as community development or not.