A community is a number of people greater than a family network who share major aspects of their life together over a considerable period.
Being a member of different communities
People can be members of several different kinds of community for different reasons:
- they may identify with the local area they live in when they are concerned with
neighbours, housing, and local services - their networks of friendship, family, identity, culture, faith, ethnicity, political commitment, colleagues or leisure interests may be rooted in their local area but equally may be spread across large areas.
Use the concept with care
It is wise to use the concept of community cautiously.- Avoid assuming that people who live in an area, even a small one, necessarily amount to a single community. Public authorities and agencies will use the term community to mean loosely the population of a given locality, and this is useful only if it does not assume the community is cohesive or exclusive.
- Be cautious about labelling people as belonging to a community, whether on the basis of locality, culture or any other criterion. We may, for example, speak of 'the community of East Cheam' or 'the Somali community' but whether people see themselves as belonging to such a community is still a matter of their individual choice. The relationship between individual and communal development is therefore always open to change.
To read our policy statement on Stronger Communities and the Community Sector, click here.
