Developing Compassionate Community: Insights from the International Standards for Community Development

Abstract

Aging populations have increased demand for hospice palliative care and support for dying persons. Community support is also becoming an increasingly important aspect of public health intervention. Compassionate communities advocate active bottom-up community participation to strengthen communities’ resilience around death and dying. However, these rapidly growing initiatives face a challenge in putting values such as health equity into practice and in making a social impact through “meaningful participation” at the community level. We reflect on potential challenges related to gendered inequalities, neo-liberal discourses around caring work, and an over-emphasis of community resilience, and argued that these need to be deliberated in compassionate community policy and service development. To address those concerns, in this chapter we argue that the eight components of the International Standards for Community Development Practice or ISCDP (from the International Association for Community Development or IACD) provide important direction about putting values into practice, for instance by advocating for service and policy improvement while engaging in practice and research on compassionate communities. We discuss how the international standards can inform compassionate community development in Canada.