As will be clear from the chapters in this volume, community development takes many forms: many people practising community development, including a very great number whose job title or role does not even specifically refer to community development, work in a way that would be recognisably community development in terms of its adherence to the core values of the practice, to equality, respect for difference and diversity and so on. (And conversely, many with this title appear not to adhere to the values of community development.) Although the definition of community development in the Budapest Declaration discussed in the Introduction to this book is very wide ranging, reflecting the fact that delegates from more than 30 countries and a variety of policy and practice contexts contributed to it, the values of social justice remain core to it: those values are also core to the struggle against racism. Anti-racist work and true community development are indeed natural bedfellows.

Doing community work is not easy, nor has it ever been. Historically, most community workers have worked on the margins of organisations, poorly financed, poorly supported, often poorly understood and working as much to convince employers of the value of their work as to support their local communities, rarely achieving the satisfaction of significant concrete gains from their work. One of the consequences of the fiscal austerity measures recently put in place across much of the world has been that these pressures on community development have grown and the majority of paid community workers are now increasingly employed by organisations that not only increasingly question the value of community development per se but may, in many cases, be subject to the influences of racism. This makes work in this territory even more difficult, as community workers are often having to face two ways and finding their commitment to the values of social justice, perhaps most of all in this case their professional and personal integrity, under threat.