Editorial Notes

Dear Community Development Readers,

I am grateful to share another collection of groundbreaking scholarship that substantially enhances our dynamic field of community development. I sincerely appreciate the authors for their crafting of such unique pieces. I thank our reviewers and editors for stewarding these articles to their final forms.

These articles hold excellent implications bolstering the very foundations of community development, and they offer a wide array of tools to be used in practice. Across the contributions, readers will find a shared commitment to fostering accessible, viable, and inclusive community development practices. The articles also showcase resilient, adaptable, and innovative methods.

The issue contains articles that showcase the “big picture” of community development. The article, “Foundational Phases for Community Development,” underscores the need for comprehensive frameworks in community development, offering a conceptual model to guide community development leaders and educators. In “Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Community Resilience,” the theme of resilience resonates throughout, emphasizing its critical role in community development, which the authors conceptualize as an interdisciplinary field. The article on “Brain Drain” in Mississippi notes migration patterns and economic impacts, continuing the long-standing discussion in the literature on retaining talent to bolster sustainable community development work. “Enlivening Popular Education in Community Development” offers new insights for action research, sharing citizen-led approaches and social change efforts in Australia. “My Brother’s Keeper” provides a great case study on mentoring, which is an important topic that our journal could highlight more often.

Other articles in this collection offer important tools to enhance community development research and practice. In “Asset Mapping 2.0,” readers will find an innovative and adaptable approach to asset mapping, building on a long tradition of asset-mapping being used in community development efforts. In this issue, readers will find the “CD+SI Toolkit” to enhance approaches using the Community Capitals Framework. The toolkit is used to assess a public health intervention but has applications beyond that context.

Finally, this issue shares two articles regarding lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. One article discusses nationwide peer meetings and the criticality of staying connected in rural communities. The other article shares the importance of retaining volunteers and quality communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both articles offer insights applicable in our now beyond-but-not-forgotten-COVID-19 world.

These articles hopefully inspire new avenues of research, teaching, policy and practice. Thank you for your continued support in making Community Development a hub for impactful and applicable scholarship. I look forward to your future submissions to and feedback on our journal.