Dear Community Development Readers,
It is my sheer pleasure to provide you with another set of articles in this issue that build community development theory, scholarship, policy, and practice. Continued thanks go to our managing editor, Dr. Sofia Kotsiri. Dr. Kotsiri has been a great steward of our journal during our interim management of the journal. I also thank our associate editors: Drs. Brien Ashdown, Bryan Hains, and Kristina Hains. Our editors have keenly polished the articles found in this issue. I deeply enjoy our team’s dedication and passion for scholarship in the field of community development that further enriches community development theory, policy, and practice.
During this interim time, we have assembled a strong editorial board to serve as reviewers and advisors to the journal as we move forward with bringing you more issues of the journal and supporting our professional association, Community Development Society (CDS: https://comm-dev.org). On the CDS website, you will find more information about calls for a new special issue and two thematic issues. We will continue to update our Taylor & Francis website too.
In 52(2), readers will find an excellent article titled, “Beyond the Façade: Layering Downtown Spillover Investment”. The authorship and approach to this article bridge theory and practice in regards to façade improvement grant programs and downtown districts. I encourage readers to also check out our CDS interview with the authors at the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/vxl5zxE9kVUrxSLnNj2cYSrAQvSe_Iav2vFtDXjRSGxSX-OkkY9vHe5MbBwu1O6B.6j9IKnzG8OSaFlgA.
This issue also features two articles focused on livelihoods, which is a prominent area of scholarship in our journal. One article comes to us from Indonesia, and the other comes from Nigeria. Both articles focus specifically livelihoods in agricultural and farming communities. We are thankful to these authors as they have helped to internationalize our journal’s reach. Relatedly, we feature in this issue Clark and colleagues’ superb analysis of rural development and commodity agriculture. Specifically, they contemporize the concept of value-added.
Also in this issue, Smith and Whitacre provide us with a strong regression analysis on the impact of United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Business and Industry (B&I) Loan Guarantee program in rural Oklahoma. In particular, they explore impacts on sales tax revenue. Turning to entrepreneurship, Hammer and Malual explore the experiences of business owners of color in rural Wisconsin leveraging the Community Capitals Framework. These entrepreneurs face notable barriers, which should be understood in community economic development work.
Finally, Costa, Vaz, and Menezes take on the tall task of researching political involvement and mobilization by professionals in Portugal. Community development contains a scarcity of research in this area. We are grateful to these authors for pushing our field forward.
I conclude these notes expressing gratitude for our authors, our editors, our reviewers, and our editorial board. Their work reflects the Community Development Society (CDS) Principles of Good Practice (https://www.comm-dev.org/about/principles-of-good-practice). I hope readers will find ways to infuse the insights of each article into their community development work.
Cordially,