Community Practice: Models in Action stresses the value of using research to examine, develop, and update community practice models. By raising questions about traditional models and identifying contextual and environmental issues that are vital to the study of community practice, this book helps you understand the relationship between theory and action. Your understanding, in turn, will lead to improvements in your practice in the areas of leadership, creativity, and the ability to affect change. Focused strongly on community organization and community development, Community Practice: Models in Action provides you with research-based examinations of emerging issues grounded in the realities of contemporary contexts and challenges. It illustrates actual practice with major models and helps you by:

• documenting the core concepts that are critical to understanding and engaging in work with any community change process
• presenting diverse ways that coalitions--an ever-expanding arena in community practice--are formed and maintained
• combining a focus on issues of leadership development and the use of creative processes to promote engagement in leadership development
• providing up-to-date exemplars of community practice that embody central practice approaches Community Practice: Models in Action is a companion to the recently published Community Practice: Conceptual Models, which presents the theory behind the models. Together, these books provide the only up-to-date exploration of theory, knowledge, and research necessary to give students an understanding of conceptual models and theories and the emerging ways that these models play out in current practice. Community Practice: Models in Action is for practitioners, faculty, and students in the fields of social work, city and regional planning, and community-oriented public health.

Dierk Schleicher is a professor of mathematics at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany.