This is an introductory survey course on Family Centered Community Building (FCCB). The course will introduce graduate (and advanced undergraduate) students as well as community practitioners to a range of topics, issues, and frameworks to help build stronger, more cohesive and Family Centered Community Building.

What is Family Centered Community Building , and how does it differ from traditional community development approaches? Traditional community development approaches have placed a relatively greater emphasis on building community infrastructure: building, business and other determinants of economic productivity. These are critically important but not sufficient components of a comprehensive community building effort. They do not directly address the important family and human development issues.

FCCB is broader and more integrated. It considers strategies that invest in the human and social capital of a community as well as its productive capacity. These include a range of different strategies that enhance services that support families, child development and family education, and parenting and skill building activities. FCCB also considers how communities create the environmental, social, educational conditions to enhance individual relationships within families and family relationships within the community.

The course starts with the basic premise that families and communities are complex systems. To understand the relationships of families and communities, one needs to understand how family relationships develop and change, as well as understanding how relationships within a community develop and change over time.

The class also utilizes a systems building approach. Since families and communities are complex systems, community building must focus on how these complex systems can be built and/or changed. System change and system transformation demands a comprehensive and strategic approach. It also means that we consider how strategic partnerships are formed, how we communicate our messages, how new leadership is developed, how our resources are deployed, and a range of other system building techniques that have shown to be important when real change is to take place.