Community centres, community centers, or community halls are public locations where members of a community tend to gather for group activities, social support, public information, and other purposes. They may be open for the whole community or for a specialized subgroup within the greater community. Community centres can be religious in nature, such as Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist community centres, or can be secular, such as youth clubs.
Uses
The community centres are usually used for:
Celebrations, Public meetings of the citizens on various issues, Organising meetings(where politicians or other official leaders come to meet the citizens and ask for their opinions, support or votes ("election campaigning" in democracies, other kinds of requests in non-democracies), Volunteer activities, Organising parties, weddings, Organising local non-government activities, Passes on and retells local history,etc.
Organization and ownership
Around the world (and sometimes within single countries) there appear to be four common ways in which the operation of the kind of community centre are owned and organised. In the following description, "Government" may refer to the ordinary secular government or to a dominant religious organisation such as the Roman Catholic Church; and it may refer to the central, national, or international branch of a government/church or to the local subdivision of it.
Community owned: The centre is directly owned and run by the local community through an organization separate from the official (local) governmental institutions of the area, but with the full knowledge and sometimes even funding from (local) government institutions. Government owned: The centre is a public (local) government facility, though it is mostly used for non-government community activities and may even have some kind of local leadership elected from its community. Kominkan (in Japan) Sponsored: A rich citizen or commercial corporation owns the centre and donates its use to the community for reasons of charity or public relations. Commercial: The community centre is a purely commercial entity which aims to profit from renting its facilities to various community groups on terms suitable for such use.
Types of community centres
The community centres typically have their own origin and history. There are some examples:
Built as such - Buildings have been erected specifically to function as community centers (as early as 1880, perhaps even earlier). A disused public building - When an official government building (such as a school or city hall) is no longer needed for its original purpose, it is sometimes offered to the community as gift, loan or sale. A disused commercial building - When a commercial building of some local importance is no longer used, it is sometimes sold or donated to the community. A building that served many of the purposes now given to the community centre in addition to a different primary use (such as school, church, inn, or town hall), which was later acquired so it could continue these functions after its primary use subsided.
Schools as community centers
Early forms of community centers in the United States were based in schools providing facilities to inner city communities out of school hours. An early celebrated example of this is to be found in Rochester, New York from 1907. Edward J. Ward, a Presbyterian minister, joined the Extension Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, organizing the Wisconsin Bureau of Civic and Social Development. By 1911 they organized a country-wide conference on schools as social centers. Despite concerns expressed by politicians and public officials that they might provide a focus for alternative political and social activity, the idea was successful. In 1916, with the foundation of the National Community Center Association, the term Community Center was generally used in the US. By 1918 there were community centers in 107 US cities, and in 240 cities by 1924. By 1930 there were nearly 500 centers with more than four million people regularly attending. The first of these was Public School 63, located in the Lower East Side. Clinton Child's, one of the organizers, described it as: "A Community organized about some center for its own political and social welfare and expression; to peer into its own mind and life, to discover its own social needs and then to meet them, whether they concern the political field, the field of health, of recreation, of education, or of industry; such community organization is necessary if democratic society is to succeed and endure".