This document is a detailed guide to community empowerment for councillors, setting out an introduction to empowerment, some activities that help councillors to work with their communities, a discussion of the skills that councillors might need to work with their communities and the support available to aquire these skills.

Community empowerment is about having the conditions in place that allow local people to make a difference to improve their localities, and that encourage them to believe that it is both possible and worth it.

The guide contains useful examples of community empowerment best practice, as well as some tools that will help councillors diagnose the strengths and areas for development within their own authority's practice.

This publication was written for Local Government Improvement and Development and the Network of Empowering Authorities by the Local Government Information Unit's (LGIU) Centre for Local Democracy.