Community centres

Community centres or community centers are public locations where members of a community tend to gather for group activities, social support, public information, and other purposes. They may sometimes be open for the whole community or for a specialized group within the greater community. Examples of community centres for specific groups include: Christian community centres, Islamic community centres, Jewish community centres, youth clubs etc.

Community centres generally perform many (though rarely all) the following functions in its community (Note this list is intended to define which meaning of the phrase community centre is covered by this article rather than being facts about what some other sources associate with that phrases, though adding source confirming that other sources use the phrase in a similar way would be nice).

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 organized. 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 or to the local subdivision of it.

Each individual community centre typically has its own peculiar origin and history, though some variants seem to be common.

Early forms of community centres 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 centres. 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 centres in 107 US cities, and in 240 cities by 1924. By 1930 there were nearly 500 centres 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

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