IT SEEMS increasingly that if you want something doing in your community, or even if you want to keep a good thing going, you will have to do it yourself. Or, to be more precise, members of the community who want to see positive activities around them will have to take the task on themselves.

Though much of this shift in the way our society works is undoubtedly down to cost-cutting by local and central government, it could be argued the change is not necessarily a bad thing.

After all, if people have worked themselves to secure a community facility or service, they are more likely to look after that facility or make good use of that service - or so the argument goes.

It seems to be at least partly behind the move by North Yorkshire County Council which could lead to libraries in Cross Hills, Settle, Bentham and Ingleton becoming managed by their own communities.

The county council admits it started down this route to save cash, but says the introduction of community-led libraries "has enabled the people of North Yorkshire to continue an effective library service, where otherwise they might so easily have seen it disappear".

If that's so, then community involvement has proved a considerable boon, even though possibly this has been something of a happy accident.

The trouble is, for community involvement to work you usually need a fairly healthy and viable community to work with, which leads to the fear that those not fortunate enough to live in an environment where such support exists could face a hard time in the future.

You also need people prepared to take on the tasks involved. Fortunately, we in Craven never seem to be short of such people, as the recent Craven Community Champions Awards reminded us.

We are also reminded of it when we read of the lives of people such as the late Allan Cawood, who did so much for football in Craven and the local branch of Parkinson's UK, and who wanted his epitaph to be: "I always tried to do my best for people."

So long as we can live up to that kind of example, our communities will thrive.