Community engagement involves working with various groups who share common interests or circumstances to identify and address issues that affect them, with an aim of building connections that foster positive social change over time and ensure long-term sustainability.
Community engagement initiatives must foster two-way communication and civic education while supporting inclusivity and being adaptable enough to suit changing community dynamics.
1. Involvement
There is much misunderstanding regarding what community engagement really entails. Wikipedia lists various objectives for community engagement and uses a triangle graphic (which I personally prefer).
But the triangle is really just a conceptual design tool that forces people to recognize that there may be three potential objectives for engagement processes and that one objective may not necessarily be more important than another.
Similar to CBPR, community engagement refers to any involvement activity undertaken by individuals, organizations or groups to find solutions that suit local conditions and circumstances. Such an approach is key for long-term change in health, according to recent reviews; interventions without comprehensive engagement processes tend to result in mixed outcomes.
2. Communication
Communicating clearly with communities during community engagement efforts is vitally important to their success. This means informing audiences how their input will be utilized, whether or not it will influence decision-making processes and what to expect from the process itself. Doing this will prevent any misconceptions and build trust.
Establish clear communication lines during every phase of a project. Identify trusted community messengers who can share details about it while building relationships. Stakeholder management software such as Simply Stakeholders is an effective way of tracking communications with different stakeholders.
Amy recognized one of her clients’ primary challenges was that different teams within an organization often had differing interpretations of community engagement, leading to unnecessary tension as each felt they should “own” this aspect for their part of the organisation.
3. Education
Community engagement involves forging relationships that empower communities to address the problems they identify. At this level of involvement, community members play a full role in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of interventions (9).
One method of integrating education into community engagement programs is service learning, which involves teaching students through community projects that fulfill both learning and action goals. This method has become popular with universities and can be utilized to teach a wide variety of disciplines.
Amy noticed there was often tension surrounding the definition of community engagement in her work, with different teams believing their objectives should be the only valid ones.
4. Participation
Community engagement involves giving individuals the power to participate in decision making that affects them directly, instilling a sense of collective self-determination and creating many successful examples such as neighborhood watch groups, cultural festivals, food banks and mutual aid networks that help those in greatest need.
As part of any engagement initiative, it’s crucial to fully comprehend the demographic and socio-cultural characteristics of your target community. Spending the time to do this work helps ensure your outreach efforts are as successful as possible, and building strong relationships within them to encourage their acceptance of all perspectives without favoring one over the other can prevent projects that only serve some or none of their interests resulting in less than desirable or harmful results.
5. Feedback
Integrating feedback into community engagement activities is a sure way to make sure that projects and policies reflect empirical evidence, while reflecting stakeholders’ perspectives. This section discusses documentation and reporting techniques, best practices for evaluation and how to maintain open channels for feedback.
Community feedback insights can provide invaluable insight into shaping change that resonates with members of your community, but gathering the insights can require time and resources. When setting your goals, take into account any possible time constraints as well as setting SMART objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable and relevant. Furthermore, use tools like stakeholder maps and social network analysis to prioritize and target stakeholders so you can engage them more efficiently later on.