Community empowerment
echo update
echo, our framework to assess and develop public sector openness to influence, is now being tested in the West Midlands as part of the Improvement & Efficiency West Midlands ‘Learning to Deliver’ Programme.
It promises to have a relatively wide application and has already been used to:
- help a Partnership Board to consider how genuinely open they are to community influence
- help inform proposals for improving the quality of community engagement across a locality
- increase awareness and understanding amongst key decision makers and influencers of the need to be open to influence and of what being open to influence looks like
- prioritise actions to move community engagement forward across a Partnership
- as part of a broader action plan on delivering community engagement in a District over a three year period.
- enhance understanding of engagement & empowerment.
- contribute to an LAA NI4 Delivery Plan
If you have not yet come across echo, but this raises your interest, you can find out more in our resources section.
Voice update
Recent comments about Voice include:
Hugely useful, quite enlightening, the breadth and depth is interesting. It doesn’t require significant adaptation to be used in a variety of circumstances
Voice, our framework on assessing and developing community influence, is now being widely used by Community Groups, Networks, Organisations and Forums.
We have recently introduced it to: Police Independent Advisory Groups, Community Centre Management Committees and Community Anchors, and are soon to see how it works with Voluntary Sector Organisations and Forums.
If you haven’t come across it yet but like the sound of it then check out our resources section to download a copy of our leaflet and handy guide, or read more about community influence under our areas of work.
Voice is of particular relevance for workers assigned/attached to particular community groups, networks, organisations, and workers working with and supporting community groups, networks and organisations.
Very useful tool it has clarified things and has given us a lot more to think about
Dispersed leadership
We have been thinking about what we understand by ‘leadership’, with the help of some ideas from ‘Power, Leadership and Change’ (OU Business School, 2000) produced by the Certificate in Management Programme Team:
Instead of seeing leadership as something invested in one person we consider leadership as a process: – tackling the big issues that face a group or an organisation.
For example, if we agree that there are three types of core issues in a group or organisation:
Strategic: the overall direction of the group and the vision
Task: how the group will achieve what it wants to
People: maintaining the morale, commitment and enthusiasm of people over time
Then, a leader is someone who helps the group tackle any or all of these issues - meaning that there can be several leaders at any one time, all working on different things.
It is therefore possible to talk about leadership being ‘dispersed’ throughout the group or organisation – with some having more dispersed leadership than others depending upon culture and membership.
People can demonstrate leadership in different ways:
- Reviewing where the group or organisation is going
- Making sure people feel comfortable and welcomed
- Searching for funding opportunities
- Representing the group in wider forums
- Researching matters of interest to the group
- Knowing the local political and funding context
People can only be leaders if other members of the group or organisation accept them as leaders, accept their influence. This acceptance is often based on knowledge and expertise.
DiCE: planning & evaluation framework
changes is pleased to introduce DiCE – download the 2-page summary here!
Researched for over 10 years, DiCE has been developed by community development specialists, to enable organisations to carry out effective community empowerment, putting the values and principles of community development into action.
DiCE can help you work with communities:
- Increasing skills, knowledge and confidence
- Promoting equality and inclusion
- Bringing people together around common issues and concerns
- Building positive relationships across communities and groups and enabling co-operative working
- Encouraging and enabling communities to influence decision making in public services
DiCE can be used for work which focuses on community wellbeing and community empowerment, at policy, programme or project level. It is appropriate to people who work in public and voluntary sectors, in roles such as: Community Engagement, Community Services, Neighbourhood Management…
changes offers 2-day training courses on DiCE – contact us for information
What is Community Empowerment?
In 1996, the Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) was contracted by the Department of Health and Social Services (Northern Ireland) to develop a system for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and equity of community development practices and principles. This research and subsequent workshops in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and England resulted in a the ABCD (Achieving Better Community Development) framework for practitioners, designed to measure change in: people, the community, local services and policy. It offered measures of change for each of the ‘building blocks of community development’ identified by the research. These building blocks included ‘dimensions of community empowerment’ which have subsequently developed, through practice and application, into the five dimensions specified here.
Further research undertaken by changes as part of the National Empowerment Partnership programme of activity (2008) led to the development of an 8-page handy guide called What is community empowerment, produced jointly with the Community Development Exchange and written specifically for Local Authority Officers.
The guide uses the 5 Community Empowerment Dimensions featured in the DiCE (planning & evaluation) framework to offer and interpretation of community empowerment which is about putting the values of community development into practice.
If you like the guide, you might also be interested in the full DiCE framework, download our news sheet with more information or - contact us for details.