Community engagement
Theory, practice, strategy development, tools and techniques around duties to involve
An introduction to community engagement
The public’s appetite for participation : It is often claimed that the public are not interested in being engaged in discussions about policies and services. However, while it is true that turnouts at elections are mainly falling, interest and participation in local and national issues remains high. A recent academic study of participation found that over a twelve month period 33 million people (three in four adults) engaged in one or more political activities.
What is Community Engagement?
“The development and sustaining of a working relationship between one or more public body and one or more community group designed to assist both of them to understand and address the needs and issues experienced by the relevant community or communities”
“…Joint working between agencies to achieve a common goal / Community influence over the actions of agencies… and holding them to account / Understanding of public/community needs… to enable an organisation to interact with and understand community needs and reflect these in the delivery of services.”
(Gabriel Chanon, CDF 2008)
The Metropolitan Police Community Engagement Strategy, defines community engagement as: “The proactive harnessing of the energies, knowledge and skills of communities and partners not merely to identify problems but also to negotiate priorities for action and shape and deliver solutions”, and identifies the benefits of community engagement under two distinct headings: decision-making and citizenship:
Benefits to: Decision-making
- Improved policies and services: Community engagement brings current local first-hand knowledge to issues of policy and service provision. Local people and service users bring a different perspective to problem solving
- Public interest decisions: Policy and service decisions better reflect the needs of users and citizens
- Improved accountability: Community engagement increases the openness and transparency of the police. It increases their accountability to the public
- Savings in time and money: Accurate information from users and citizens avoids the wrong decisions being taken and reduces the need to undertake costly corrective action
Benefits to: Citizenship
- Higher levels of trust: Community engagement bridges the ‘us and them’ feeling between decision-makers and the public. It builds trust, knowledge, legitimacy and ownership
- Active citizenship: Being invited to take part in decision-making encourages people to develop the skills and interest in becoming more active in their communities
- Inclusiveness: Community engagement is a way of opening up decision-making to all parts of the community. It builds relations across communities and tackles problems of isolation
- Enhanced democracy: It can build the sense that democracy is something that everyone has a stake in, and takes part in
Our perspective on community engagement
The community engagement agenda is beset by a whole range of different definitions and understandings of what it means and how it can be ‘done’ in practice. As a first step it is useful to clarify terminology while recognising that different organisations and individuals define these terms in different ways and they are often used interchangeably.
We have found it useful to see them as separate and distinct in their own right and to see involvement and participation as steps on the way to engagement so that:
Involvement… is about involvement in community activities in a variety of different ways. Community involvement often starts with agendas and programmes that originate outside the community. (CDX)
Participation… is about people being active partners in the regeneration of communities – contributing and sharing in the decisions that affect their lives. Participation should enable people to have a degree of power and control in the processes with which they are involved. (CDX)
Engagement… is about continuous dialogue – the development and maintenance of relationships between communities and organisations where decisions are shared and based on mutual and growing understanding.
Inevitably, this raises the thorny issue: what do we mean by ‘community’?
This question is complicated because ‘community’ can be presumed, chosen or imposed and there are many factors at play: everybody can be a member of a community; that is, of place, identity and/or interest; people can belong to more than one community at a time; people may move in and out of communities, depending on a range of factors including time, motivation and need; not everybody may identify as being part of a community. In addition, some people may be excluded from communities because of discrimination, or may choose to exclude themselves.
In theory (and in some practice), there is a myth that communities are homogeneous and that anything to do with ‘community’ is inherently good whereas, the reality is that ‘communities’ can be competitive, territorial and reactionary. Communities can also be oppressive to themselves and each other which is why it is important for any notion of community empowerment to have at its core the values of social justice, equality and human rights.
Over the years our work has led us to a position where we believe that it is essential to clarify the purpose of any engagement activity and to be clear where it sits in relation to the ‘empowerment’ agenda.
We are clear that, while the ‘ladder of participation’ [link to: www.partnerships.org.uk/guide/ideas.htm] can be very usful to help us thin about the different ways in which engagement can happen, it is also helpful to bear in mind that activities – even at the lower on the ladder – can be undertaken in ways which are more (or less) empowering – or which are disempowering. For example, ‘information giving’ can be:
- Less empowering
Information has no allusion to local circumstance, perhaps has no pictures, nothing in it which makes the recipient feel a connection with what you are saying, uses jargon, assumes knowledge - More empowering
Information is of relevance, recipients feel involved and identify with what you are telling them – they feel that you are speaking to them and are aware of them and their circumstances - Disempowering
Information does not include the views sought to inform it, it gives instruction, provides no contact name or routes to recourse, the phone number provided is a general number – the person at the other end is unable to provide any clarity or answers to queries
Any contact between ‘people’ (either individuals or communities) and ‘agencies’ can be seen as a form of engagement and the quality of that engagement is directly related to the quality of the (empowering) relationship between these two.
So it makes sense to say that authentic community engagement happens in that overlap – where both sides are both empowered and empowering.
The diagram illustrates that ‘authentic’ community engagement happens when people in public agencies create structures and processes that are ‘empowering’ for themselves and others and people in communities create structures and processes that are ‘empowering’ for themselves and others.
Without “authentic” community engagement, change occurs but the process and outcome are unlikely to be an empowering experience for both agency and community. The research tells us that if public agencies – or communities – work in non-empowering ways, there is a lack of reciprocity; agencies become service providers and communities, receivers of services, with each party having unrealistic expectations of the other – often leading to mutual distrust and blame.