Community Engagement: A Multistep Process

Community engagement is like politics done right. It's planned, it's flexible, carries all the opinions and weight of the people's voices into consideration to create a plan of attack that meets the needs of the people. While every project will vary, most follow the same basic outline, a five-to-six step process that bridges the local and academic community together to achieve success. In this section, we'll be talking a bit about the general process of an average project in engagement based on a design by researchers from the San Francisco Department of Health.

Step 1: Outreach and Organization
Communication is everything in engagement, and is the first step of the whole process. Outreach not only includes introductions, but also the opportunity to seek out representatives within the community willing to participate and become advocates - people who can help the research team communicate with the community and also provide a voice for community itself. Advocates help bring in the concerns and issues they'd like to address to the researchers and create a foundation for the project.

Step 2: Research and Design
Perhaps where community engagement differs the most from standard charity, researchers hit the streets and try to get the heart of the matter here. Advocates found during the outreach process became instrumental here in not only making connections, but explaining problems and issues unapparent to the researcher's eye. Advocates play a major role in fact, taking charge of the research design and providing ideas for how to go about conducting any research in the community. The researchers play more of a supporting role, helping shape the plans and tie loose ends, sometimes providing research examples to give advocates an idea of how and where projects can go.

Once a research is made, the team is sent out to work, gathering interviews and data to help build a picture of the problems in the community.

Step 3: Analysis and Preparation
Once the data has been collected, it's time for analysis. A big part of this process is the education provided to advocates on how to interpret the data found. A major goal of community engagement is to help members of the community gain the research experience and confidence to go out and do more future projects. Advocates are taught how to not only analyze data, but also present their findings to the public.

Step 4: Action
Once the problems have been found, it's time for action! Advocates take the knowledge gained from their research and take on some of the ideas generated from their analysis. They're encouraged to take on any project as long as it manageable and creates a positive effect on the community. Projects are designed with the goal of creating closer ties in the community while encouraging more supportive activity towards a common goal, whether it be improving the neighborhood, battling an illness, cutting violence, or other similar kinds of problems that can plague a community.

Step 5: Sustainability
At some point in the project , an eventually assessment needs to be made to see if the project was effective. Several things can happen here, adjustments may be made, and possibly new projects proposed.

Community Engagement, What is it Good For?

Understanding community engagement can be a pretty difficult process. It's not an instant fix, like a band-aid on a bruise. It's not a short term deal, like a charity or fundraiser for victims of an earthquake. If anything, community engagement is best described as a doctor's appointment. You arrive perhaps twenty minutes before your appointment, in hopes of perhaps sneaking in earlier, but then of course you are brought in ten minutes past your original appointment. You go in, maybe get weighed, and then are eventually led to the inevitable second waiting room. In many ways, the second waiting room is more painful then the first. You're all by your lonesome, stuck in a two-by-four compartment. You can hear the doctors passing by outdoor, and you hope that one of them is yours, but of course it never is. Twenty minutes later, you're sweaty, coughing or sneezing depending on your illness, and ready to simply roll out on the stretcher and call it a life. Fortunately, the doctor finally comes in, and of course is the nicest person you've ever met, making you feel a little sour for all the hateful things you've mumbled about them while waiting. A feel here, a look there, and after all that waiting, you finally get what you came for - a prescription. You may feel a little heated about the long and agonizing wait, but deep down you're just happy to get what you came for.

Community engagement isn't all that different when it comes down to it. People don't just come, make a few warm gestures, drop a few dollars and leave. Community engagement is all about creating a long-term relationship that brings together. You might cringe at the idea of "long-term", especially considering all the economic problems plastered across our nation today and even just the idea of waiting a "long" time to make a current situation better, but lets look at it this way: the greatest movements against the big threats in modern history, from everything like civil rights in the United States to apartheid in South Africa to the end of slavery in the 1800s and the abolishment of concentration camps during World War II all took not a day, not a month, not a year, but ages to succeed. The idea behind community engagement is not to give instant answers, but rather provide anyone willing to listen an opportunity to bring positive change to those in need, often in their own community. It's not about words and promises either, but constant action and aid that helps build success.

Less Talk, More Action: The "How"
Unlike a government or a charity, community engagement doesn't look to force change in any way shape or form. This is very much a group process that brings everyone together. Communication is key, and perhaps the biggest part that separates community engagement from other forms of charity. Some places look to force their way in and provide fast relief, whether it is through money, material aid like medicine or shelter, all positive things to be certain, but sometimes not the answer to their problems. Community engagement, however, looks to take the time to get to the heart of the matter by talking with the community. Through research and data gathering, it tries to look at the big picture and develop some answers to the big problems at hand. This can be a long and difficult process, but it importantly brings the community into the study and gives them a voice, an arena, for their problems, allowing the researchers to focus what's important rather than accidentally going off on a tangent. The community is involved every step of the way, whether it is in the research, the development of "the answer" or the "action" part of the plan.

So... What is Community Engagement?

Attempting to define "Community Engagement" may be as hard as the actual process of doing it. With literally dozens of interpretations, it can be a hard fought battle trying to find a sensible definition of the method as everyone utilizes community engagement in different ways. Let's start with the most obvious route in the 21st century, wikipedia:

"Community engagement refers to the process by which community benefit organizations and individuals build ongoing, permanent relationships for the purpose of applying a collective vision for the benefit of a community. While community organizing involves the process of building a grassroots movement involving communities, community engagement primarily deals with the practice of moving said communities towards change, usually from a stalled or otherwise similarly suspended position."

In a definition that includes the word "community" in some way, shape, or form seven times, it seems like a good idea to define the actual word itself. Communities as we generally like to them of them generally consists of a group of people that share some kind of common bond such as a political structure or ethnic tie. It is a flexible term that can cover a wide range of individuals in any given place or time, thus making "community engagement" an even more complicated idea to breakdown. At its most basic, however, communities deal with a group or set of people that share at least one common characteristic -- an idea that we can surely w.

The wiki definition provides the basic framework for what community engagement is. From it we understand that it involves some form of "community benefit organization" that builds "ongoing, permanent relationships" for the benefit of a community that is somehow "stalled" or in "suspended position". Though we receive a fair definition of what community engagement is all about from here, there seems to be a lot of ground to add before we really understand what it is all about. There is obviously a process -- a methodology -- involved, but what?

Let's look at another definition of community engagement, this one submitted by a Matt Perry:

"Community engagement is the participation of members of a community in assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating solutions to problems that affect them. As such, community engagement involves interpersonal trust, communication, and collaboration. Such engagement, or participation, should focus on, and result from, the needs, expectations, and desires of a community's members."

Here we get a more developed understanding of community engagement. It is not just a point-and-click job, but rather a complicated series of steps that leads to answers that ideally meet the needs of the community. It does not come easily either, but rather "involves interpersonal trust, communication, and collaboration" to help make engagement possible.

Considering this definition alongside wikipedia's, we can bridge the two and form our own nuanced definition of "community engagement":

"A multi-step process that involves a group of organized individuals who gather to participate and focus on bringing sustainable changes to a community in suspension, changes that supports the needs and desires of that community."

In this definition, we return to "community" and the importance of its place in the definition. It is vital to understand that community engagement seeks to help not just individuals, but rather entire communities. Community engagement, as we will soon see, can come in many shapes and forms when it comes to the processes, the people, and even the objectives, but regardless of all the methods, the underlying goal -- the benefit of a community -- is the same no matter how you spin it.

It is also important to emphasize that engagement not only seeks to make one or two changes, but a series of sustainable changes that encourages the progression of a community. How often do we see a major incident where charity is piled upon for days, sometimes weeks, and then neglected for the next major catastrophe months later? Charity only provides temporary relief, community engagement on the other hand looks for a way to create changes that are capable of being sustainable for long periods of time by not only the community, but the participants involved. This is both the charm and danger of community engagement that sets the requirements for the multi-stepped processes involved. As we will see in our analysis of the various methods that have been carried out by programs nationwide, while community engagement contains all the promise of a methodology that promotes fair and balanced change for the better of the community, it also presents a process that takes a long and arduous series of steps to become fruitful. This longer period of development, however, allows a deeper level of communication and collaboration that often gets left out of charity work. By establishing a long-term plan, community engagement allows bridges between communities that would otherwise never be made. It is in these bridges that the hope of beneficial change emerges and the success of community engagement arises.

Sources
Anonymous source.
Department of Sustainability and Environment.
Google Definitions.
Wiki Page on Community Engagement.
NIH.

Welcome to the 101!

Welcome to Community Engagement 101, a new blog where we'll be discussing the in's and out's of community engagement! Here we'll be looking at how grassroot communities emerge and use various techniques -- old and new -- to help move and change the world around us through this distinct process. From the very basics to the complex and obscure, we're here to help raise your understanding of what exactly "community engagement" is all about. We'll also introduce you to the wide range of projects going on at the moment by touring some of upstarts of the past decades and analyzing the techniques they've embraced to forward community engagement. From articles to interviews, blogs to VODs and reviews, you can expect to find out everything you could have possibly wanted to know about engagement and more in the 101, so stay tuned!