How to increase community involvement
Extracted from 'Councillors involvement in communities' workshop by Essence Consulting.
'There isn't a single service or development in Britain which hasn't been improved by actively involving local people'. [Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government]
'Community Empowerment' is about people and government, working together to make life better. It involves more people being able to influence decisions about their communities and more people taking responsibility for tackling local problems, rather than expecting others to. To achieve this lofty ambition, it is important to review and develop engagement processes to ensure that they are effective and enable an organisation to gain feedback from the whole community (including communities of place, interest and origin).
Setting the scope
Defining the scope of a participatory activity clarifies what the boundaries are. You should consider how much can really change as a result of the exercise. This will help you to decide whether participation is the right thing to do and what level of participation is appropriate. You should only go ahead with your participation project if:
it is clear how it can make a difference;
there a demand or interest from potential participants to get involved; and
there are sufficient resources to make the process work properly.
Purpose
Agreeing a clear purpose is the most important stage of any engagement process and no process should proceed without it. A bad purpose is poorly defined and open to many different interpretations.
A good purpose:
has clear outcomes and outputs;
does not need to be limited or prescriptive; and
must be easy to understand and an accurate reflection of what is going to happen.
It is important that that all key players are aware of and supportive of the purpose of a process. The agreed purpose provides a reference point throughout the process and also gives participants the opportunity to make an informed choice about getting involved.
Participants
Success depends upon being clear about who the participants are and what role they are playing. Participants themselves need to know what role they are expected to play within any given participatory process. In general terms, there are two ways of thinking about selecting participants:
Open-anyone that wants to should be able to participate.
Selective-the numbers or types of participants who may be chosen as part of the process.
There are three main selection approaches:
Representative: cross-section of the target audience.
Instrumental: those with appropriate power, knowledge.
Required: those required by any guiding regulation, funding regime and so on.
Context
Take into consideration the local context as you must be as clear as to whether this creates any obstacles or opportunities. Understanding the wider context is important to ensure that the participation process:
is responsive to participant needs;
builds on previous experience and learns lessons from the past;
does not duplicate other activities; and
progresses quickly and is relevant.
The factors that are likely to affect the success of any participatory process include the decision-making environment; history & patterns of involvement and characteristics and capabilities of participants. It is often worth spending time developing a shared understanding of the context as part of the participatory process.
Follow-up
Too often not enough time is spent on follow up activities. Evaluation and review of practice is very important and planning an evaluation in advance ensures that you learn as you go along as much is possible. This enables those involved to judge whether or not the process has been successful. However, an evaluation only works if it includes the perspectives of all those involved in the process. The views of the participants can be the most useful, but also the hardest to get if not gathered at the time.
