What’s important when recruiting people for a community project?

Some reflections from our social imagination and climate project in Melbourne

Those of you who have worked on a community project know how important and sometimes difficult it is to find the right participants. The Centre for Public Impact Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) is partnering with the City of Melbourne and Hinterland to experiment with how social imagination could help bring a sense of civic agency and possibility to the complex challenge of the climate crisis.

In this article, we share reflections on how we recruited and specifically, how the approach and design decisions might impact the makeup of the final imagineer team and the success of this project.

The right imagineers…

The first step in the recruitment process was to consider what would make a good imagineer. We needed a group of people with different perspectives to seed new relationships, conversations, and ideas that would otherwise not be possible. We also needed people with agency to enable changes as a result of the experience. So, we looked for people from different backgrounds and experiences and with different roles within Southbank (residents, students, businesses, local government etc.).

…and how to find them

We recruited participants by approaching key contacts across Southbank and circulating an invitation and flyer to support conversations. This approach was supported by a website designed to convey a sense of identity and tangibility to an otherwise strange and unorthodox invitation.

So what happened?

We received expressions of interest from 29 people and conversed with each one to learn about them, explain more about the project, and answer questions. We were looking for three main criteria to signify a good fit:

1. Did they feel dissatisfied with the status quo?
2. Were they personally interested in ideas of belonging and the climate crisis?
3. Could they attend all five days of workshops?

Melbourne’s Southbank. View from Flinders Street Station

What did we learn, and what might we try next time?

We relied heavily on the networks and social capital of the City of Melbourne Neighbourhood partner for Southbank Ash Lee, who is skilled at community building and has worked over the years to understand the depth and breadth of Southbank communities.

For the success of this project, what might be the benefits and costs of leaning heavily on the existing networks of the City of Melbourne?

Benefit 1: Strong and wide networks

The City of Melbourne has strong networks built over time. This will help make this work possible and sustain the momentum after our support is no longer available.

Benefit 2: Understanding of community needs

The City of Melbourne has sound knowledge of the communities within Southbank based on their time working there and an extensive community consultation process. This partnership meant we had less need for a lengthy and expensive discovery phase.

Benefit 3: Acceptability

Trusting relationships meant that invitations were more readily accepted. Given the commitment we were asking for, without this trust and relationship, it is doubtful that we would have found the right participants.

Cost 1: Additional labour for community partner

The time and emotional labour it takes to convince someone to accept an invitation is often unrecognised, particularly when the invitation is unfamiliar and requires a significant time commitment. At times, this cost for our neighbourhood partner felt particularly burdensome.

Cost 2: Narrow reach

Although we supplemented our approach with flyering and sharing across the communities, our reliance on the City meant some people might have been interested in participating but did not hear about the opportunity.

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

We chose to make this project begin with five days of workshops, a time commitment that we knew would be costly for some.

For the success of this project, what might be the benefits and costs of five full days of workshops?

Benefit 1: Relationships and social capital.

Time spent together will build relationships and connections across the group, which will set the group up for success when trying to make changes in their communities. They will require trust and support to sustain this work and each other’s networks to make change happen.

Benefit 2: Safety for risk

We believe the longer the group spends together, the more trust and psychological safety will develop, which is necessary for this creative work.

Benefit 3: Committed and engaged group

The barriers to entry mean that those who participate are likely to be enthusiastic and committed to the ideas and purpose. Prospective imagineers report using their leave from work to attend and going to great lengths to ensure their caring responsibilities are managed while they participate. This suggests that the group will be committed and enthusiastic, potentially more likely to act on what they learn and experience during the project.

Cost: Accessibility

The flip side of the big ask of five full days of participating in an experiment was the increased barrier to access. Although we did what we could to decrease barriers (funding childcare, providing a participant stipend), our group is composed of those who can absorb that risk if it goes wrong for them: those with time, money, and emotional labour to spare, or those willing to get involved because they are deeply committed to climate justice and or belonging across the Southbank.

Reflections on our recruitment process

1. We could have better utilised social and local print media, which have a broad reach and uptake. This could be easier in the second iteration of this process, given we will have experiences to speak from and images and videos to share the ideas and process more tangibly.
2. Given the extensive time commitment, we could have staged recruitment. We could have begun with a low-stakes 30-minute online meeting explaining the ideas and offered a short exercise to those interested. Those wanting more could have been invited to a half day, from which a smaller group could engage in a more extensive time commitment and deeper exploration of the ideas. This would have helped to manage the time commitment, splitting it across online and in-person.

What might this mean?

As a project team, we wondered about those who accepted our invitation and those who did not. How will this affect group dynamics and how they engage in what we have prepared, and what might the results be?

Additionally, what are the motivations of the individuals we will be working with — are there patterns across the group? How will the more commercial interests interact with those with a more grassroots community perspective?

Stay tuned to find out what we learn about whether social imagination can create more expansive thinking around the climate crisis and whether focusing on belonging to self, each other, and the planet enables a social imagination to create a world that works for us all.