What’s the value of community engagement?
Your response to the phrase “community engagement” will be telling. Either it’s business as usual for you, which indicates you probably work in a charity or a social enterprise and have been exploring, expanding and perhaps normalising it within your organisation for a good few years now. Large charities, in particular, are setting a precedent in this area, and showing the structural possibilities, cultural revelations and personal impact it can have.
Realising Potential
Current HI Future partner, Back on Track, is running a citizenship programme where they’re introducing disadvantaged adults to the power of their lived experience and its potential value in future education, (re)training and employment. Recent client Turn2us have a co-production partner programme, where people with lived experience of financial insecurity are embedded into the design and delivery of their grants and programmes.
Shelter’s GROW Trainee programme, to recruit and offer work experience to people impacted by homelessness, goes above and beyond however. Not only does it both offer both relief and prevention from the systemic issues faced, but demonstrates just how much potential exists within traditionally marginalised and disadvantaged communities. Potential that more often than not goes overlooked. For shame!
Serving People
We’ve found this is often the case in the public sector. While consultation has long been the go-to in government, the opportunity to provide perspectives and inform priorities is often shaped by institutional and political agendas, rather than looking at the context of and hopes people have for their own lives. As a result, the value created tends to err in favour of organisations, as opposed to the people they’re there to serve.
Academia, on the other hand, is a mixed bag when it comes to public engagement. While health specifically and humanities more broadly do speak to the communities which research is uncovering insights and posing recommendations for, exploring problems and possibilities with the public isn’t the norm across faculties. Bureaucratic practises, processes and policies — endemic across the sector — have a lot to answer for.
As for businesses, community engagement rarely gets a look in. Given the private sector’s success depends on meeting the needs of users and consumers, it’s rare to find an organisation which puts people first in understanding, designing and developing its products and services. Market and user research plus user and penetration testing are all gaining pace, but only at the point where solutions touch their target customer’s lives.
Unlearning Systems
All of which is understandable, of course. We live in systems which value bottom lines, cost-effectiveness and knowing best. We measure value in profit, people processed and cited passages, over and above the security, love and purpose people need. It’s hard to forget — in a society which champions power, wealth and fame above all else — that it’s connection, consciousness and creativity that brings us the most joy.
Yet, overcoming our conditioning to bring humanity back to our work — regardless of the sector we’ve landed in — isn’t mutually exclusive with the success we’ve hardwired our sectors, industries and organisations towards achieving. In fact, putting people first when advancing the knowledge of our species, serving the tax-paying public and selling needed products and services can be most efficacious, and in every way (I see you, Scaffold fans).
Trusted Solutions
At its most basic level, engaging communities is going to supercharge performance. Understanding what’s important to people’s lives, the challenges and opportunities they’re facing and aligning the solutions created is only ever going to help sell more, receive more engagement or be useful. It’s also going to provide more fulfilment to those delivering them.
That’s because making a difference in people’s lives is far more motivating than lining the pockets of shareholders or promoting the good (?) name of an impersonal institution. It also reduces risk, for everyone from the CEO (who will ultimately cop the blame) to the front-line worker should things go awry. When the world runs on reputations and the threats of fines or unexpected costs hang in the balance, getting ahead of issues pays.
Also bringing dividends (so to speak) are the unexpected insights, opportunities and ideas that emerge when engaging communities. At Noisy Cricket, we never would have realised that the inherent strengths of people impacted by homelessness mean they’re suitable for employment opportunities they never could have imagined. It’s transformed our approach to homeless employment through our HI Future venture.
Mutual Benefit
Having co-created HI Future with government, businesses, charities and people impacted by homelessness, our cross-sector partners have faith that it will help them find the talent they previously would have overlooked. For those impacted, they can trust that we’ll help remove the structural and cultural barriers within organisations that impact their ability to live secure and stable lives.
Of all the reasons to undertake community engagement, trust is the most fundamental. Trust can only exist when one or more people or entities have faith in the ability and reliability of the other to meet mutual needs. It’s rooted in relationships, and the choices made to honour that. All that community engagement does is remove the agendas and assumptions made about the people our organisations are here to serve.
Instead, it moves us towards a place where we consider what’s important to everyone, and makes sure that everyone mutually benefits. It’s a choice, but one that only organisations, industries and sectors can make, with the resources, budgets and capacity they have at their disposal. The question is, who’s needs are you meeting, and how willing and able are you to let go — of knowing best, being in control and making decisions — to realise its value?
