COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

At the heart of our work is our approach to participation and community engagement.

A lack of ownership and involvement from people who have experienced social issues first-hand and groups that are likely to be disproportionality affected, can result in the development of irrelevant and ineffective solutions. This leads to a lack of engagement in the programmes and interventions that are supposedly designed to support or resolve the issues.

Communities have been the victims of research extraction from third parties who are parachuted in to ‘do research’. These communities do not benefit from this research extraction which results in deep levels of mistrust to traditional forms of research and the people and organisations conducting it.

Not listening top and prioritising the voices of people who have experienced social issues first-hand and groups that are likely to be disproportionality affected, nor delving deeper to understand people’s behaviours, motivations and beliefs, means that we are not truly appreciating their lived experience and missing out on valuable insight, full of cultural nuance. This negatively affects the quality of social programming and service design and only deepens inequalities in society.

To reimagine a fair society, we must centre people who have experienced social issues first-hand and groups that are likely to be disproportionality affected and focus on issues that reinforce or create inequalities and injustice. Community engagement is therefore paramount across all the work that we do – from participatory research and developmental evaluation to co-design and coproduction of new and existing funding and services.

As we continue to deepen our approach to participation and community engagement we will:

Prioritise participatory approaches and look for ways to do it, rather than seeing it as an afterthought.
Deepen our approach to engaging community/peer researchers.
Support other organisations to embed participatory research practices through toolkits, insights and training.
Steer our partners toward co-production to ensure services are created by valuing the skills, experience and knowledge of the end user equally alongside other contributors.
Test creative or new approaches to deepen our impact – seeking out opportunities to use ‘Most Significant Change’ in particular.
Ensure people who have experienced social issues first-hand have the knowledge power and resources to tell their own stories.
Deliver a real-time learning strategy around participation and community engagement to shift mindsets in the wider sector towards embedding participatory approaches as standard practice.