Harnessing the Power of Community Engagement for Lasting Social Impact
From transportation infrastructure projects to placemaking strategies, “community engagement” has gained buzz and popularity across public and private sectors. It’s known to vet ideas and solutions before allocating resources and breaking ground. But what do we mean by “community engagement”? What is the role of community engagement in facilitating the positive change we all desire?
At Interplay, our community engagement praxis is born from the idea and belief that thoughtfully designed engagement encourages inclusive civic participation, invites collaboration and co-creation, and fosters a sense of agency and ownership of processes and outcomes. When we design inclusive and accessible engagement activities — and move at the speed of community — we create space for people with a spectrum of identities, experiences, and ideas to contribute to meaningful change. So for us, navigating these dynamics with intention, sensitivity, and reciprocity are the keys to achieving successful engagement and long-term relationships. Better yet, with diverse communities that accelerate social change.
Refining this praxis over the years led us to focus on how the design and implementation of community engagement can drive meaningful change for a spectrum of communities across a range of social impact projects. As a result, we’re redefining what community engagement means for organizations, practitioners, and community organizers.
So how does this new definition help create lasting change? We believe that community engagement is about sharing insights and power — both as a framework and process, it creates a reciprocal flow of data, ideas, experimentation, outcomes, and evaluation. Then, when it’s enabled by authentic relationships and trust, it equips people to learn, contribute, and take action, facilitating new experiences, growth, and confidence in creating community-driven change. This kind of authentic collaboration rooted in true power-sharing creates the deepest and most irresistible form of engagement.
We’ve discovered that effective engagement is achieved through a multipronged approach that:
Understands the root causes of the issue at hand
Creates processes that support information and power-sharing
Designs meaningful ways for communities to learn and make decisions
Honors the time, expertise, and labor communities contribute to creating change
Through our insights, gleaned from our research and project experience, we’ve outlined a paradigm shift in the definition of community engagement and a best-practice step-by-step framework for meaningfully engaging diverse communities through social impact projects. Our goal is to inspire and support organizations and causes to think about and approach community engagement differently.
The Community Engagement Journey
We’ve developed a clear set of effective steps for impactful community engagement — from establishing authentic relationships to empowering communities to generate solutions that meet their needs and create meaningful, sustainable change.
Step 1: Create Shared Understanding
Who better than those most impacted by racial, social, and environmental issues to define the problem, identify root causes, describe barriers, and find solutions made for their immediate and long-term needs?
Through years of leading ethnographic research for social impact projects, we’ve come to a clear conclusion: communities possess invaluable knowledge and expertise that can significantly inform the design and implementation of social impact projects. People understand the unique challenges, cultural nuances, and existing resources within their communities better than anyone else. By tapping into this wealth of knowledge, organizations and causes can develop more contextually relevant strategies that are sensitive to the community's historical, cultural, economic, and social context. Incorporating local expertise also fosters a sense of inclusivity, power-sharing, and respect for community insights.
Step 2: Establish Relationships
We have yet to see a successful social impact project that didn’t have strong relationships as its foundation. Relationships are the cornerstone of effective engagement — and establishing them within diverse communities doesn’t happen overnight. We see social impact projects as an opportunity to learn about communities, from their point of view, while mitigating the risk of exploitation or saviorism. Authentic engagement enables us to seed relationships and nurture them over time so that change-making is sustainable between communities and mission-driven organizations.
Step 3: Build Trust / Reciprocity
We’ll be the first to tell you what doesn’t work: exploitative, transactional engagement. It’s the antithesis of building trust and demonstrating reciprocity. We build trust by leading with transparency, mutual understanding, respect, and honoring the time, expertise, and labor communities lend to change-making. We show, rather than tell, by actively involving community members in the planning, implementation, and evaluation stages of a project. This reciprocal approach sets the foundation for trust-building and long-term collaboration and ensures that initiatives are tailored to meet the genuine needs of communities.
Step 4: Invest & Empower
Community engagement gives individuals and groups agency to define issues that affect their lives and develop solutions that meet their needs. Well-resourced engagement projects can also enable and empower community members to have a sustainable role in shaping processes and outcomes — and their voice becomes integral to decision-making and defining milestones and the next steps in a project. When we invest in engagement, we are investing in communities — from infrastructure to honoraria. As a result, well-invested and empowered communities are more likely to continue supporting, advocating, and mobilizing resources for initiatives after initial project goals and outcomes are achieved.
Step 5: Collaborate + Innovate
What’s the best way to solve an imagination crisis? Invite community members and subject matter experts with diverse perspectives to the table. Together, you can foster creativity and innovation by encouraging collaborative problem-solving. This diversity of thought often leads to the emergence of innovative solutions that may not have been possible through traditional top-down approaches. By leveraging the collective intelligence of the community, social impact projects can uncover new approaches and strategies that better address complex issues.
Ultimately, the success of social impact projects hinges on their ability to generate meaningful and sustainable change. Community engagement maximizes impact by ensuring that interventions are relevant, effective, and accepted by the people they are intended to benefit. By involving communities as partners rather than passive recipients, projects are more likely to achieve their objectives and create lasting positive outcomes.
Community engagement is far from just a buzzword; it is, in and of itself, a theory of change, and a fundamental principle that underpins effective social impact work. By prioritizing shared understanding, relationships, trust-building, empowerment, investments, and collaboration, your projects can harness the collective knowledge and power of communities to address and solve some of our most pressing racial, social, and environmental justice issues.
By investing in community engagement, we can unlock the full potential of social impact initiatives and create a more equitable and sustainable world for all.
