Community engagement connects people to improve lives where they live.
Community engagement brings together individual, institutional, and social network interests to serve the common good. It is through the community building (institutional), community organizing (social networks), and community leadership (individual) infrastructure that community engagement happens.
Community engagement thrives in a context where partnerships, collaborations and coalitions are nourished. Its values are rooted in inclusion, tolerance, and active participation.
These values and context are operationalized in a real-world environment that is first and foremost diverse. This ‘diversity reality’ must be understood, acknowledged, and recognized as the driving cultural paradigm of community engagement.
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The definition offered above is intended to be a ‘working draft’. It is intended to be a ‘starting point’ for people embarking on a community engagement process to mull over, revise, and adjust to local realities.
Please chime in with your comments and ideas.
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What exactly is community engagement? A Google search and the Wikipedia definition provide some rather interested, but narrow and incomplete results. Academic research does not fare much better.
It appears that the term ‘community engagement’ is currently being used most in university settings referring to engaging students in community life. Also, there seems to be quite a few entrepreneurs that are trying to claim it as an area of consultancy. Interestingly enough, the domain name ‘communityengagement’ is still available as a .com and .org.
One thing that community engagement is not, is ‘civic’ engagement. Civic engagement connotes a certain level of formality, duty, ‘citizen-driven’, voters registration, Elks Club-type engagement that is intuitively different from ‘community’ engagement.
Neither is community engagement the same as ‘citizen participation’. Citizen participation usually refers to involvement in the political process; i.e.: public hearings.
Democratic governance, citizen juries, innovative polling practices and other emerging techniques offer a glimpse of how related fields can have similar “feel” to community engagement. New technologies (the internet and smart phones in particular) are reshaping how engagement, participation, and mobilization can happen in lighting speed. Certainly, the recent elections are a vivid example.
While all of the above is certainly related to community engagement, community engagement is more… Yet, can we define it? We can try.
The definition offered below is intended to be a ‘working draft’. It is intended to be a ‘starting point’ for people embarking on a community engagement process to mull over, revise, and adjust to local realities.
Please chime in with your comments and ideas.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Community engagement connects people to improve lives where they live.
Community engagement brings together individual, institutional, and social network interests to serve the common good. It is through the community building (institutional), community organizing (social networks), and community leadership (individual) infrastructure that community engagement happens.
Community engagement thrives in a context where partnerships, collaborations and coalitions are nourished. Its values are rooted in inclusion, tolerance, and active participation.
These values and context are operationalized in a real-world environment that is first and foremost diverse. This ‘diversity reality’ must be understood, acknowledged, and recognized as the driving cultural paradigm of community engagement.
Successful community engagement yields tangible, practical, meaningful, measureable, and impactful results valuable to the community at large, not only to those engaged in the process or vested in the results.
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