More and more organizations and community groups have a mandate or mission that requires them to engage communities of one kind or another for the purpose of creating social justice. The enthusiasm and excitement that can come with feeling that you can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives is like gasoline. It can provide energy for the work of social justice – or, it can provide fuel for a project blowing up in your face.
That is to say, in our excitement to engage a community, we can skip over important questions that should guide our potential work. Here are 5 we should ask EACH time to make sure we “first do no harm”...
1) Why are we doing this work?
The easy answer to this question for we who look to engage community is nearly automatic - to help the people of course! This is potentially wonderful - AND not enough to keep from doing harm.
We don't typically engage communities with explicitly malicious motives. We take part in community engagement (CE) because we want to make the world a better place. Our motives for CE are very important. In some cases our motives are about a sense that we need a clearer purpose in our lives, or that we want to give back, or help others less fortunate than us.
These are not necessarily evil reasons for CE, but they can fool us into believing a false equation.
Specifically: I do something I feel will help others = Others will be helped
The desire to be helpful does not always mean people need or want the help we’re offering. If our motives for helping revolve around ourselves (as an individual, group, or institution), they may lead to more hurt than help.
2) What's the history of community engagement in this place?
There are at least two reasons to understand a bit about who has and how a community has been engaged in the recent and distant past. First, it's important to gain a sense of how a community sees engagement efforts. For instance, many communities have a history of outside intervention by well-meaning folks who have done more harm than good. Trust is something that these communities guard for good reasons.
In other spaces, CE has taken on established patterns that help shape community expectations. If your CE work falls into old (unwanted) patterns, whatever innovative twists you've added, locals will likely be disinterested. Likewise, there can be norms for generating respect and input that a CE group's failure to recreate will likely render the group’s work useless.
Second, it is possible that your CE agenda, especially if created ahead of time without community co-creation, will replicate previous or current efforts - or address “problems” that are not felt by the community. Plenty of marginalized communities can practically predict the attitudes, solutions, and expectations their latest "savior" will show up with.
Doing your homework means listening to a variety of voices within the community and resisting the urge to develop solutions to problems you have not yet deeply understood. This is also true for groups with long histories in a place - our understanding of the past and present are fluid. What you interpreted a few years ago (let alone a few decades) may no longer apply.
3) Who is at the table?
This “table” is the metaphorical table where the power to define problems, dream about solutions, and assign responsibility takes place. Asking “who is at the table?” is important to examining how the power to plan and act is distributed. Whatever stage we are in our Community Engagement, it is always useful to ask whose voice may be missing and to notice whose voice may be privileged in the work.
The answers to these questions give us a glimpse into the future.
First, a table where problems are defined, solutions are created, and responsibility is delegated that also excludes the voices of marginalized or vulnerable people RECREATES the very injustices the group seeks to address. That ought to be a future we are trying to avoid.
Second, it shows us who has a stake in the success or failure of the endeavor. People are not accountable because others say so, but because they choose to be accountable to one another. If community engagement aspires to be a co-created experience for all involved, widespread ownership in the project is far more likely when people have a hand in its creation from the beginning to the end.
4) What are the felt needs of the community?
By asking about the felt needs of a community, trust in the capacity of community members to order their lives for themselves is restored. This is a humanizing act in and of itself.
Certainly an outside eye or specialized expert can offer insights into needs that are not obviously apparent. However, the community deserves the trust of outsiders to evaluate information and make decisions regarding their community.
We who look to engage communities are welcome to offer insights, data, and interpretations. However, it is important that we remain reflective toward how we might use credentials, language, or the promise of resources to manipulate a group rather than participate in dialogue as equals.
This is of utmost importance to the sustainability of relationships and trust between “experts” and communities. Dismissive experts and gatekeepers to resources are one reason that trust in institutions has so eroded.
5) What does success look like?
Often in community engagement, success is measured in terms that are too high, too low, or altogether irrelevant.
On the one hand, CE endeavors aspire to wonderfully ambitious heights. We’ll end homelessness, or curb drug abuse, or reform the education system. Our dreams should be big. But most CE projects happen on a timeline that makes this sort of systemic change unlikely to happen within a short, set timeline.
On the other hand, we sometimes assume that it’s the thought that counts. We’re doing what we can, with what we have, within the boundaries of our time and resources. This is true to some extent, but can sometimes be used to justify sloppy work or unmet promises.
Evaluating CE is as much about understanding the purpose and values of the endeavor as it is accounting for the specific projects, programs, and interventions.
Creating spaces where community members, particularly those who have historically been excluded from decision-making and collective-planning, have the ability to be fully present as humans and express their felt needs, their expertise, and their capacity for self-determination is a radical act.
Too many community members are “engaged” in ways where their capacities, aspirations, and capabilities are marginalized in the name of community betterment.
Asking these 5 questions can make it more likely that community engagement is a project of social justice rather than a reproduction of dehumanizing social relations.
Looking for a process for this work? Check out this free workbook.