From community engagement to ownership
From a resource by Facilitating Power
How empowered is your community?
The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership charts a pathway to strengthen and transform our local democracies.
Thriving, diverse, equitable communities are possible through deep participation, particularly by communities commonly excluded from democratic voice & power. The stronger our local democracies, the more capacity we can unleash to address our toughest challenges, and the more capable we are of surviving and thriving through economic, ecological, and social crises.
It is going to take all of us to adequately address the complex challenges our cities and regions are facing. It is time for a new wave of community-driven civic leadership.
Leaders across multiple sectors, such as community-based organizations, local governments, philanthropic partners, and facilitative leaders trusted by communities, can use this spectrum to assess and revolutionize community engagement efforts to advance community-driven solutions.
The key to closing equity gaps and resolving climate vulnerability is direct participation by impacted communities in the development and implementation of solutions and policy decisions that directly impact them. This level of participation can unleash much needed capacity, but also requires initial capacity investments across multiple sectors to strengthen our local democracies through systems changes and culture shifts.
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Community-based organizations play a critical role in cultivating community capacity to participate in and lead decision-making processes that meet community needs and maximize community strengths.
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Staff and elected representatives within local government have essential roles to play in helping to facilitate systems changes to increase community voice and decrease disproportionate harms caused to parts of the community.
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Philanthropic partners have a role to play in partnering with impacted communities to balance uneven power dynamics and ensure adequate resourcing of essential community capacities.
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Third party facilitators and evaluators can help cultivate the conditions for collaboration and participation across sectors, while assessing and documenting progress towards practice goals and community solutions.
What are the developmental phases?
1. IGNORE
Marginalisation. In many subject areas, current systems have been historically designed to exclude deep involvement by community populations. If concerted efforts are not made to break-down existing barriers to participation, then by default, marginalization occurs.
2. INFORM
Placation. Information is the foundation for taking action towards real solutions to the threats we face. As the saying goes, 'knowledge is power'. If, however, community engagement efforts remain at the level of one-way information sharing, such efforts result in placation. The role of the community is reduced to absorbing information from those with more positional power; meanwhile, the notion that every day people can actually shape solutions is stifled.
3. CONSULT
Tokenisation. The most common form of ‘community engagement’ among mainstream institutions is consultation, usually in the form of semi-interactive meetings or online input in which members of the community have the chance to offer input into pre-baked plans. This is of course a step up from one-way information-sharing; a two-way exchange is initiated.
The biggest critique of this form of engagement is that decisions are often already made; the community input period simply serves to check a box. What’s more, if the people participating have not had the chance to develop a shared analysis of the problem or articulate a shared vision, values, and priorities, with their peers, then they don’t actually represent a ‘community,’ they are simply participating as individuals, and therefore are only ‘tokens’ of the community they are supposed to represent. This is the trap of consultation.
4. INVOLVE
Voice and Power Shift. Community organizing and power building is needed to bring community engagement out of tokenization and into true involvement of impacted residents in the decisions that impact them. Community organizing offers vital elements to local democracies:
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Community power puts needed pressure on local systems to make change;
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Education and leadership development supports residents to make informed decisions that reflect the needs and interests of their communities;
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Organizing builds the public will to develop, advocate for, and implement viable solutions;
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Community organizing can also balance uneven power dynamics so that communities can effectively collaborate among sectors with more institutional power.
5. COLLABORATE
Delegated Power. As a culture of systems change develops through community organizing, advocacy, and relationship-building, the limits of local systems to carry out changes on their own becomes apparent. At this point, the opportunity to collaborate across sectors emerges and makes culture shift possible.
Through the leadership and delegated power of community leaders, structures of participation can be made more accessible and culturally relevant to groups that have been excluded. In turn, collaboration requires and makes possible more trusting relationships and the healing of old divides within systems that tend to be more transactional. Collaboration also brings together unique strengths, assets, and capacities essential to enacting needed solutions, and that unconsciously go untapped.
6. DEFER TO
Community Ownership. We are building to community ownership to ensure communities have a direct say over what is needed to survive and thrive. Throughout each of the developmental phases, we must be consciously building the capacity for communities currently impacted by poverty, pollution, and political disenfranchisement to have increasingly more control over the resources needed to live, such as food, housing, water, and energy. Strengthening local democracies is about ending dependency and restoring dignity.
With the exception of ignore/marginalization, each of the development steps along the spectrum are essential for building capacity for community collaboration and governance. Communities must be informed, consulted, and involved; but through deeper collaboration we can unleash unprecedented capacity to develop and implement the solutions to today’s biggest crises in our communities.
Whole governance and community ownership are needed to break the cycle of perpetual advocacy for basic needs that many communities find themselves in. Developmental stages allow us to recognize where we are at, and set goals for where we can go together through conscious and collective practice, so key to transforming systems.
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From a resource by Facilitating Power, 10/09/2024