How to partner with communities
“Nothing about us without us”
The Can Do Approach is based on the ‘3Cs’ – Clients, Contractors and Communities – working together to decide what you want to achieve and how to measure success. From major investment programmes to day-to-day services, the key is to share power from start to finish.
The community aspect of this is crucially important. Too often in the past local residents have been the ‘poor relations’ when important decisions are being made about the future of their homes and communities. This guide aims to help you address this deficit.
Partnering with the community is about filling in the gaps in what you know and identifying the resources you need to deliver.
The community are a really important partner in any project. Knowing what they want, and how you can best meet those demands, is essential to meeting your objectives.
At the very least, community engagement enables people within the community to express what they want. Any good business engages with its customers to ensure their products meet the customers needs and desires - you are no different. So as well as being the fair thing to do, community engagement also makes good business sense.
Making the most of their knowledge, enthusiasm and skills will help you be more efficient in using the resources you already have, or any that you identify together.
By working together you can build up a more accurate picture of what matters to the community and what resources are available to help. But be aware: this is not about box ticking nor is it about appropriating these assets as yours without their consent or participation. Above all this needs to be based on genuine co-production.
If you’re following the Can Do Approach, then you’ve committed to co-production with the community. In order to get to that point you need to ensure that they are properly engaged.
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Co-production is the design and delivery of services through the engagement of all stakeholders. It is at the heart of the Can Do Approach.
It means designing, delivering, and owning a process, project, or an activity together, in a context of equality and reciprocity. It requires opportunities to be realised, created, and for people to be supported to access help when they need it.
It involves maximising strengths to overcome weaknesses, and developing a shared understanding of problems and opportunities. It is about reducing duplication and harnessing resources for common good.
You can find out more about Co-production from Co-production Network for Wales
This guide brings together a range of effective resources and gives you step-by-step help to engage with and harness the skills and expertise the community can bring to your projects.
The guide can be used whether you're at the beginning of your journey with the community, or part-way through. Always start by considering:
What is happening or being planned that will impact on the community?
What ‘facts’ do we know about the community and what are the gaps in our knowledge?
Once you have done this you will be ready to start the process of engagement. We think there are four distinct stages you need to work through, which is why we’ve structured the guide as follows:
Starting with purpose
Start by focusing on the purpose of your project together, why you want to engage the community and what you want to get from that engagement. Most importantly, involve the community itself at the earliest opportunity and build in as much flexibility as possible so that they can genuinely shape things from the outset. Ideally this should be part of a wider exercise establishing the vision and objectives of the project itself - it’s never too early or too late to start.
You can use these 5 steps to work together to help build a common understanding and purpose.
1. Vision
Express your aspiration in a single sentence. Think big, but be realistic.
2. Mission
Establish your purpose and the desired impact for a specific group or place. Think about what, who, and why.
3. Aims
Break down exactly what you want to achieve point-by-point.
4. Objectives
Outline how you are going to achieve your aims. What does success look like in each case? What are the specific must-haves by the end of the project?
5. Measures
Put in place the measures that will allow you to check on progress and assess the overall success of the project.
Understanding why people might engage
People generally engage for two reasons. Either they believe in your cause, purpose or vision, or they have a need of their own to fulfil.
Belief in a cause
or vision
They are looking for:
An attractive vision
A trustworthy leader
Multiple ways to engage
To fulfil their
own need
We need to:
Understand their needs
Provide multiple ways to engage
Demonstrate progress
The most successful approaches will meet both those criteria, sitting in the sweet spot between the two.
In engaging your community, you need to ask why would they engage with you? What is their motivation? And do you need to make that motivation clearer?
Remember: don’t expect the community to engage just because you think your work is important, and don’t expect them to engage on your terms alone.
Identifying the community
Community can mean different things to different people. Agreeing what we mean is a useful discussion to have with everyone around the table at the earliest opportunity.
Who is most affected?
As a focus, think about who is most affected by the project itself. This might be the residents of a particular area or the current users of a particular service.
Identifying “the community”
There are some important questions you can ask to help further define “the community”.
If you could create an ‘inner circle’ of only 10 representatives of the community, who would they be and why? What are the roles, resources and assets they bring?
Do they have a specific geographical reach?
What are the demographics of those involved?
What do they all have in common? Do they have a common interest or a local need that is bringing them together?
What are the reasons people want to be involved?
What are they willing to do or contribute to make that happen?
Who is prepared to get more involved?
What will make them interested and keep them involved?
What is the best way to approach them?
What will entice them to engage?
This is not to say that other stakeholders do not matter – other tenants of your organisation, nearby residents, future customers. You can maintain awareness of likely impacts and spill overs to these groups, but the priority should be to focus on what you have agreed together is “the community”.
Those affected most by the project provide an important focus. This not only helps agree priorities but also provides a visible, shared understanding for everyone involved.
Resources and ideas to help you better understand “the community”:
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Try creating an empathy map of your ‘typical’ community members; a fictitious persona that represents what the local community sees, says, does, feels, hears and thinks.
This can help you keep “your community” at the front of your mind when developing your project. It can give you a useful reference point for trying to anticipate their responses.
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Validate any assumptions made about individuals, organisations or processes by reviewing what is fact, what is opinion and what is rumour.
Take a statement that you’ve been told and seriously consider if it's a fact, or simply an opinion or rumour. Make sure to get additional perspectives when conducting this type of review.
This can help you build up a deeper and more accurate understanding of your community.
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Create a stakeholder map for those with power and influence - what groups, organisations and individuals hold the most ‘weight’ to create action? Don’t just identify the relationships you have already developed, try and recognise potential relationships you may need as well.
This should give you a sense of how well-developed your network within “your community” is. If you can’t access or influence the people who are able to instigate change, who do you know that is able to? Who do you know who can unlock those important relationships?
A great tool to help with this activity is the ‘Power and Influence’ chart from Oxfam Cymru’s Sustainable Livelihoods Approach: Toolkit for Wales (2015)
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It’s important, but difficult, to get people talking. Here are some techniques that we think are useful for getting discussion going.
Low-tech social networking is an idea to replace the dreaded “Hi, my name is” section of an event or meeting. Leave a plain piece of paper, pens and sticky notes near the tea and coffee. Encourage people to add their own name and draw and annotate the connections they have with other people in the room. It helps to demonstrate that it’s not necessarily a room full of strangers, and that your community may have lots in common to discuss.
A world café is an exercise to conduct with a large group to facilitate more informal discussion than a standard roundtable meeting. Imagine a café where a different discussion is taking place on on each table. Identify people in your group to host and record each discussion. Split your group evenly between the tables. Their are lots of ways to move people between the tables - either rotate the groups evenly, or try something a little different like this example
Partnering with the community
The next step is to engage with the wider “community”. There are two golden rules to follow at this stage. The first is to be open and upfront with everyone from the start about what you want to achieve and how you will work together. You can think of this as communicating to the community the steps you’ve followed in this guide so far.
The second is to start with the people that will help you to connect and widen your circle of engaged community members. But how do you know why they are?
Who are the most effective people to engage with first?
Although everyone is an individual it can be helpful to think in terms of what motivates and characterises particular community activists.
Connectors & Mavens are people that are well connected within their communities and/or openly enjoy learning and sharing knowledge to help others. ‘Maven’ is a Yiddish word for ‘one who is knowledgeable’.
They are generally extroverts, outgoing, confident and/or are experienced in some way. If they don’t know something themselves, it’s likely that they can connect you with someone who does.
Salespeople are people that influence others to make decisions (whether they are aware of it or not). They are generally thoughtful, contemplative, strategic, provide reasoning, and can be opinionated.
Not all salespeople are purposely intending to influence, many are looked up to by others but don’t realise it, nor do they credit themselves.
Remember: identifying these personalities provides a way of identifying and navigating the resources that individuals can bring from “your community”.
Getting people on board
Every community will have people either already engaged or with an appetite to get involved. Identifying these people and understanding their motivations to get involved is an important part of the process.
You also need to ensure that your engagement reflects the wider community, and it’s not biased towards the most vocal or readily involved people. Working with those easiest to engage could leave you with a distorted understanding of the community’s wants and needs, limited ideas and stagnation, and could limit the sustainability of any engagement you generate.
Remember: the people who are most likely to engage can very easily become the subject of volunteer fatigue. You should also be mindful of creating dependency or over reliance on you.
Ways of engaging
No one single form of engagement is enough. Every method has drawbacks but mixing methods can secure better results.
Your selection of methods should be guided by the context and characteristics of the community, the trust and reciprocity you have already built up and, the time and resources you all have to give.
They should be both quantitative (things that are easy to measure and categorise with numbers ) and qualitative (the colour to the numbers that include opinions, motivations and desires).
Methods can include surveys, focus groups and exhibitions. But never ignore the small opportunities to engage and the opportunities you have to make it happen. A conversation, no matter how informal, is a means of engagement so make sure you don’t miss what the community have to say.
Remember: there is no one way to engage the community or seek the views and participation of those within it.
Asset mapping
Asset mapping is an exercise that involves identifying either a group or an individual’s strengths (or ‘assets’), to apply to a particular problem. It’s a positive approach, harnessing things we have direct or indirect access to, rather than dwelling on what’s missing. It’s therefore an effective method for gaining confidence, problem-solving ability and establishing new ideas.
There are five categories of community assets:
Social Assets – social connections/networks
Financial Assets – capital and revenue funding available
Public Assets – local services and amenities
Human Assets – individual skills, knowledge and values
Physical Assets – physical items such as buildings, transport, technology, or equipment
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Our recommended starting point for asset mapping is derived from Oxfam Cymru’s The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach: Toolkit for Wales (tool 8 on pages 39 and 40 of the toolkit).
To start, get a large piece of paper and split it into five sections. You can use columns, a pentagram, or radial spokes.
Name each section for the assets you’ll be writing in there (social, financial, public, human, physical).
Under each one start thinking about, discussing (this is crucial for using asset mapping as an engagement tool), and writing down each strength or asset in the relevant section.
You’ll end up with a a visual representation of all the resources you can call on when faced by a problem. Just like a geographical map, it’s much easier to plan a route when you can get an overview of the landscape.
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There are two ways in which these conversations can start:
1: People come to you with a particular problem and in turn you use the asset mapping technique as a guide to help them find potential solutions.
2: You approach individuals and ask them if they would mind giving you the time to go through an exercise that will help better understand what matters to local people.
As you become experienced conversations become second nature and when issues are raised you naturally start asking open questions to help them identify what assets are available to help.
Remember: it is about supporting people to identify their strengths, and harnessing them to meet their needs.
A continuous cycle
There’s a really important reason that this section is called beginning to partner with the community. Your ultimate aim should be to build trust, relationships and engagement in a way that lasts. That means a continuous cycle of refreshing everyone’s understanding of your objectives, communicating what’s going to happen, and continually looking at performance to demonstrate that progress.
Treating community work like a “task and finish” exercise would see the benefit of your hard-earned engagement diminish and eventually fade away over time. Always remember that the trust of a community is hard to earn, but easy to lose.
Remember: you are aiming for equal partnership with the community through co-production, and that means committing for the long haul.
Case Study
In 2020, “Ty Glas” completed a new innovative housing residency comprising of 6 units in urban South Wales. Residents moved in just prior to the Coronavirus lockdown of March 2020. As restrictions and contact ‘bubbles’ began to ease, the residents reported feelings of isolation and a need to improve their wellbeing. Still unable to travel more than 5 miles from their home, they began to introduce themselves to each other.
Next to the development was a small piece of wasteland (owned by Ty Glas), and between themselves they began clearing the area as a way to socialise and keep themselves busy, while transforming the area to create a communal meeting space. It also became apparent that amongst the group was an experienced volunteer coordinator and a few keen gardeners.
They discussed their ideas and the possibilities with their local Tenant Liaison Officer who agreed to allow them to transform the land into a small communal garden area to be managed by the group.
Ty Glas supported their idea by providing some gardening materials and some extra manpower from volunteer colleagues. They had an area of wasteland improved with little cost to themselves while the tenants were empowered and able to alleviate their isolation worries.
This win-win situation is a perfect example of how the landlord and the community identified each other’s assets to co-produce a solution at little cost, that also has a great chance of long-term sustainability.
So what were the takeaways from this case study?
Co-production engendered a trusting and positive relationship between the housing association and its tenants.
The experience built foundations and scope to work together more in the future.
There is likely to be a knock-on effect e.g. fewer complaints
The health and wellbeing of tenants and staff is likely to improve because of the positive relationships
Tenants have gained confidence, they feel both empowered and a sense of support.
Ty Glas have an ‘eyesore’ developed and sustained with little input.
All of the above have been acquired by effective cooperation and communication and at minimal cost.