Community Engagement: Understanding Its Pillars, Types, And Skills For Employability

Understanding Community Engagement

The process involving operating collaboratively along with a various group of individuals, who are affiliated to certain geographic proximity, a similar state of condition, special interests to address, similar concerns affecting the overall well-being of people is known as an approach of community engagement. Community engagement is considered to be one of the most significant tools for accomplishing behavioral, social, environmental economical changes in the community with the intent of improving the overall health or wellbeing of the members (Felber 2019). The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the cognizance regarding community engagement with the support of the theories followed by defining the state and approaches of community engagement. The paper will be concluded by summarizing the main conceptions of community engagement and the strategies stimulating or maintaining the practices.

Community engagement integrates a collaborative approach with the sole intention directed towards the strategy of public health intervention. Community engagement is very crucial and the significance of its implication can be witnessed at the time of public health emergencies. Community engagement focuses on the area of risks with the planning of framing response actions. The application of community engagement can be witnessed with the features of transparency, recognition of diversity, equality, inclusiveness, cooperation, influence, responsiveness, and deliberation. Community Engagement is strategized with the offer of relevant information to the community in a simplistic manner. Community Engagement practices and approaches must consider the option or potentiality of a diverse group with differences in age, backgrounds, mental and physical ability, gender, and socio-economic group. A community may belong to the same geographical region, but they have differences and parameters of diversities, which must be considered while considering interests, backgrounds, aspirations, and needs. Community engagement practices do not only encourage the involvement of members but also should offer the opportunity of contributing to all sections of the community. Equality should be the core principle for facilitating any approach of establishing community engagement programs by not directing the control of the decisions over one specific section. Cooperation from the community members can be expected by scheduling meetings, with the intent of offering convenience as per the timing and place for the majority of the community (ACU.edu.au 2020). Responding to the complaints and concerns through the members of communities is crucial as constructive feedbacks can contribute to the whole process of the project. The decisions for the wellbeing of the community need to involve thoughtful consideration for reaching careful deliberation.

Pillars of Community Engagement

The community engagement practices in a region should be built upon a few considerable theories including:

Theory of change for consumer involvement or patient care: This theory of community engagement focusses on the strategies of service development, where the practices empower the individuals of a community for elevating their engagement with respect to the role and contribution of the service professionals, accomplishing a sustainable change within services.

Theory of changes directed at lay-delivered interventions or peer-delivered intervention: Services tends to engage communities and individual from communities for delivering interventions, which ultimately empowers them through the enhancement of skills. This specific approach aims at affecting the sustainable change within peer and individual groups.

Theory of empowerment in reducing the health inequalities amongst communities: In this theory, people are involved within a program based on community development with the intent of creating an empowered community with the outcome of improving mutual support and directing collective action for mobilizing resources.

Community engagement can be denoted as the range of activities, which is built with the motive of ensuring capacity as well as affirm human dignity from reciprocal and sustainable collaboration along with the communities with the experiences of marginalization and disadvantage. Community engagement is not restricted till the practice of helping members for short-term goals but is about understanding and working towards the well-being of the community by establishing a longer-term relationship by developing meaningful solutions over complex issues such as disparity in community educational, developmental and healthcare opportunities or services.

Community engagement can also be understood within the understanding of five pillars, which represents the areas of functioning in community engagement. One of the pillars in facilitating community engagement practices involves building connections. The main purpose of this principle is to generate a trustable, strong, and long-term connection with the community institutions as well as the broader community. This principle or core pillar helps in ensuring genuine connections, empathic understanding, understanding, and recognition of fullness with dignity and flourishing the growth of human beings. Another principle or pillar of community engagement deals with the development of sustainability and capacity within a community with the feature of humility. The nature of incorporating humility can ensure equity with no bounding of inferiority and superiority, equal and productive collaboration with the community. The aspect of humility can also significantly minimize the ultimate power differentials, which is largely prevalent in various aspects of the community practices. Humility can be considered as the required requirement for honest cognition with respect to the aspect of human dignity. Humility helps in building contributions for the people, who have contributed majorly in building a long-term relationship.

Forms or Types of Community Engagement

Another principle or pillar of community engagement is affirming dignity. The community engagement practices recognize equity and inherent moral worth and rights in human beings. Respecting dignity amongst community members implies working for confirming the provision and protection of fundamental human rights. This principle also reflects the growth of capacities, which leads to the realization of purpose, self-worth, and the meaning of the required practices. The development of understanding reflects another section of community engagement, where the aim is directed towards the understanding of people. The main purpose and objective of empathic understanding are to reflect and listen to the heart with the intellect for deep intellectual and emotional comprehension of dispositions, desires, hope, needs, and beliefs. Pursuing justice is another area of significance, which denotes the nature of working for social justice. By the work, contribution, and intent of developing understanding and recognition, operating with humility, building actual long-term connections, affirming the aspect of human dignity. The common good is tough to accomplish if the pillars of community engagement theory are ignored.

Community engagement can be categorized into various forms or types, each serving the intention of encouraging maximum and equitable contribution. The types or forms of community engagement:

• Community Building: This form of the community engagement practice motivates the people to bring them together by elevating the understanding amongst the member. One of the instances can be Morris Community Meal (edu.au 2020).
• Community Education: The projects which are meant to offer instructional services or serving the population for educating the public regarding the emerging social issues with a non-biased approach reflect the practice of community education. Instances of Community Education can be Community ESL courses, TREC programs (edu.au 2020).
• Community Organizing: The projects which are aimed at amalgamating efforts of each community member for addressing various community concerns and for acting upon progressive opportunities for development of a community. This form of community engagement can only operate for the local or regional issues and issues which are non-partisan.
• Deliberative Dialogue: These types of projects intend to and work towards intentionally bringing people together for building an understanding across the differences in culture.
• Direct Service: These types of community engagement projects help in offering valuable products and services to groups, communities, and groups. Few instances are establishing the volunteer shift in a regional organization, creation of the tools  within the area of social media, and the creation of community mural.
• Economic Development: These projects are based on working over the development of the regional economy sustainably. This type of project is usually operated with the collaboration of not-for-profit organizations with governmental or authoritative entities. Few instances can be the feasibility analysis of understanding the success of projects for attracting people of the community.
• Engaged research: The research projects that directly derive benefits for the communities through the clarification of causes in the community challenges. These types of community engagement projects or practices ensure contribution to the current challenges, ensures the mapping of community assets (Battaglia et al. 2019).
• Advocacy: The approach of advocacy determines the strategy of building a knowledge-based approach for enabling the members of the group to contribute to the policy-making procedure and constructive research. The advocacy approach supports the development and skills of community members by strengthening the relationship, engaging skills, and expertise and by advocating the overall equitable well-being of the community members within the authoritative system (Ahmed et al.2017).
• Project-based community engagement: These programs broaden the scope of addressing the gap of knowledge and community-based concerns through allocating resources, responsibilities, and learning opportunities towards the volunteers and experts of the communities.  

The skills that define the nature and contribution of volunteers and workers in community-engaged services:

• Affinity towards understanding people: The skills and nature of understanding people reflect one of the crucial skills in a volunteer and worker. The skill of understanding amongst the member of the community is what drives the intent and contribution of working towards community engagement programs.
• Creative and excellent communication skills: Workers and volunteers should have the ability or skills to attract the members of the community through creative communication skills, creating interesting content for indulgence and ensuring a productive discussion forum for an unbiased decision-making approach in the community engagement services (Bandy 2016).
• Project management skills: This is another most crucial skill set for volunteers and workers. This skill set helps in ensuring the steps of research processes by designing an action plan (Vaughn et al.2017).
• Data analytic skills: Data analytic skills allows the volunteers and workers to develop the insight and understanding regarding the community’s well-being, health status, employment data, and parameters for development followed by the interpretation of data through quantitative and qualitative approach (Vaughn et al.2017).
• Empowerment skills: This skill set enables the establishment of effective communication strategies, conduction of educational programs, and motivation of creating a change in the community through each member.
• Systems-thinking: This skill set reflects the core competency amongst the volunteers and workers that allows them to understand both social infrastructure and physical infrastructural design in a community, which makes the process of delivery efficiency in community-engaged services easier (Bandy 2016).

The challenges facing volunteers and workers in community-engaged services:

• Ensuring equity in service delivery can be the biggest challenge facing the workers and volunteers in service delivery, especially the elevating concerns of the Indigenous population in Australia.
• The establishment of partnership amongst service workers and volunteers with the governmental authorities can be very challenging with respect to sufficiency in allocating resources (gov.au 2016).
• Another major challenge can be countered in professional drift due to the tendency of drifting the professional operations in offering services efficiently (gov.au 2016).

There are various significant contributions towards knowledge and skills of community engagement towards the goal of employability and self-development:

• It can help in developing a crucial understanding of common good, which will contribute both in personal and professional self-development as my decision-making approach will consider the benefits and influence of personal or organizational actions over the community’s well-being and development motive (Tirole 2017).
• It can help in developing a rational and ethical approach of conducting action plans in my personal and professional career with the significant consideration of addressing community engagement issues (Kline et al.2018).
• It can help in paving the professional career of a community engagement consultant, which can satisfy both the intent of the personal and professional urge of working towards a change (Mtawa, Fongwa and Wilson-Strydom 2019).
• The involvement in the community-engaged services will allow developing communication, analytical, organizing and project management skills, which can ultimately contribute in my professional career due to the need of organizing corporate events, presentations, and engagement of key stakeholders like, shareholders, investors, and customers(Williamson et al. 2020).

Conclusion

Therefore it can be concluded from the paper that community engagement practices and services are crucial for the progressive approach of developing individual skills and addressing prevalent community concerns. The skills of stakeholders in community-engaged services should range from communication skills, project management, empowering skills to empathetic understanding towards the society. The paper indicated various challenges facing the volunteers and workers of the community-engaged services such as seeking government support and ensuring avoidance of professional drift. The paper also presented the application and contribution of community-engaged service skills and understanding of community engagement towards personal and professional development through the indication of consultancy positions, ethical decision-making roles in organizations which leads to the aspect of the common good and ultimately to become a responsible citizen both through a personal and professional approach.

References:

ACU.edu.au 2020. What Is Community Engagement?. [Online] Available at: https://www.acu.edu.au/about-acu/community-engagement/what-is-community-engagement

Ahmed, S.M., Young, S.N., DeFino, M.C., Franco, Z. and Nelson, D.A., 2017. Towards a practical model for community engagement: advancing the art and science in academic health centers. Journal of clinical and translational science, 1(5), pp.310-315.

AIFS.gov.au 2016. Child Family Community Australia. What Are The Challenges Of Community Engagement?. [Online] Available at: https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/community-engagement/what-are-challenges-community-engagement

Bandy, J., 2016. What is service learning or community engagement. Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University. https://cft. vanderbilt. edu/guides-subpages/teaching-through-community-engagement.

Battaglia, T.A., Pamphile, J., Bak, S., Spencer, N. and Gunn, C., 2019. Connecting community to research: A training program to increase community engagement in research. Progress in community health partnerships: research, education, and action, 13(2), p.209.

Felber, C., 2019. Change everything: Creating an economy for the common good. Zed Books Ltd..

Kline, C., Asadian, W., Godolphin, W., Graham, S., Hewitt, C. and Towle, A., 2018. From “academic projectitis” to partnership: community perspectives for authentic community engagement in health professional education. Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 4(1), pp.79-96.

Mtawa, N., Fongwa, S. and Wilson-Strydom, M., 2019. Enhancing graduate employability attributes and capabilities formation: a service-learning approach. Teaching in Higher Education, pp.1-17.

Tirole, J., 2017. Economics for the common good. Princeton University Press.

Vaughn, L.M., Jones, J.R., Booth, E. and Burke, J.G., 2017. Concept mapping methodology and community-engaged research: a perfect pairing. Evaluation and program planning, 60, pp.229-237.

Williamson, S.N., Paulsen-Becejac, L., Tong, K., Minette, R. and Forbes-Burford, J., 2020. Embedding graduate employability skills into health and social care course-a scoping review. World Journal of Advance Healthcare Research, 4(1), pp.147-164.