Some Thoughts on Engagement

I’ve been involved (to a very tiny percent) in some work we are doing with the LGA and New Local on innovative community engagement and was lucky enough to help facilitate one of the final show n share workshops this week.

The Local Government Association, New Local and TPXimpact have been working together on this exciting project for the last few months to capture and celebrate examples of innovative community engagement.

We’ve heard inspiring stories of councils, communities and partner organisations bravely moving beyond traditional forms of consultation to find new ways of listening to and involving residents. If you are reading this, you may be one of the bright sparks driving this change in some way.

Nearly 400 bright sparks from across the country came together in our recent workshop series to learn from these examples and share best practice on how councils and combined authorities can strengthen their community engagement.

Those who have read ay of my previous blogs know I have plenty of thoughts on this from my previous life leading consultations and there is a lot to talk about. However this was really about showcasing this weeks show n tells which brought about some of the conclusions around what we have discovered so far and where this might go in the future. There were 2 sessions and these are some of the hot takes;

Exploring new methods and approaches

• Some really nice examples of work that had been started / completed since the first workshops: definite area to explore a community of practice
• Use of new tools and digital to engage people and present information with maps or visual content and also used with young people in schools
• Consultation through drama to bring creativity and youth voice into the development partly inspired by a legislative theatre example given at the last workshops
• Other tools of interest were Minecraft and Gather Town and how these can be particularly good at engaging neurodiverse groups (Yay)
• Conversation about the need for diverse teams bringing different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives to this work.

Connecting with other bright sparks

• Conversation about the need for a Community of Practice space maybe a discord or slack to share and learn.
• How important it is embrace co-design approaches especially when forming policy and how internal teams need better nodes within councils to be effective.

Understanding your community better

• How do we build trust and overcome scepticism?
• What are the timelines of building relationships with communities — how long does/should it take, how does that connect with pressures for outputs coming from elsewhere, how can individuals doing this work demonstrate the value of spending their time in that way
• Lots of new roles in councils — questions around where to start with the understanding of what’s come before, i.e. the staff are new but the community isn’t; how can they honour that history while also establishing something new.

Within your Council and Learning and Developing

• Sharing what was learned around council
• Tackle engagement fatigue and streamline council engagement
• Robust structures to support things like co-production
• People are more excited to start the conversation when it leads to action. Especially in working with other parts of the council.
• Allow ourselves to try different things and be OK with making mistakes. ‘Sector will see we’re trying’.

Across your community/with partners

• How to facilitate more of a 2-way dialogue with communities — feels like we’re broadcasting a lot — we want to be more accountable to the communities
• A great example of how engaging community members themselves to do research within their community can be powerful as the community trusts the community over the council

Support ecosystem — from partners

• It would be good to learn from what others are doing — what’s worked and what hasn’t so we’re not reinventing the wheel
• Eg if I wanted to do a community mapping exercise could there be an interactive forum where you can ask if anyone’s done it before and share learning

Nationwide

• People were really keen to find ways to share knowledge and experiences through partnerships but also regular networking opportunities where they can access each other in ways that they seem to struggle with right now
• Interest was in these events being regional primarily and national once in a while — also, national as medium to grow the regional activities
• Attendees should have the opportunity to actively participate in workshops/events/opportunities rather than just passively listen
• The hope is also that these would help with creating clear and sustainable links between organisations so they aren’t just reliant on one person
• Quite a bit of interest in how to get the buy in of stakeholders, including internally as there’s often a disconnect between teams in LAs
• Enable and support networking opportunities
• Use KPIs to measure impact and ensure sustainability of networks
• External influence at different levels of LAs outside the — i.e. provide evidence of benefits of innovative civic and participatory engagement to those who internally are interested like the engagement/community teams
• Lots of interest in helping measuring impact, supporting the networking opportunities and idea generating

So watch this space for next steps and feel free to start a discussion on here or with any of the team involved as in true participatory fashion we need many voices in this space.