Modern Day Strategies For Community Engagement

Government agencies, corporations, and organizations have often experienced difficulty when trying to connect with the people who are most impacted by their projects. It is necessary to leave the office, get from behind the computer, and interact with people face-to-face. There is an art and process to engaging with your community--a group of people with shared commonality. This book serves as a primer for how the public and private sectors can interact with their customers and constituents in an authentic, equitable, and intentional manner. In Modern-Day Strategies for Community Engagement: How to Effectively Build Bridges Between People and the Bottom Line, MaKara Rumley takes the reader through the process of effective community engagement. She sets the stage for why community engagement remains an invaluable tool when it comes to managing headline risk, maintaining project timelines, and ensuring good will. With Modern-Day Strategies for Community Engagement as a guide, the reader will engender confidence in their ability to implement measurable strategies and communicate using plain language that will resonate with their prioritized audience.

This book is a reference for administrators and educators at institutions of higher learning who are thinking about taking serious steps to link their educational mission to helping their surrounding communities. Various research findings across the disciplines in higher education about integrating community engagement in traditional coursework are presented. This book provides a multi-disciplinary and multi-method approach to both incorporating and studying the effects of community engagement (service learning) in the curriculum. Multiple departments, from Kinesiology to Sociology, as well as various types of classes (undergraduate, graduate, online, face-to-face, traditional, international) are represented here. Both qualitative and quantitative work is included. Methods involved include interviews, case studies, reflections, and surveys. One chapter also uses longitudinal data collection to address the overall effect of engaging in community engagement during the undergraduate college experience. If you are not sure how to study the effects of community engagement on students at your university, this book is for you.

Community Engagement in a Changing Social Landscape reaches deep into the authors’ extensive experience as both observers and practitioners of community engagement. It is further enriched by insights drawn from the diverse experiences of professionals in the field. Critical questions are honestly faced in a refreshing discourse that also highlights promising practices and approaches. These combined features provide both a thought-provoking retrospective and forward-looking commentary, which offer the reader a renewed understanding of community engagement and its exciting possibilities. Professionals, students and volunteers working in the community should find in this book a very useful resource.

While an increasing number of universities have or are committed to engaging their campuses in their surrounding communities, many recognize they lack the strategic focus and resources to maximize and sustain their impact on those communities. Place-based community engagement provides a powerful way to creatively connect campus and community to foster positive social transformation.In developing community engagement strategies, most universities and community organizations face significant challenges in deciding who to partner with and why. Frequently this leads universities and community organizations to say “yes” to too many opportunities which significantly limit their ability to pursue long-term impact. Focusing on an established geographic area can make it much easier to decide where to deploy resources and which partnerships to prioritize and thus increase their ability to form strong and sustainable partnerships that are of greater value to all stakeholders.This book presents the emerging model of place-based community engagement as a powerful process for attaining more positive and enduring results in their local communities as well as stimulating wider engagement by campus constituencies. Drawing upon the concept of collective impact and using data-driven decision making, place-based initiatives build long-term partnerships based upon a shared vision. Done thoughtfully, these place-based initiatives have attained impressive results.Drawing upon the case studies of five institutions that have implemented place-based community engagement initiatives, the authors provide guidance on the opportunities, challenges, and considerations involved in putting a place-based approach into effect. By sharing the experiences of these five institutions, they describe in detail the routes each took to turn their place-based initiatives from concept to reality, and the results they achieved.

Full of informative and inspiring examples of collaboration, Community Conversations captures the essence of creating such conversations and offers ten practical techniques to host conversations in your community."--Pub. desc.

Community Engagement in Post-Disaster Recovery reflects a wide array of practical experiences in working with disaster-affected communities internationally. It demonstrates that widely held assumptions about the benefits of community consultation and engagement in disaster recovery work need to be examined more critically because poorly conceived and hastily implemented community engagement strategies have sometimes exacerbated divisions within affected communities and/or resulted in ineffective use of aid funding. It is equally demonstrated that well-crafted, creative and thoughtful programming is possible. The wide collection of case studies of practical experience from around the world is presented to help establish ways of working with communities experiencing great challenges. The book offers practical suggestions on how to give more substance to the rhetoric of community consultation and engagement in these areas of work. It suggests the need to work with a dynamic understanding of community formation that is particularly relevant when people experience unforeseen challenges and traumatic experiences. This title interrogates the concept of community through an extensive review of the literature and explores the ways of working with communities in transition and particularly in their recovery phases through an array of case studies in a range of socioeconomic and political contexts. Focused on the concept of community in post-disaster recovery solutions—an aspect which has received little critical interrogation in the literature—this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars in disaster management as well as humanitarian agencies.

Community Engagement: Principles, Strategies and Practices is a collection of chapters written by engaged scholars. The authors of the chapters work in diverse settings and come from different philosophies of community engagement. For instance, Taylor and Luter in Chapter One cogently make the argument that universities have essentially sold out when it comes to community engagement. The authors argue that engaged scholars would be better served by looking at the Civil Rights Movements than progressive theories that drive service learning. Harkavy, Hodges, and Weeks take an opposite position and discuss historical figures such as Francis Bacon. Bacon spoke of improving a mans estate. By that, Bacon meant that people should make life better for all. Astute readers will want to read and dwell on the thoughts and ideas generated in the first two chapters. In Chapter Three, Bielefeldt, discusses service learning and community engagement in relation to engineering. Her chapter will interest those who do not traditionally engage with the community and in service learning. Bielefeldts writing style is exciting and will open new doors for readers of our text. Basma and Arce-Trigatti introduce two important concepts to readers. The authors claim that mental health services are delivered more effectively through community schools than through traditional health clinics. Further, the authors entertain the notion that migrants and refugees are often missed by those doing community engagement. Basma and Arce-Trigatti fall in line with Taylor and Luter in bringing up important questions concerning the role that universities are taking in community engagement. In Chapter Five, Iwaskai does a marvelous job of describing how he involved those he is studying as part of his research team. Iwaskais discussion of the YPAR method may be of particular interest for young scholars who want to do on-the-ground research. In Chapter Six, Conwill writes from an ethnographic perspective about his personal experiences as a psychologist and community organizer. He is an inductive thinker and brings his experiences alive by relating them to theory. Readers of this chapter should be enticed to think about this type of work in regards to community engagement and service learning. In Chapter Seven, Kronick and Daniels discuss how the University of Tennessee engages with the community. The authors present service learning and collaboration as important aspects of community engagement. Hicks-Goldston and Goldston present a unique way of looking at service learning in Chapter Eight. They report both the successes and failures of doing service learning online. In Chapter Nine, Bruner, Szepe, and Blueford discuss systems theory. The authors consider the role that closed systems play in the role of mental health care. Finally, Butler uses extreme detail to describe a university-business collaboration effort to establish a STEM program.