Christmas in July: a recipe for engagement with Dr Anne Lane
Take 20+ Brisbane-based community engagement practitioners.
Add the IAP2 Australasia CEO and the IAP2 International Chair.
Blend together in a quirky and unusual social setting.
Add in a university educator and academic with a passion for engagement research that has real meaning for theory and practice.
Stir well.
What do you get?
A wonderful confection of conversation, discussion, and reflection on the incredible and occasionally frustrating practice that is community engagement.
This recipe for a great evening of interaction came together last week courtesy of the Brisbane local network of IAP2 Australasia.
As a researcher in stakeholder engagement generally – and community engagement in particular – I was delighted to be invited to facilitate a discussion with practitioners as part of the local IAP2A’s celebration of Christmas in July. My aim for this session was to provide a setting where hard-working people could discuss their experiences on the front line of community engagement, sharing thoughts and ideas with like-minded professionals. It also gave me chance to talk about some of the findings from my research, and to see how they resonated with those who work in the field. As an academic, this was a real treat. I’m used to my work being evaluated and critiqued by other scholars, but getting the opportunity to discuss these ideas with skilled and experienced community engagement practitioners was a chance not to be missed! I’d like to share with you here some of the topics we covered, and I invite you to think about what your responses might have been if you had been with us while we engaged about engagement.
We started by discussing why organisations generally enter into engagement with community members. I spoke about the antecedents or motivations for engagement that I had identified in the academic literature, ranging from compliance with legal requirements through to an organisational desire to participate more fully in society. The practitioners eagerly contributed their own thoughts and experiences, noting that organisations often saw engagement as a tool or instrument through which they could identify and mitigate issues, and achieve acceptance of organisational behaviour among community members. There was some discussion over whether this might even be seen as manipulation. We also talked about whether there were any links between community engagement and an organisation’s social licence to operate – the tacit, intangible, but nonetheless vital permission to keep operating granted to organisations every day by their host communities.
What do you think? Is community engagement always carried out in response to the pragmatic, practical concerns of individual organisations, or is there a place for acknowledging more esoteric social-level motivations? And is there a link between community engagement and manipulation?
Next, I invited the practitioners to seize a rare moment of self-reflective luxury, and consider why they as individuals carried out engagement. This resulted in a brief moment of silence, as those present tackled a task that is probably something most never get the chance to do – to think deeply about themselves and their professional practice. A recurrent theme across all the responses that were shared was that they saw themselves as providing a voice for those outside the organisation so that community members could have a say in organisational decisions that affected them. This led us to an extended session of story-swapping about engagement involving overly-loud community participants, and those who sought to dominate every meeting. The practitioners described their concerns that such people might be the loudest ones in the room, but that didn’t mean they were authentically representing popular opinion. I asked about the flip side of the coin – those whose voices aren’t heard, either because they don’t want to participate for some reason, or because they can’t. We talked about whether these ‘silent voices’ were a significant issue for community engagement, and how far efforts to involve people should go.
As we wrapped up for the evening, I couldn’t resist poking a little fun at the lovely people in the room. I told them about my current research, which is all about authentic and silent voices, and commented on the irony that I found it very hard to get community engagement practitioners to speak with me. But thanks to all their great ideas and suggestions about how to get responses from unwilling stakeholders, I now had a whole new recipe of techniques to try on them!
What do you think? Are authentic and silent voices a consideration in community engagement? Let me know.
You can ether:
1. Follow this link https://survey.qut.edu.au/f/191697/60aa/ and complete the online survey. This should take you no more than 30 minutes; or
2. Send your contact details to me at a.lane@qut.edu.au to schedule an interview where you can discuss your ideas in more depth. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.
The closing date for submissions is August 31. QUT Ethics Approval Number 1700001178