Community engagement seeks to better involve the community to achieve sustainable outcomes through participatory processes, relationships, decision-making, and implementation. It is a process that enables people to become actively involved in issues that affect their lives by defining the issues, making decisions, planning and delivering services, and creating change. Community engagement involves collaborative work with community groups to address issues affecting well-being, and often creates partnerships that mobilize resources to influence systems and policies. The term seeks to broaden the focus from individuals to the whole community while promoting inclusiveness.

1. Community Engagement
Dr. Purshottam
Guest Faculty
Department of Social Work, KUK

2. Community Engagement
• Community Engagement seeks to better engage
the community to achieve long-term and
sustainable outcomes, processes, relationships,
discourse, decision-making, or implementation.
• Participation implies a process by which people
are enabled to become actively and genuinely
involved in defining the issues of concern to
them, in making decisions about factors that
affect their lives, in formulating and
implementing policies, in planning, developing
and delivering services and in taking action to
achieve change.

3. Conti..
• Community Engagement is… “the process of working
collaboratively with and through groups of people
affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or
similar situations to address issues affecting the well-
being of those people.
• It is a powerful vehicle for bringing about
environmental and behavioral changes that will
improve the health of the community and its
members.
• It often involves partnerships and coalitions that help
mobilize resources and influence systems, change
relationships among partners, and serve as catalysts
for changing policies, programs, and practices”.

4. Continued
• The linking of the term 'community' to
'engagement' serves to broaden the
scope, shifting the focus from the
individual to the collective, keeping the
consideration made of the diversity that
exists within any community.
• It also promotes the inclusiveness in
community.

5. Purpose
• Increasing democracy
• Encourages community to address their
problems
• Combating exclusion
• Empowering People
• Mobilizing resources and energy.
• Achieving better decisions and more effective
services.
• Ensuring the ownership and sustainability of
programs

6. Approaches
• Reaching community is important
• Inform, get feedback, active involvement
• Generate interest and ideas
• TV, Radios, newspaper advertisement
• Community meeting (face to face interaction)
• Focus group
• Survey
• Web based engagement (online public
participation)

7. Conti…
• Social mobilization
• Increase Formal or informal involvement
• Insights on socio-cultural and political
contexts of affected communities to build
locally acceptable interventions. Some
examples include: – Understanding myths,
beliefs – Managing rumors, misinformation

8. Conti…
• INFORM(awareness)
• CONSULT(feedback)
• INVOLVE (participation)
• COLLABORATE(partnership)
• SHARED LEADERSHIP (decision making)

9. Thank you