There have been growing calls for service providers to seek greater community engagement in the design and delivery of services. However there is no consensus as to what this involves, and there appears to be a gap between the rhetoric and the reality of community engagement. This paper seeks to clarify what community engagement involves, how it relates to other ideas and practices, and the role it can play in improving outcomes for children and families.
Some key messages
-
The major social changes that have occurred in recent decades have altered the conditions under which families are raising young children and challenged the traditional service system’s capacity to support them effectively.
-
There is a need for service approaches more suited to the needs of contemporary families, with community engagement as a potential strategy for ensuring that services are more responsive.
-
In this paper, community engagement is understood as a process whereby actors in a service system proactively seek out community values, concerns and aspirations and incorporate them into a decision-making process, establishing an ongoing partnership with the community to ensure that the community’s priorities and values continue to shape services and the service system.
-
Community engagement has a strong rationale and accumulating evidence of efficacy, and the potential to be a key strategy for improving outcomes for Australian children and their families.
-
Convergent evidence from well-established fields of service delivery suggests a common set of characteristics that underpin effective community enga
Download Practice guide here