Community engagement
Organizational efforts to benefit community
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Community engagement is involvement and participation in an organization for the welfare of the community, and is thus a form of civic engagement.
Defining characteristics
Volunteering, which involves giving personal time to projects in humanitarian NGOs or religious groups, are forms of community involvement.[1] The engagement is generally motivated by values and ideals of social justice.[2] Community engagement can be volunteering at food banks, homeless shelters, emergency assistance programs, neighborhood cleanup programs, etc.[3][4][5]
It is also defined as "a dynamic relational process that facilitates communication, interaction, involvement, and exchange between an organization and a community for a range of social and organizational outcomes".[6] As a concept, engagement features attributes of connection, interaction, participation, and involvement, designed to achieve or elicit an outcome at individual, organization, or social levels.[7] Current research acknowledges engagement's socially-situated nature. Community engagement, therefore, offers an ethical, reflexive, and socially responsive approach to community-organizational relationships with engagement practices that aim to both understand and be responsive to community needs, views, and expectations.[8][9] For academic research to have an impact, community engagement is essential, especially for the research around population health and wellness issues.[10][11] It is imperative that the researchers employ community-engaged approaches where community members[12] and organizations[13] and researchers work hand-in-hand to identify the problems, co-develop solutions, and recommend policy changes.
Community engagement is a community-centered orientation based in dialogue.[14] Community engagement enables a more contextualized understanding of community members' perceptions of the topics and contexts, and facilitates stronger relationships among and between community members.[15][16] The outcome of community engagement is ultimately social capital and stronger relational networks.[17] While community organizing involves the process of building a grassroots movement involving communities, community engagement primarily deals with the practice of moving communities toward change, usually from a stalled or similarly suspended position.