Hi friends,
I was working with my local Trauma-Informed city project and it seems they have no infrastructure for Peer / Community / Service Recipient Engagement.
There is actually a whole field of academic literature related to this that most service providers seem unaware of. If we are going to look at the literature on trauma, can we look at the literature on community engagement? If we are doing city wide projects?
I have noticed this is a problem with lots of cities and lots of projects, not just the one in my city. How does your city put good infrastructure in place? How make good engagement practices more of a standard part of these projects? Does your city do any of the following?
- plans for community engagement outside of the meeting style process? Research show marginalized groups get ignored or beat up in meetings with power players.
- Plans to deal with strengths / weaknesses of coalitons so that group efforts do what groups do well and avoid what groups do poorly. ie. coalitons can do fundraising and information dissemation, but do poorly with innovation and challenging the status quo.
- Prep work for engagement. Like training advocates, like training service providers, like figuring out where the input will go.
- Budget for community engagement, especially outside of the meeting style process. Advocates cannot work for free and are not on salary like service providers.
- Service recipients that are part of process instead instead of just service providers.
- Understanding of how input was gathered to create the shared goals and shared agenda for the Collective Impact. Was this input gathered from service recipients or just service providers? If the latter, what are the plans to change the goals and agenda later?
- Plans to not punish advocates for remaining advocates (this is standard coaltion behavior, not unique to this group.)
- Plans to deal with power imbalances and trauma issues within the group. Ie. when advocates present suggestions, focus on the content and not the advocate's technique.
