Engaging with a diverse range of people is what makes your job one of the best.
But sometimes it can be hard to get through, particularly to people who don’t speak English, working families who don’t have time for input and Indigenous groups who aren’t engaged in your process. That’s just the start.
Community engagement should be an important feature of future service development and projects. It requires you to represent your services and service systems by building relationships with a diverse community and groups through trust and respect.
When the community sees value to a service system that they trust and is responsive to their needs, this will lead to meaningful participation (such as through joint decision-making) and capacity building.
By engaging communities with sharing decision-making with them, you are making a significant shift from traditional ways of determining policies and services. While not easy to achieve, such a change in practice has the capacity to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of professional services.
So, what does it take to engage your community?
Find our at the 3rd annual Community and Stakeholder Engagement Summit. In 2019 we are bringing you 4 days of insightful learnings and advice from Australia’s top government departments on effectively engaging your community and stakeholders to build trust. If building community trust through transparent engagement and collaboration is important to you, you will not want to miss this event.
