Building capability for community involvement

Community is used here in a broad sense and includes local organisations, families, individuals and community groups. These considerations are relevant when you are preparing to move from working with the small group that lead and authorised the exploration of the concept to testing and co designing with those who are most impacted if the work were to proceed.

Effective community involvement hinges on understanding and agreeing on the boundaries of co-design with partners and the community. Having a clarity of purpose and a shard understanding of the essential and nice to aspects in the Schools as Community Platforms model and being open to flexibility fosters a shared commitment to meaningful community engagement.

Identifying key service stakeholders as advisors to the design process is essential for building partners' capability for community involvement. By involving those with expertise and experience in relevant services, the design can benefit from diverse perspectives, leading to more comprehensive and effective community-oriented solutions.

Recognizing where authorization needs to come from for different aspects of design is crucial. Partners need to build understanding of the varies decision-making hierarchies and ensuring that gaining the necessary permissions for various elements of the project are factored into planning.  

Being alert to underlying mindsets and assumptions about community involvement is also important. Identifying and exploring preconceptions and concerns about community involvement in various aspects of implementation before commencing provide an opportunity to build in appropriate structures and support to enable genuine and impactful engagement with the community.

Our Experience/Learnings

Co design and community involvement has been a new experience for some partners and has been challenged in cases where there was a more transactional or risk management mindset at play.  Working in this way takes longer than simply rolling out a standard product especially when there are expectations for a fast turnaround or completion of plans, designs or builds.

At times it felt like the partnership was being viewed as a contract management exercise by one of the parties rather than a joint venture.  In most cases this could have been avoided with better briefing by the senior authorisers about the nature of the partnership and the intention to work differently when the project was being delegated to others in the department.  

In some cases, important stakeholders could have been involved earlier in the planning and ideation phase to test the waters of what is possible. When presented with a fait accompli it took significant effort to get beyond a sense that huge change and sometimes cost was being imposed.

The Our Place approach is family centred and community informed but not community led. In the initial stages, Our Place made a conscious choice not to have parent representatives on the pre implementation governance structures. We found ways in the early scoping to learn about local need and built community involvement into the implementation framework once we knew that we could go ahead.

There was a recognition that to plan to address local system shortcomings, the parties involved need to have a high level of trust in each other.  There was a risk that stakeholders could feel too exposed and defensive if the hard conversations about local systems and practice challenges were held in a broad group and that this would lead to defensiveness or “positive spin” taking precedence over robust analysis or exploring a shared strategy to operate differently.