Incorporating community voice

Community is used here in a broad sense and includes local organisations, families, individuals, and community groups.  

Although evaluations of place-based initiatives show persistent challenges in engaging communities effectively and consistent gaps between aspiration and practice, there are a range of strategies and approaches that the literature identifies as important enablers of engagement (Zanghi et al, 2014; Raderstrong and Boyea-Robinson, 2016; Lynn et al, 2018; CFCA 2016; Welsh Government, 2022; Rodrigues and Fisher, 2017; Lewing et al, 2020; Pennington et al, 2018; Moore 2021; Hall et al, 2022; Smart, 2017). Key themes from the research include:

• Explicit commitment – clear, strategic and whole-of-initiative commitment to including community voice and involvement in decision-making. 
• Dedicated time and resources for engagement (i.e., a community facilitator) – recognition of the time and resourcing required to build and maintain relationships and trust, including building this explicitly into people’s roles and responsibilities and building in time for relationship development in project planning.
• Focus on relationships – trust built through personal relationships that grow over time, which are grounded in respect and a strengths-based approach.
• An ongoing approach – community voice and participation is fostered through ongoing, persistent efforts that become part of ‘business as usual’ rather than one-off activities, events, or efforts – while at the same time, not asking too much and overburdening the community.
• Established processes for engagement – informal or ad-hoc approaches to engagement are likely to lack consistency, clarity, transparency, inclusiveness. Pragmatic processes and protocols for engagement help embed engagement in routine ways of working, as do dedicated roles to ensure a consistent approach. 
• Active outreach – going to families, inviting them in, and tailoring engagement approaches to their needs. This is particularly important for priority cohorts. Hiring community members and local staff is an important strategy for this.
• Shifting power and accountability to community – awareness of how power dynamics are operating is critical, with an overarching objective of shifting ownership and power from system leaders to the community members over time. This includes consistently amplifying community voice, reporting back to community and being accountable to the community (for ways of working and driving meaningful change) via ongoing feedback loops.
• Openness to learning – a culture of learning, adapting and improving, with established feedback loops and a commitment to understanding community dynamics, norms and values, histories and demographics. 

Underpinning all these elements is recognition that building positive community relationships and enabling effective engagement with families cannot be ad-hoc – it must be prioritised and adequately resourced. Building genuine trust and engagement with the community is a collective effort, involving leaders and partners across the community. (dandolopartners, 2022).

Our Experience/Learnings

Community voice and ongoing input into site priorities is part of the Our Place approach and is a key feature of early implementation. In the pre implementation phase opportunities for community input could include inviting community input into building design aspects, sharing the concept of Schools as Community Platforms with community members and listening to aspirations and concerns.

Partners will come with various perceptions and experience of what including community voice entails and means for their work ranging from a compliance exercise in collecting feedback to complete community governance. There is value in embedding the inclusion of community voice as a key principle in the framework for implementation and in exploring with the governance group how this is brought to life in not only the work of the backbone (coordinating) team, but in all practice.  

A commitment to sharing relevant aspects of community feedback and input between partners encourages a culture of learning and reduces the risk of consultation fatigue in the local community. Gaining this type of commitment from partners requires an environment of trust and respect between organisations and a shared understanding of how the information is being used.