Your community is a valuable resource and establishing and maintaining positive relationships with local people is vital in ensuring positive outcomes and sense of local ownership. Working with community groups is a key way to engage with and involve local people in the design and delivery of the service, and to help widen participation.
Why work with community groups?
Community groups can:
- Act as champions for your service
- Help you to engage with and involve people who are harder to reach
- Keep you informed about what people in the community want and need from the service
- Act as ‘representatives of interested persons’ under the ‘duty to involve’.
What is important in working with community groups?
It is important to establish an on-going, mutually beneficial relationship, based on trust and commitment to shared priorities. In order to achieve this, you must:
- Ensure that there are clear parameters and that responsibilities are defined on both sides;
- Provide the opportunity for real influence and involvement so that people feel they are making a difference;
- Communicate regularly and make information easily accessible. Be clear about how community groups are involved and what role they play.
- Access their expertise and acknowledge and celebrate their input. Work in partnership where such approaches can achieve better outcomes for your community and help to achieve success under local priorities.
- Think about what you can offer to community groups to support their work. Do you have space or other resources that they can use? Can you help them to organise events and publicise their work? Can you facilitate networking between different groups?
Achieving this type of positive relationship with community groups should help to improve the service, increase satisfaction levels and ensure that local people feel more able to influence service planning and delivery.
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