How to enhance community engagement through imagination

Aunty Vickey Charles, cultural lead at TACSI and Aunty in Residence, has a mantra to answer the common question “How do we start?”: She always replies with: “Relationships, relationships, relationships.” 

While we might be tempted to start community consultations with a completed plan and clear direction, when we follow the advice of Aunty Vickey and other First Nations Peoples and start by building authentic relationships, we can establish consultation processes that prioritise trust, active collaboration and partnership. In time, this ensures that existing strengths of community are recognised through the process, and mutually beneficial ways of working are established.

Imagination can also be applied to the form community engagement takes. We’ve found that the value of engagement can be enhanced for communities, and organisations through engagement approaches that change the norms of how community is engaged, for how long, and the influence they have over decision making.

Great community processes don’t have to mean town-halls or advisory board meetings. Engagement from all sides can be amplified when we draw on best practice from around the world including: 

• Community Connectors: Recruiting local people to build community connections, reach out to community members at the margins and hold conversations that unearth what matters to people.

• Community Innovation Teams / Codesign Circles: Establishing small (yet diverse) groups of local people to steward innovation work on behalf of their community. These could be informed by First Nations Knowledge systems and/or Western knowledge systems. 

• Community Innovation Labs: A dedicated time and space for community to come together to engage in innovation work through facilitated processes.  Labs may last days, weeks, months or years. 

• Community Pacts: Establishing agreements between communities and local authorities that catalyse imagination into action.

• Co-governance Models: Establishing collaborative decision-making approaches where power and responsibilities are shared between different groups—often governments and communities. 

• Participatory Granting: Processes for community members to make decisions on the way funds are distributed in community.

In addition, embracing these mechanisms can create new connections, mindsets, confidence and build momentum for impact beyond project lifetimes.

By prioritising relationships, imagination, and community voice, place-based work becomes more inclusive, impactful, and sustainable.  

With Fire to Flourish, we drew on all three to deliver trauma-informed, community development processes and community-led responses to disaster resilience.

Whereas, in the Welcome Experience, we’ve used it to inform Regional NSW’s design of a new service ecosystem. Currently, in the Ballarat Saturation Model, we are working with Respect Victoria to bring community-voice into the ongoing design and implementation of the model.