Community engagement for the next generation calls for a re-thinking around the who, what, where, how and why of sharing information, uncovering unheard voices and collaborating with your constituency. Knowing who your audience is and what spaces they occupy is key to ensuring your engagement efforts are fully optimized.
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With all the buzz around technology and community engagement, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the array of tools and networks at your disposal. When it comes to social media, this is especially true.While new tools and apps continue to develop around us, the effort we put into managing these networks may not always amount to the return on investment that we're looking for.
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A group of people wait together on a chilly day for the morning bus. No one speaks, but instead each individual has their head buried in their device, fully consumed in the technology at their fingertips. An email, the morning news, a podcast - whatever it may be, their energy and focus is spoken for.
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In last month's edition of Engage! we turned to you to help us select a winner for our photo contest searching for the perfect picture to encapsulate the theme of "Possible."
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In the July edition of Engage! we challenged you to submit up to ten photos that were inspired by the theme of "Possible" to bring out imagery that could inspire others.
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Last year I joined the Collective Impact Summit after completing a Masters in Africa and International Development from the University of Edinburgh. Having lived, studied and worked abroad on and off for the previous three years gaining insights and experience regarding international development initiatives within southern and eastern Africa, I came home feeling disappointed and disheartened by the track record of the field and lost by the complexities of the issues I had faced in both my practical work and my theoretical studies. Frustrations around top-down approaches to community development initiatives; the saturation and overlap of NGO’s working in silos on similar issues within the same regions; the neglect of context-specific, place-based solutions and the proliferation of silver-bullet ideas to ‘save the world’; the privilege and power of the western voice over the strength and wisdom of community actors. It felt as though one could not take a step forward in this field, without taking two steps back.
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