How to Make Community Engagement Better

Way back in the 1970’s, the design and planning professions responded to growing environmental concerns by cross-pollinating with the fields of ecology and biology, birthing the sustainable design movement.

Today, those of us who work with communities face a similar moment.

The social context of our practice is changing dramatically underneath our feet. Our society is experiencing a seismic shift of fragmentation, tribalism, mistrust, anomie, and more. Bowling Alone is our new Silent Spring.

Our community engagement practices need to adapt to this new social context, or risk becoming irrelevant and inefficient.

More importantly, community engagement needs to become regenerative – a counterforce to these negative social trends. It has incredible potential to do so.

Community engagement needs to become regenerative – a counterforce to our negative social trends.

Like design and planning turning to ecology and biology, those practicing community engagement need to now look to social psychology and other disciplines to fuel a similar cross-pollination and evolution.

Social psychological concepts like Intergroup Contact Hypothesis and Social Identity Theory don’t have the catchiest of titles, but don’t let that fool you. They contain compelling and pertinent understandings of the root causes of social decline, racism, polarization, and more. 

Social psychology gives us the tools to look under the hood to understand the dynamics of why people sort themselves into groups, and under what conditions they will bridge those groups to tackle shared problems.  

This is the raw material for evaluating, refining and reinventing how we can work within today’s social context to engage with communities.

Unfortunately, the current typical toolbox of community engagement strategies, along with the training and skill sets of facilitators, are increasingly inadequate for dealing with our climate of accelerating uprootedness, tribalism, and polarization.

This is because current practices rely on things like ‘expertise’ and ‘objectivity’, which cannot accommodate the emotional forces unleashed by tribalized identities that feel under threat (real or imagined) by “others.” Current practices were also forged when social identities were more cross-cutting and we could appeal to a shared sense of Place to foster collaborative behavior. 

Current community engagement practices rely on things like ‘expertise’ and ‘objectivity’, which cannot accommodate the emotional forces unleashed by tribalized identities that feel under threat by “others.”

Sadly, more public agencies and consultants are responding to our social fragmentation by retreating into ‘checkbox’ engagement processes that feel safe and avoid contact between people, like online surveys, tabling, or ‘town halls.’ 

This tragically misses out on the restorative potential to connect people, build a larger sense of community, and restitch the frayed fabric of civic life.

We need to approach community engagement with renewed creativity and flexibility. We need to acknowledge that our social fabric is fragile and frayed. We need to embrace the duality at the root of community engagement: that bringing together different types and groups of people contains both the awesome power for increased tolerance and inclusivity, and the scary potential to incite conflict and prejudice.

So then, what does that looks like?

Here’s a great example from a recent piece in FiveThirtyEight, “Why Being Anti-Science is Now Part of Many Rural Americans Identity”

In this story the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission knew they were going to face community challenges to implementing forest and floodplain management changes in a popular duck-hunting area.

Rather than hosting a typical set of expert-driven public meetings, Game and Fish staff instead convened a series of four dinners where staff shared meals alongside stakeholders and community members. After some introduction, they invited attendees to discuss the project with the staff as they ate and mingled. 50-100 people attended each dinner. 

What happened? Attendees left the dinners not only informed and supportive of the complex environmental management changes, but became advocates for them within the larger community. The dinners also cultivated a sense of shared ownership over the public lands, and fostered a long-term relationship between agency staff and the hunting community.

Not bad for rural Arkansas, eh?

If you think hosting four dinners is too time-consuming, complicated or expensive for a community engagement approach, just dwell for a moment on the likely cost of the usual way: increased distrust, bitterness, lawsuits, protests, and the inevitable spiral into ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ positions. 

 Dwell for a moment on the likely cost of the usual way: increased distrust, bitterness, lawsuits, protests, and the inevitable spiral into ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ positions. 

They may not know it, but the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission employed two important social psychological concepts at the core of community engagement: reducing the biases or perceived threat between different groups, and reinforcing a superordinate group identity. 

If this is Greek to you, hang in there. Next time we’ll take a deep dive into this rich and productive territory of social psychology. 

And hopefully, with a little help from our social psychology friends, we can learn a few new things to help us evolve our community engagement practices.