The momentum of community engagement
Like many if not all of us I have been following the national bushfires and subsequent fundraising efforts around the clock. I've been watching what's been happening from the angle of a community specialist with a special interest in community resilience.
We (community development and engagement specialists) focus our efforts day in day out, trying to get people involved in our community.
We try to get them interested.
We try to get them to have a say on local issues.
We try to form connections in communities so that people can work together to make a difference in their communities.
We try to get people along to community meetings, consultations and focus groups all so they can have their say and be heard.
It's an uphill battle, so much of our time as practitioners (from my experience) is spent trying to whelm and engage the unengaged, the silent majority ie. most of the population.
Now it's completely understandable why this is an uphill battle, because people are so busy these days with many competing priorities but throw in a crisis, a disaster, a large critical incident and suddenly that silent majority is mobilised.
During the recent bushfire crisis, in the space of hours we witnessed people with their hearts on their sleeves organising fundraisers, talking about what's going on with our political leadership and how collectively we can tackle the environmental issues presented to us. This kind of community activation is what is needed right now, and it is amazing to watch from both a personal and professional view point.
Now I know that the most engaging topics are emotive things and events that people can get their heads around and relate to, and a national bushfire crisis is exactly these things.
It made me think back to a recent evaluation project we did for our partners at Northern Rivers Community Gateway to evaluate their Managing Spontaneous Volunteers framework. One of the key challenges they and their stakeholders identified was how can volunteer resource centres keep spontaneous community volunteers engaged and interested in volunteering when there isn't the impetus of disaster activation.
And I guess that I am stuck here too. It’s what gets me.
Where do we go from here? How do we keep our silent majority involved in community life once the hype dies down, when the towns and people impacted need our support most? What can we as community specialists learn from this activation that we are seeing and apply it in our practice?
We would love to hear your thoughts on this.