Found difficult and left untried? Perspectives on participation and engagement

For me, one of the recurring puzzles in participation and community engagement is how little attention is paid to the benefits experienced by those who participate. I wonder if the widespread uncritical use of the C word has something to do with this: if you go round assuming that 'community=consensus' I suppose you expect the benefits to the individual to be somehow self-evident. But they ain't.

We've found that people do have views on the 'wifms' (what's in it for me), you just have to ask them. Bev Carter and I asked young people in Milton Keynes what sort of benefits might ensue to those who were active on the local issues. Among the responses:

Power
Diserplin
Make friends
Be popular
Have fun
Showing off
Right decisions
Achievements
New things
Get more respect
Feeling happy
Helping people
Express talent...

Among the perceived barriers to participation for these young people:

Getting into trubble
Age diffrence
Bitchieness
Bullying
Parents get worried
Racism...

If we are to understand the difficulties in establishing a sustainable culture of participation and involvement, surely we need to have a serious appreciation of the identifiable benefits at the individual level?

Over a year ago I noted that community engagement was starting to get some negative press, suggesting a need to distinguish its principles from managerialist practices in the public sector. If nothing else, that might mean that when we speak about engagement, we don't always adopt the service-centric view.

I'm revisiting these thoughts because JRF have just published a 'round-up paper' reviewing the evidence on citizen involvement in local governance. It's a clear and useful summary of JRF's work in this area, but guess what, it considers involvement from the perspective of service provision and decision-making. If we always do that, then this kind of conclusion is what we're going to get:

'Community involvement costs public services significant time and money. Communities volunteer their scarce time and limited resources, taking away their energies from other activities in their community. If neither providers nor communities are clear about the objectives nor perceive any impact on decisions, on service quality or on citizen satisfaction, the policy is not sustainable in the face of tightening finances and difficult decisions about resource allocation.'

This suggests, to paraphrase G K Chesterton, not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it will have been found difficult and left untried.

I can't help wondering if a different perspective might find community involvement economically, socially and morally indispensable.

Comments

[Tim Davies]

This post raises an interesting challenge. In promoting youth participation I've often found myself, if not playing down, at least not putting in the foreground, the benefits to individuals from involvement - in order to focus on the importance of participation leading to change for communities and groups.

The risk of talking up the individual benefits is (or at least, I have perceived it to be,) that investment in participation is justified (particularly in the case of your participation) as an investment in the skills and confidence of young people to be involved in the future and be decision makers of the future - and not in supporting young people to be active citizens creating change now. The accepted answer to the "what's changed?" question ends up being 'the group have more confidence', and answers of the form 'the group's involvement led to a change in local policy / practice etc.' are not deemed neccessary.

But there is a degree to which in trying to value 'change' at a collective / system / community level - we have devalued change at the individual level - and always focussed on the short term 'what's changed' now, as opposed to seeing investment in individuals skills and confidence as a valuable long term investment in collective / system / community level change.

Perhaps one resolution to the tension lies in reframing the 'What's changed?' question from one based entirely on the big change (http://hbr.nya.org.uk/whatschanged) - to one that, in youth participation at least, asks the triad:

> What's changed for individual young people?
> What's changed for adults involved in the process?
> What's changed for the community?

and which recognises that different projects and experiences will lead to a different emphasis across these dimensions of change at different times...

[Kevin Harris]

Nicely put Tim, thanks. Reminds me of some discussion years ago at Community Development Foundation, when Gabriel Chanan tried to get practitioners thinking about the impact on some individual activists of being 'community developed'. More than youth work I think, CD has a hugely important anti-individualist ethos, sometimes hard to distinguish from its anti-professional ethos.

I think it's good that these are defended and remain unscathed, but wonder if their robustness partly explains the difficulty that CD practitioners sometimes have in thinking more broadly about the benefits of participation and empowerment.

So the question arises, can empowerment be felt collectively without being experienced individually? Eg could you work hard voluntarily for a local cause over a long period, bring about some form of collective empowerment for your group, and still feel personally disempowered?