Establish a Community Engagement Process
Effective community interaction has several parts that must all be done to be meaningful. Our status quo is thinking that if we focus on engaging community members, we will have done our due diligence. Meaningful community engagement requires more than engaging, talking to, or facilitating. EQUITY developed the SPICE model as a guide for impactful community interaction.
Seek: Search out new partners; learn and understand how to interact with other communities in a culturally appropriate and respectful manner. Seeking is about reaching out to our community instead of making them find us. It is about using our resources to connect with people and start relationship building. Consider the following questions as you develop methods for searching out new partners or learning how to interact with others:
- What are your current contact methods? Which community groups are missing as a result of the current methods?
- How are you adapting your processes to meet different situations (e.g., working remotely due to the pandemic) and ensuring they are accessible?
- Who is assigned responsibility to seeking new connections? How do we know they have completed the task?
- How do you measure how comprehensive and diverse your contacts are? Where is there room to improve?
- How do you define success for your contact and connecting methods? Are you calling it good enough, or are you continuously improving?
- How do you measure success? How do you use the results to continually evolve these methods?
Partner: Work in a collective decision-making model. A partner shares in investment, benefits, and risk. Who, what or how much is invested, risked, and benefited may vary depending on the partners involved. A state agency may fund the project, compensate community members, and assume legal risk, while a community member may invest time, and energy, and risk their reputation if products do not serve their community well, and harm if the product is contentious. Questions to consider:
- How do you evaluate the authenticity of your partnerships?
- Who gets to participate in the evaluation?
- How do you strengthen and build upon those partnerships for future collaborations?
- Which communities have you partnered with and which communities are missing?
Inform: Provide updates in an accessible manner; share information in ways that reach different communities. Effective and culturally appropriate communication is key to establishing, building, and strengthening relationships. Your communication with communities must be intentional and tailored to different community groups and the specific audience you are informing. Questions to consider:
- How do you keep communications open and transparent with different community groups throughout projects, processes, decisions, and actions your agency takes?
- When you make mistakes is there transparency in owning those mistakes?
- Which perspectives are represented in your communications team? Which perspectives are missing? Do you have enough variety in perspective on your team to effectively reach the different communities in Washington?
Connect/Collaborate/Compensate: Make contact to build or strengthen relationships; co-create with community members; pay community members for their time and their expertise. Depending on where you are in your community experience journey, you may need to build and strengthen your connections or build and strengthen your collaborations (or both). Both options are provided in this model for you to utilize as needed. Consider the following questions:
- What new relationships with different community groups are you building and growing?
- How are you continually improving your approach?
- Are your approaches meaningful, sustainable, and relational, or are they transactional and extractive?
- What are your methods for community compensation?
Engage: Interact with others through activities or events and listen to understand the perspectives of community members.
- What [unique] approaches can you use to engage with un/underrepresented communities
- What activities can you participate in to strengthen new connections?
- What methods do you use to receive feedback and input from different communities? Are there any perspectives being missed through current methods?
- How are you using feedback to improve engagement efforts? This is not a check-the-box exercise. Incorporate feedback and resolve concerns to make a stronger product.