How data-driven community engagement can drive meaningful change

In the US, municipal and regional governments are increasingly integrating and institutionalizing community engagement across and within agencies to promote more community-centred design.

In New York, in the last year alone, we’ve seen the creation of The Mayor’s Office of Engagement, NYC Planning’s Community Planning and Engagement division and renewal of the Civic Engagement Commission. Clearly, something is happening.

The US federal government has started integrating “community engagement” requirements in its own funding calls. The “Build Back Better” programme, passed as part of the American Rescue Plan, is a prime example. In deciding its funding allocations, Build Back Better evaluates how “residents and community leadership will be engaged throughout,” meaning that states need to have in place structured processes for mapping and engaging residents and collecting impact data that enables evaluation.

The challenge is knowing how to run constructive community engagement that produces measurable results and contributes to effective project management. So far, 65% of state applicants did not have compelling or strong cases for designing, implementing and measuring their proposal’s equity-building ability through community engagement.

In Brownsville, Brooklyn — a 1-square-mile residential community of 117,000 people, the majority of whom identify as Black — ineffective or incomplete community engagement doesn’t reflect a lack in ability, commitment or willingness among governments to engage the community, but a strain on capacity. Managing community relationships requires flexible work schedules, multidisciplinary skills like service design, conflict resolution and social psychology research — all converging in an integrated process.

For meaningful participation among community members, community engagement cannot be seen as a phase of a project plan — it is the project plan. Integrating residents throughout the project in ways that leverages collective wisdom and resources helps create a more informed and productive effort.

Resident leaders have shared their insights on how to best manage community engagement to drive meaningful change. They argue for the following:

When presenting to the community for initial impact, it is best to have members from the community be the voice. Communities who have a long-standing history of redlining see every proposal that is not internally driven as a threat. That’s why when “outsiders” come into any community — whether from government, non-profits, or universities — they are met with resistance and distrust. Putting community leaders and residents at the forefront can alleviate this issue.

Engagement efforts should provide opportunities for community members to participate and share their lived experiences with as few barriers as possible — whether financial, time or logistical. Community members typically carry a lot of responsibility and are usually unpaid. Providing a small stipend or reimbursements for food, transportation and childcare allow more people to participate.

One of the benefits of having a team of community leaders with varied experiences and networks serving as project managers is that they bring connections to a wide range of local resources that help resolve challenges or capitalize on opportunities that come up.

For example, research found that food insecurity was a top stressor for Brownsville residents, so the team tapped into networks to bring in food service providers, researchers and urban farmers all from within the community to think about how to address the issue. This had the added benefit of these experts flagging likely challenges.

Community-centred research underscores the importance of adapting academic approaches to fit new contexts and constraints. Social science researchers said that, from this work, three important lessons have emerged that can facilitate more thoughtful and effective community-researcher collaborations from the outset:

Community-driven research is most fruitful when all collaborators are considered valuable contributors to the science inquiry process, each bringing different but equally meaningful skills and knowledge to the table.

Community leaders and residents can provide crucial insights from their lived experiences. They raise questions about patterns they observe in their community, focusing on locally relevant and actionable topics. In Brownsville, with some support from academic researchers, this foundational knowledge helped shape a survey, results summary and several public presentations, demonstrating how anyone can take part in the research ideation process when given the opportunity to do so.

There are many different ways to collect and analyze data. When co-designing with community members, the final product will often look different than the starting approach. The key to drawing insights from community research is to balance general research objectives with practical contextual considerations.

Initially academic social neuroscience researchers proposed to track how stress and well-being changed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic by asking residents to complete multiple surveys at different timepoints. But concerns voiced by community members about taking too much time from residents during an already stressful time led the work in another direction. The final community-informed design: a one-time survey covering broad topics deemed important and actionable by Community Engagement Officers and the academic researcher team, including sources of stress, mental health and trust in public and government officials.

Academic researchers often aim to use “validated” survey questions: questions that have been tested to make sure that they in fact capture what they intend to measure. For example, the Beck Depression Inventory is considered to be a valid measure of depression because its 21 questions have been shown to consistently probe clinically and socio-psychologically meaningful aspects of depression like sadness, pessimism and self-dislike.

However, much of past research, particularly in psychology, is based on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) samples. This means that many “validated” survey questions may not be appropriate when working across cultures and communities. A more fruitful approach is to use validated survey questions as a starting point, and then work with community members to tweak, remove or add questions based on cultural norms and expectations within the community.

Building in opportunities for multi-stakeholder input in the design process benefits everyone involved. It leads to a better research design, a more effective use of resources and increased inclusivity.

As more governments adopt data-driven community engagement in their project planning, design and implementation, the more important it is to leverage insights like these to achieve greater equity at scale.