The Realities of Community Engagement: What Works (And What Doesn’t)
WHAT WORKS:
1. Learning the Community First
Real engagement starts with understanding the neighborhood’s full reality—its people, businesses, challenges, and strengths. Knowing the economic conditions, food access, health disparities, and daily lived experiences allows you to move with accuracy, not assumptions.
2. Listening Before You Act
Showing up to hear what residents want, fear, and have experienced creates trust and gives you the blueprint for meaningful solutions. Listening reveals the true issues and prevents misalignment.
3. Building Real Relationships Without an Agenda
Communities open up when they see you consistently showing up without expecting anything. Relationship-building is foundational; it shows respect for residents’ knowledge, history, and lived experience.
4. Respecting the Work Already Done
Many neighborhoods already have plans, strategies, and community-driven priorities. Reviewing them shows respect, keeps you aligned with their vision, and helps you build on existing momentum instead of starting from scratch.
5. Identifying Key Players and Resources
Understanding who influences and supports the community—block captains, nonprofits, faith institutions, small businesses, schools, and city departments—helps you connect people to opportunities and bridge existing gaps. Many resources exist but aren’t being fully accessed. Mapping the ecosystem creates real impact.
6. Clarifying Your Purpose and Desired Outcomes
Transparency about why you’re engaging and what you hope to accomplish builds credibility. When people understand your intentions and the potential benefits, they can participate more fully and confidently.
7. Being Ethical, Strategic, and Intentional
Engagement should be mutually beneficial. Underserved communities want to contribute ideas and shape solutions. When your approach honors dignity, agency, and collaboration, people feel respected and valued.
8. Keeping Your Word (Underpromise, Overdeliver)
Trust is built through consistency. Delivering what you promise—even small commitments—strengthens relationships. Being reliable is one of the fastest ways to build community credibility.
9. Sharing Thoughtfully and Transparently
Be clear and honest, but avoid sharing incomplete or uncertain information before it’s ready. Responsible communication builds trust and reduces confusion, fear, or misinterpretation.
10. Prioritizing the Community’s Best Interest
The most effective engagement centers community wellbeing, opportunity, and long-term stability—not the project. When your decisions consistently benefit residents, trust deepens and resistance decreases.
11. Connecting People to Resources and Opportunities
Helping residents access programs and support they may not know exist creates immediate value. Often the issue isn’t lack of resources—it’s lack of access. Connecting those dots makes your engagement meaningful.
12. Supporting the Community’s Vision
Your work should strengthen and align with the goals residents have already defined. When people can see themselves in the future being created, engagement becomes cooperative and sustainable.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
1. Entering a Community Without Understanding It
Showing up with assumptions, guesses, or outside ideas without understanding the neighborhood’s history or struggles creates distance and mistrust.
2. Talking First, Listening Last
Leading with presentations, plans, or proposals instead of listening shuts down collaboration. Communities feel ignored when their voices aren’t centered.
3. Transactional Engagement
Only appearing when you need something—support, signatures, approvals—quickly destroys trust. Residents can sense when engagement is performative or extractive.
4. Ignoring Existing Community Plans
Disregarding the work residents already created communicates disrespect and signals that you’re not aligned with their long-term goals.
5. Overlooking Local Leaders and Resources
Failing to recognize key players, trusted voices, or existing programs isolates you from the community and weakens the ecosystem you’re trying to support.
6. Being Unclear About Intentions
Vague motives lead to confusion, fear, and resistance. People need to know why you’re present and how your work benefits them.
7. Approaching the Community With a “Fixing” Mindset
Communities don’t need saving—they need support, access, opportunity, and partnership. Coming in with a savior mentality harms relationships and undermines residents’ agency.
8. Making Promises You Can’t Keep
Nothing damages trust faster than overpromising and underdelivering. Even one broken commitment can set you back significantly.
9. Oversharing or Sharing Too Soon
Revealing incomplete plans, early concepts, or unconfirmed information can create panic or misinformation, making engagement harder.
10. Prioritizing the Project Over the People
When decisions center developer convenience instead of community impact, residents feel used and undervalued. This leads to pushback, resentment, and long-term distrust.
11. Failing to Connect People to Opportunity
When engagement doesn’t provide real, tangible benefits, communities feel like their time and voices are being used without outcome.
12. Forcing a Vision the Community Didn’t Ask For
Trying to push ideas that don’t align with community goals will always create conflict. Engagement fails when residents can’t see themselves or their needs in the final outcome.
Community engagement is more than outreach—it is a commitment to understanding, respecting, and partnering with the people who live the reality you’re trying to impact. The most effective engagement builds on community knowledge, strengthens existing networks, and prioritizes residents’ long-term wellbeing. When you lead with listening, act with integrity, and deliver on your word, you transform engagement from a requirement into a genuine collaboration. And when you avoid extractive practices and center the community’s vision, you create outcomes that are both meaningful and sustainable. Real engagement doesn’t just support a project—it strengthens the entire neighborhood for generations to come.
Written with purpose by Alexis Miles — Founder of The Ashe Group and lifelong student of community, strategy, and impact.