Is Your Leadership Style Preventing Community Engagement?

Aid for Aid Workers Leadership Podcast

We all engage with communities on some level in our work. But the difference between meaningful engagement and mediocre is the difference between the community adopting new technologies or maintaining behavioral practices beyond the life of the project versus a full stop.

So how can we more meaningfully engage with communities? Lucky for us, Deb Cummins of Bridging Peoples has significant experience in this area and provides some practical advice you can start using next week to better influence the communities in which we work.

Some of the areas we cover in this episode include:

• Difference between community development and engagement
• At what point in project life cycle to start thinking about community engagement
• Why engaging with local leaders is not enough
• Why community engagement is so important
• How your staff fearing failure may prevent community engagement
• The impact of being process focused versus outcome focused
• How what we measure for success is what will influence the level of community engagement
• Practical ways leaders can start encouraging teams to engage communities better (starting next week!)
• How to influence community engagement if you work through local partners
• Why stakeholder mapping is so critical at the beginning of a project