narrative essay about community engagement

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Exploring the impact of community service – a comprehensive essay sample.

Community service plays a vital role in shaping individuals and communities. Engaging in service activities not only helps those in need but also has a profound impact on the volunteers themselves. By giving back to the community, individuals can develop empathy, leadership skills, and a sense of responsibility towards society.

In this essay sample, we will explore inspiring examples of community service projects and provide tips on how you can get involved in making a difference. From volunteering at local shelters to organizing charity events, there are countless ways to contribute to your community and create a positive impact on the world around you. Let’s delve into the world of community service and discover the power of giving back!

Community Service Essay Sample

Community service is a valuable activity that allows individuals to give back to their communities. It provides an opportunity to make a positive impact on the lives of others while also developing important skills and values. Here is a sample essay that highlights the benefits of community service and reflects on personal experiences.

Introduction: Community service is an essential part of being an active and engaged member of society. It not only benefits the community but also helps individuals grow and learn. Through my involvement in various community service projects, I have seen firsthand the power of giving back and the joy it brings to both the recipient and the volunteer.

Body: One example of the impact of community service is the work I did at a local soup kitchen. By volunteering at the soup kitchen, I was able to help provide meals to those in need and offer a listening ear to those who were struggling. This experience taught me the importance of empathy and compassion, and showed me how even small acts of kindness can make a big difference in someone’s life.

Another example of the benefits of community service is the time I spent tutoring children at a local elementary school. Through this experience, I was able to help students improve their academic skills and build their confidence. I also gained a greater appreciation for the value of education and the impact it can have on a child’s future.

Conclusion: In conclusion, community service is a valuable and rewarding activity that allows individuals to make a positive impact on their communities. Through my experiences with community service, I have learned important lessons about empathy, compassion, and the power of giving back. I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to volunteer and look forward to continuing to serve my community in the future.

Inspiring Examples and Tips

When it comes to community service, there are countless inspiring examples that can motivate you to get involved. Whether it’s volunteering at a local shelter, organizing a charity event, or tutoring underprivileged children, these acts of service can make a real impact on the community.

Here are a few tips to help you get started on your community service journey:

1. Find a Cause You’re Passionate About: Choose a cause that resonates with you personally. When you care deeply about the issue you’re working on, your efforts will be more meaningful and impactful.

2. Start Small: You don’t have to take on huge projects right away. Start small by volunteering for a few hours a week or helping out at a local event. Every little bit helps.

3. Collaborate with Others: Community service is often more effective when done as a team. Reach out to friends, family, or colleagues to join you in your efforts.

4. Stay Consistent: Make a commitment to regularly engage in community service. Consistency is key to making a lasting impact.

5. Reflect on Your Impact: Take the time to reflect on how your service is making a difference. Celebrate your achievements and learn from your challenges.

By following these tips and drawing inspiration from others, you can make a meaningful contribution to your community through service. Get started today and see the positive impact you can have!

Why Community Service Matters

Community service is an essential component of a well-rounded individual. It provides an opportunity to give back to society, make a positive impact on the community, and develop valuable skills and experiences. Engaging in community service helps individuals cultivate empathy, compassion, and a sense of civic responsibility. By volunteering and helping others, individuals can learn to appreciate the needs of others and work towards creating a more inclusive and supportive society.

Furthermore, community service allows individuals to build connections with others and foster a sense of community. Through collaboration and teamwork, volunteers can develop important social and communication skills that are valuable in all aspects of life. Community service also provides a way to explore new interests, gain new perspectives, and expand one’s horizons.

Moreover, community service is a way to address pressing social issues and contribute to positive change. By participating in community service projects, individuals can make a tangible difference in the lives of others and work towards creating a more just and equitable world. Community service is a powerful tool for promoting social justice, equality, and human rights.

In conclusion, community service matters because it helps individuals grow personally, develop important skills, build meaningful relationships, and contribute to a better society. Engaging in community service is a fulfilling and impactful way to make a difference in the world and leave a lasting legacy of service and compassion.

Benefits of Engaging in Community Service

Engaging in community service offers a wide range of benefits both for the individual and the community as a whole.

1. Personal Growth: Community service allows individuals to step out of their comfort zones, develop new skills, and gain valuable life experiences. It helps enhance empathy, compassion, and understanding of diverse perspectives.

2. Social Connections: By participating in community service activities, individuals can build strong relationships with like-minded individuals and expand their social network. It provides opportunities to collaborate with others and work towards common goals.

3. Skill Development: Community service offers a platform for individuals to develop and hone various skills such as leadership, communication, problem-solving, and teamwork. These skills are transferable to other aspects of life.

4. Civic Engagement: Engaging in community service promotes active citizenship and a sense of responsibility towards one’s community. It allows individuals to contribute to positive change and make a meaningful impact on society.

5. Personal Fulfillment: Giving back to the community and helping those in need can bring a sense of fulfillment and purpose to individuals. It provides a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction knowing that one has made a positive difference in the lives of others.

Overall, engaging in community service not only benefits the community by addressing various social issues but also contributes to personal growth, social connections, skill development, civic engagement, and personal fulfillment.

How to Choose the Right Community Service Project

When deciding on a community service project, it is important to consider your interests, skills, and the needs of your community. Here are some tips to help you choose the right project:

Identify your passion: Think about what causes or issues you feel strongly about. Whether it’s helping the environment, supporting education, or assisting the elderly, choosing a project that aligns with your passions will keep you motivated and engaged.
Evaluate your skills: Consider what skills you have to offer. Are you good at organizing events, teaching, or fundraising? Select a project that allows you to utilize your strengths and make a meaningful impact.
Assess the community’s needs: Research and assess the needs of your community. Talk to local organizations, schools, or community leaders to identify areas where help is most needed. By addressing pressing needs, your project will have a greater impact.
Consider the time commitment: Be realistic about the time you can dedicate to a community service project. Choose a project that fits into your schedule and allows you to make a consistent contribution over time.
Collaborate with others: Consider teaming up with friends, classmates, or colleagues to take on a community service project together. Working as a team can help divide tasks, share responsibilities, and create a stronger impact.

By following these tips and considering your interests, skills, and community needs, you can choose the right community service project that aligns with your values and makes a positive difference in your community.

Steps to Writing an Effective Community Service Essay

If you are tasked with writing a community service essay, follow these steps to ensure it is impactful and engaging:

Choose a meaningful community service experience: Select a service project that has had a significant impact on you or your community.
Reflect on your experience: Take time to think about the lessons learned, challenges faced, and personal growth from the service project.
Outline your essay: Create a clear outline that includes an introduction, body paragraphs detailing your experiences, and a conclusion that ties everything together.
Show, don’t tell: Use descriptive language and vivid examples to bring your community service experience to life for the reader.
Highlight your personal growth: Discuss how the community service experience has shaped your values, beliefs, and future goals.
Connect your experience to the broader community: Share how your service has impacted those around you and the community as a whole.
Revise and edit your essay: Review your essay for clarity, coherence, and grammar errors. Make revisions as needed to strengthen your message.
Seek feedback: Ask someone you trust to read your essay and provide constructive feedback for improvement.
Finalize your essay: Make any final adjustments and ensure your essay is polished and reflects your authentic voice.

Community Service Essay Structure

When writing a community service essay, it is important to follow a structured approach to ensure that your message is clear and impactful. Here is a recommended structure to help you organize your thoughts and create a compelling essay:

Introduction: Start with a strong opening sentence that grabs the reader’s attention. Introduce the topic of community service and provide some context for your personal experience.
Background Information: Briefly explain what community service means to you and why you chose to engage in it. Provide background information on the organization or cause you volunteered for.
Personal Experience: Share specific examples of your community service activities. Describe the impact you made, challenges you faced, and lessons you learned. Highlight any skills or qualities that you developed through your volunteer work.
Reflection: Reflect on how your community service experience has influenced your personal growth and perspective on the world. Discuss any changes in your attitudes or values as a result of your volunteer work.
Impact: Describe the positive impact your community service has had on others. Share stories of individuals or communities that benefitted from your efforts.
Conclusion: Summarize the key points of your essay and reiterate the importance of community service. End with a powerful closing statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

By following this structure, you can effectively communicate the value of community service and inspire others to make a difference in their communities. Remember to be sincere, reflective, and passionate in your writing to convey the true essence of your volunteer experience.

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Reflective on Community Service

Categories: Community Service Personal Growth and Development

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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Introduction, 1. personal growth and development, 2. academic enhancement, 3. social responsibility and civic engagement, 4. challenges and lessons learned, 5. future implications.

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Community Engagement Matters (Now More Than Ever)

Data-driven and evidence-based practices present new opportunities for public and social sector leaders to increase impact while reducing inefficiency. But in adopting such approaches, leaders must avoid the temptation to act in a top-down manner. Instead, they should design and implement programs in ways that engage community members directly in the work of social change.

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By Melody Barnes & Paul Schmitz Spring 2016

narrative essay about community engagement

In October 2010, three men—Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey; Cory Booker, who was then mayor of Newark, N.J.; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook—appeared together on The Oprah Winfrey Show to announce an ambitious reform plan for Newark Public Schools. On the show, Zuckerberg pledged a $100 million matching grant to support the goal of making Newark a model for how to turn around a failing school system. This announcement was the first time that most Newark residents heard about the initiative. And that wasn’t an accident.

Christie and Booker had adopted a top-down approach because they thought that the messy work of forging a consensus among local stakeholders might undermine the reform effort. 1 They created an ambitious timeline, installed a board of philanthropists from outside Newark to oversee the initiative, and hired a leader from outside Newark to serve as the city’s superintendent of schools.

The story of school reform in Newark has become a widely cited object lesson in how not to undertake a social change project. Even in the highly charged realm of education reform, the Newark initiative stands out for the high level of tension that it created. Instead of generating excitement among Newark residents about an opportunity to improve results for their kids, the reform plan that emerged from the 2010 announcement sparked a massive public outcry. At public meetings, community members protested vigorously against the plan. In 2014, 77 local ministers pleaded with the governor to drop the initiative because of the toxic environment it had created. Ras Baraka, who succeeded Booker as mayor of Newark, made opposition to the reform plan a central part of his election campaign. The money that Zuckerberg and others contributed to support the reform plan is now gone, and the initiative faces an uncertain future.

“When Booker and Christie decided to do this without the community, that was their biggest mistake,” says Howard Fuller, former superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools and a prominent school reform leader. Instead of unifying Newark residents behind a shared goal, the Booker-Christie initiative polarized the city.

Zuckerberg, for his part, seems to have learned a lesson. In May 2014, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced a $120 million commitment to support schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. In doing so, they emphasized their intention to “[listen] to the needs of local educators and community leaders so that we understand the needs of students that others miss.” 2

Another project launched in Newark in 2010—the Strong Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI) —has had a much less contentious path. Both Booker and Baraka have championed it. Sponsored by Living Cities (a consortium of 22 large foundations and financial institutions that funds urban revitalization projects), SHCI operates with a clear theory of change: To achieve better educational outcomes for children, policymakers and community leaders must address the environmental conditions that help or hinder learning.

If kids are hungry, sick, tired, or under stress, their ability to learn will suffer. According to an impressive array of research, such conditions lie at the forefront of parents’ and kids’ minds, and they strongly affect kids’ chances of success in school. Inspired by this research, SHCI leaders have taken steps to eliminate blighted housing conditions, to build health centers in schools, and to increase access to high-quality food for low-income families.

SHCI began as an effort led by philanthropists and city leaders, but since then it has shifted its orientation to engage a broader crosssection of community stakeholders. Over time, those in charge of the initiative have built partnerships with leaders from communities and organizations throughout Newark. “We avoid a top-down approach as much as possible,” says Monique Baptiste-Good, director of SHCI. “We start with community and then engage established leaders. When we started, a critical decision was to operate like a campaign and not institutionalize as an organization. We fall to the background and push our partners’ capacity forward. Change happens at the pace people can adapt.”

Challenges related to housing and health may seem to be less controversial than school reform, but these issues generate considerable heat as well. (Consider, for example, the controversy that surrounds efforts by the Obama administration to change nutrition standards for children.) In any event, the crucial lesson here is one that spans a wide range of issue areas: How policymakers and other social change leaders pursue initiatives will determine whether those efforts succeed. If they approach such efforts in a top-down manner, they are likely to meet with failure. (We define a top-down approach as one in which elected officials, philanthropists, and leaders of other large institutions launch and implement programs and services without the full engagement of community leaders and intended beneficiaries.)

This lesson has become more acutely relevant in recent years. Disparities in education, health, economic opportunity, and access to justice continue to increase, and the resources available to confront those challenges have not kept pace with expanding needs. As a consequence, leaders in the public and nonprofit sectors are looking for better ways to invest those resources. At the same time, the increasing use of data-driven practices raises the hope that leaders can make progress on this front. These practices include, most notably, evidence-based programs in which there is a proven correlation between a given intervention and a specific impact. But they also include collective impact initiatives and other efforts that employ data to design and evaluate solutions. (In this article, we will use the term “data-driven” to refer to the full range of such practices.)

In rolling out programs that draw on such research, however, leaders must not neglect other vitally important aspects of social change. As the recent efforts in Newark demonstrate, data-driven solutions will be feasible and sustainable only if leaders create and implement those solutions with the active participation of people in the communities that they target.

The Promise of Data

Under the sponsorship of an organization called Results for America , we recently undertook a research project that focused on how leaders can and should pursue data-driven social change efforts. For the project, we interviewed roughly 30 city administrators, philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and community builders from across the United States. We began this research with a simple premise: Social change leaders now have an unprecedented ability to draw on data-driven insight about which programs actually lead to better results.

Leaders today know that babies born to mothers enrolled in certain home visiting programs have healthier birth outcomes. (The Nurse-Family Partnership , which matches first-time mothers with registered nurses, is a prime example of this type of intervention. 3 ) They know that students in certain reading programs reach higher literacy levels. ( Reading Partners , for instance, has shown impressive results with a program that provides one-on-one reading instruction to struggling elementary school students. 4 ) They know that criminal offenders who enter job-training and support programs when they leave prison are less likely to re-offend and more likely to succeed in gaining employment. ( The Center for Employment Opportunities has achieved such outcomes by offering life-skills education, short-term paid transitional employment, full-time job placement, and post-placement services. 5 )

Results for America, which launched in 2012, seeks to enable governments at all levels to apply data-driven approaches to issues related to education, health, and economic opportunity. In 2014, the organization published a book called Moneyball for Government . (The title is a nod to Moneyball , a book by Michael Lewis that details how the Oakland A’s baseball club used data analytics to build championship teams despite having a limited budget for player salaries.) The book features contributions by a wide range of policymakers and thought leaders (including Melody Barnes, a co-author of this article). The editors of Moneyball for Government , Jim Nussle and Peter Orszag, outline three principles that public officials should follow as they pursue social change:

“Build evidence about the practices, policies, and programs that will achieve the most effective and efficient results so that policymakers can make better decisions.
“Invest limited taxpayer dollars in practices, policies, and programs that use data, evidence, and evaluation to demonstrate they work.
“Direct funds away from practices, policies, and programs that consistently fail to achieve measurable outcomes.” 6

These concepts sound simple. Indeed, they have the ring of common sense. Yet they do not correspond to the current norms of practice in the public and nonprofit sectors. According to one estimate, less than 1 percent of federal nondefense discretionary spending goes toward programs that are backed by evidence. 7 In a 2014 report, Lisbeth Schorr and Frank Farrow note that the influence of evidence on decision-making—“especially when compared to the influence of ideology, politics, history, and even anecdotes”—has been weak among policymakers and social service providers. 8 (Schorr is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy , and Farrow is director of the center.)

That needs to change. There is both an economic and a moral imperative for adopting data-driven approaches. Given persistently limited budgets, public and nonprofit leaders must direct funds to programs and initiatives that use data to show that they are achieving impact. Even if unlimited funds were available, moreover, leaders would have a responsibility to design programs that will deliver the best results for beneficiaries.

The Need for “Patient Urgency”

The inclination to move fast in creating and implementing data-driven programs and practices is understandable. After all, the problems that communities face today are serious and immediate. People’s lives are at stake. If there is evidence that a particular intervention can (for example) help more children get a healthy start in life—or help them read at grade level, or help them develop marketable skills—then setting that intervention in motion is pressingly urgent.

But acting too quickly in this arena entails a significant risk. All too easily, the urge to initiate programs expeditiously translates into a preference for top-down forms of management. Leaders, not unreasonably, are apt to assume that bottom-up methods will only slow the implementation of programs that have a record of delivering positive results.

A former director of data and analytics for a US city offers a cautionary tale that illustrates this idea. “We thought if we got better results for people, they would demand more of it,” she explains. “Our mayor communicated in a paternal way: ‘I know better than you what you need. I will make things better for you. Trust me.’ The problem is that they didn’t trust us. Relationships matter. Not enough was done to ask people what they wanted, to honor what they see and experience. Many of our initiatives died—not because they didn’t work but because they didn’t have community support.”

To win such support, policymakers and other leaders must treat community members as active partners. “Doing to us, not with us, is a recipe for failure,” says Fuller, who has deep experience in building community-led coalitions. “If we engage communities, then we have a solution and we have the leadership necessary to demand that solution and hold people accountable for it.” Engaging a community is not an activity that leaders can check off on a list. It’s a continuous process that aims to generate the support necessary for long-term change. The goal is to encourage intended beneficiaries not just to participate in a social change initiative but also to champion it.

“This work takes patient urgency,” Fuller argues. “If you aren’t patient, you only get illusory change. Lasting change is not possible without community. You may be gone in 5 or 10 years, but the community will still be there. You need a sense of urgency to push the process forward and maintain momentum.” The tension between urgency and patience is a productive tension. Navigating that tension allows leaders and community members to achieve the right level of engagement.

Rich Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation , makes this point in a post on his website: “Understanding and strengthening a community’s civic culture is as important to collective efforts as using data, metrics and measuring outcomes. … A weak civic culture undermines the best intentions and the most rigorous of analyses and plans. For change to happen, trust and community ownership must form, people need to engage with one another, and we need to create the right underlying conditions and capabilities for change to take root and spread.” 9

Factors of Engagement

We have identified six factors that are essential to building community support for data-driven solutions. These factors are complementary. Social change initiatives that incorporate each factor will tend to have a greater chance of success.

Organizing for ownership | In many cases, efforts to engage affected communities take place after leaders have designed and launched data-driven initiatives. But engagement should begin earlier so that community members will have an incentive to support the initiative.

One of the biggest mistakes that social change leaders make is failing to differentiate between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing is about recruiting people to support a vision, cause, or program. In this model, a leader or an organization is the subject that makes decisions, and community members are the passive object of those decisions. Organizing, on the other hand, is about cultivating leaders, identifying their interests, and enabling them to lead change. Here, community members are the subject of the work: They collaborate on making decisions. At its best, community engagement involves working with a variety of leaders—those at the grass tops and those at the grass roots—to ensure that an effort has the support necessary for long-term success.

The International Association for Public Participation has developed a spectrum that encompasses various forms of engagement. 10 At one end of the spectrum is informing , which might take the form of a mailing or a town-hall meeting in which professional leaders describe a new change effort (and perhaps ask for feedback about it). At the other end of the spectrum is empowerment , which supports true self-determination for participants. One organization that practices empowerment is the Family Independence Initiative (FII) in Oakland, Calif. Instead of focusing on delivery of social services, FII invests in supporting the capacity and ingenuity of poor families. (Through an extensive data-collection process at six pilot sites, FII has demonstrated that participating families can achieve significant economic and social mobility.)

The further an initiative moves toward the empowerment end of the spectrum, the more community members will feel a sense of ownership over it, and the more inclined they will be to advocate for it. Of course, it’s not always possible to operate at the level of full empowerment. But initiative leaders need to be clear about where they are in the spectrum, and they need to deliver the level of engagement they promise.

John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann, co-directors of the Asset- Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University and authors of the classic community-building guide Building Communities From the Inside Out , argue that too often “experts” undermine the natural leadership and the sense of connectedness that exist in communities as assets for solving problems. At a recent international conference of community builders, McKnight and Kretzmann suggested that when providers work with communities they should ask these questions: “What can community members do best for themselves and each other? What can community members do best if they receive some support from organizations? What can organizations do best for communities that people can’t do for themselves?”

It’s important, in other words, to view community members as producers of outcomes, not just as recipients of outcomes. Professional leaders must recognize and respect the assets that community members can bring to an initiative. If the goal is to help children to read at grade level or to help mothers to have healthy birth outcomes, then leaders should consider the roles that family members, friends, and neighbors can play in that effort. A mother who watches kids from her neighborhood after school is a kind of youth worker. The elder who checks in on a young mother is a kind of community health worker. Supporting these community members—not just for their voice but also for their ability to produce results—is crucial to the pursuit of lasting change.

Engaging grassroots leaders requires intention and attention. “If we commit to engaging community members, we have to set them up for success. We have to orient them to our world and engage in theirs,” says Angela Frusciante, knowledge development officer at the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund . “We need to work with leaders to make meaning out of the data about their communities: Where do they see their own stories in the data? How do they interpret what they see? Remember, data is information about people’s lives.”

Allowing for complexity | Leaders must adapt to the complex system of influences that bear on the success of any data-driven solution. Patrick McCarthy, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation , made this point forcefully at a 2014 forum: “An inhospitable system will trump a good program—every time, all the time.” 11 Instead of trying to “plug and play” a solution, leaders should consider the cultural context in which people will implement that solution. They should develop a deep connection to the communities they serve and a deep understanding of the many constituencies that can affect the success of their efforts.

One pitfall of data-driven social change work is that it sometimes provides little scope for complexity—for the way that multiple factors are intertwined in peoples’ lives. Evidence-based approaches can “[privilege] single-level programmatic interventions,” Schorr and Farrow note. “These [programs] are most likely to pass the ‘what works?’ test within the controlled conditions of the experimental evaluation. Reliance on this hierarchy also risks neglecting or discouraging interventions that cannot be understood through this methodology and sidelining complex, multi-level systemic solutions that may be very effective but require evidence-gathering methods that rank lower in the evidence hierarchy.” 12 Those who implement data-driven practices, therefore, need to treat them not as miracle cures but as important elements within a larger ecosystem.

The need to reckon with complexity is one reason that the collective impact model has gained popularity in many communities. 13 In a collective impact initiative, organizations and community members work together at a systemic level to achieve a complex community-wide goal. They work to connect each intervention to other programs, organizations, and systems (including family and neighborhood systems) that influence the lives of beneficiaries. It’s not likely that a single intervention, pursued in isolation, will create lasting change. Delivering an evidence-based reading program for children in elementary school may have a positive impact on literacy outcomes, for example, but the long-term sustainability of that intervention will depend on the health, safety, home environment, and economic well-being of those children.

Working with local institutions | Often the pursuit of a data-driven strategy involves shifting funds away from work that isn’t demonstrating success. Taking that step is sometimes necessary, but when leaders shift funds, they must be careful not to harm the community they aim to help. Such harm can occur, for example, when they underfund programs with deep community connections, when they eliminate vital services for which there is no good alternative, or when they import programs from outside the community that destabilize existing providers.

A decision to shift funds can also generate otherwise avoidable resistance from natural allies. An official from a local foundation recounts an episode that happened in her city: “Our mayor got excited about a college access program that he visited in another city and raised money to bring it here. The existing college access programs had trouble raising money once the mayor was competing with them to raise funds, and they started going out of business. The new initiative never gained community support.” According to this official, the mayor’s actions were ultimately counterproductive. “There is now less happening for the people served,” she says.

In some cases, moreover, local organizations have built up social capital that creates an enabling environment for data-driven interventions to succeed. A community center that has fostered active participation among parents, for example, might be an important asset for a data-driven effort to improve third-grade reading scores.

For these reasons, it’s often better to encourage existing grantees to adopt data-driven practices than to defund those groups. Carol Emig, president of Child Trends , a nonprofit research organization that focuses on issues related to children and families, argues for this approach: “Instead of telling a city or foundation official that they have to defund their current grantees because they are not evidence-based, funders can tell long-standing grantees that future funding will be tied at least in part to retooling existing programs and services so that they have more of the elements of successful programs.” 14 The mayor who brought an outside college access program to his city, for example, might have had more success if he had worked with local providers to implement a variation of the program.

Collaborating with local groups takes effort. Funders must start by assessing whether a grantee has a solid grounding in the community, experience in the relevant issue area, and a willingness to alter its practice. Nicole Angresano, vice president of community impact at the United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha County , explains how her organization works with grantees to improve performance: “We assess the state of the organization’s relationships.” Her group looks in particular at the level of trust that grantees have earned within their community. “If that [trust] is high, we’ll build capacity and partner with them to improve results,” she says.

Applying an equity lens | Jim Collins, in his management strategy book Good to Great, argues that effective leaders “ first [get] the right people on the bus … and the right people in the right seats—and then they [figure] out where to drive it.” 15 Too often, social change efforts don’t engage the right mix of people. When leaders seek to bring data-driven solutions to low-income communities and communities of color, they must take care to apply an equity lens to this work. Members of those communities not only should be “at the table”; they should hold leadership positions as well.

Many groups apply an equity lens to their initiatives downstream: They analyze disaggregated data to identify disparities, and then they adopt strategies to reduce those disparities. That’s important, but it’s even more important to apply an equity lens upstream—in the places where people make critical decisions about an initiative. The ranks of board members, staff members, advisors, and partners must include members of the beneficiary community. “Some leaders just want black and brown people to carry signs,” says Fuller. “They don’t want them to actually lead, to have a voice, to have self-determination.”

It’s not enough to bring a diverse set of leaders together. Creating a culture in which those leaders can collaborate effectively is also necessary. Applying an equity lens involves working to build trust among participants and working to ensure that all of them can engage fully in an initiative. Achieving equitable participation, moreover, requires a commitment to hearing all voices, valuing all perspectives, and taking swift action to correct disparities of representation. And although this process cannot eliminate power dynamics, leaders should strive to mitigate the effects of power differences.

Leaders should also apply an equity lens to the selection of organizations that will receive funding to implement data-driven work. One way to do so is to establish a continuum of eligibility that allows groups—those that are ready to implement data-driven practices as well as those that will require capacity-building support to reach that level—to apply for funding at different stages of an initiative. That approach can enable the inclusion of small organizations that are led by people of color or by other under-represented members of a community.

Building momentum | The work of engaging communities, as we noted earlier, requires a sense of patient urgency. According to people we interviewed for our project, it often takes one to two years to complete the core planning and relationship building that are necessary to launch an initiative that features substantial community engagement. That is all the more true when the initiative incorporates data-driven approaches.

For this reason, achieving significant results within a typical two-to-three-year foundation grant cycle can be challenging. Similarly, it can be difficult to pursue lasting change within a time frame that suits the needs of public sector leaders. Government agencies usually operate in one-year budget cycles, and elected officials want to see results within a four-year election cycle. So when public agencies take the lead on an initiative, it’s incumbent on philanthropic funders and other partners to create external pressure that will lend staying power to the initiative.

Another solution to this problem is to build momentum up front by achieving quick wins—early examples of demonstrated progress. Quick wins will encourage grantmakers to invest in an initiative and will help meet the political needs of public officials. In addition, quick wins will keep resistance from building. If an initiative hasn’t shown any results for two to three years, the forces of the status quo will reassert themselves, and opponents will eagerly claim that the initiative is failing.

Early wins will also help a community build a narrative of success that can replace existing narratives that dwell on the apparent intractability of social problems. Likewise, quick wins will enable community members to see that their engagement matters. As a result, they will be more likely to embrace ambitious goals for social change. “You have to give folks who are ready to run work that will keep them energized, and [you have to] give others time to absorb change and build trust in the process,” Baptiste-Good says. “It takes patience and relationships to make it work.”

Managing constituencies through change | Leaders who shift to a new data-driven framework need to manage how various constituencies react to that change. A good way to start is by distinguishing between technical challenges and adaptive challenges. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership , Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky explain that distinction: “Technical problems … can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through the organization’s current structures, procedures, and ways of doing things. Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties.” 16 For leaders, it’s tempting to focus on straightforward technical challenges (such as developing criteria for funding a data-driven intervention) and to neglect pressing adaptive challenges (such as dealing with changes in relationships and behaviors that staff members, partners, and service recipients will experience with the rollout of that intervention).

Multiple constituencies will feel the effects of a shift in strategy. There are existing partners, who will need to change their ways of operating and who may lose funding. There are potential new providers, who must gear up to help implement the new strategy. There are intended beneficiaries, who may need to alter or discontinue their relationships with trusted service providers. There are grant officers, who may need to jettison grantee relationships that they have cultivated over many years. And so on. To build community engagement around adoption of a new framework, leaders must prepare all of these constituencies for the adaptive changes they will have to make.

Communication is paramount, and it should begin early in the change process. In particular, leaders should take these steps:

Signal changes early so that stakeholders can prepare for them.
Focus less on expressing excitement about new practices than on showing empathy for the concerns of each constituency. (“Seek first to understand—and then to be understood” is a good rule to follow.)
Disclose how and why decisions were made, and who made them.
Acknowledge that there will be trade-offs and losses, and explain that they are a necessary consequence of adopting a strategy that promises to improve results.
Clearly describe the transition process for people and groups that are willing and able to move toward the new framework.

Above all, leaders must focus on managing expectations for each constituency each step of the way.

Models of Engagement

Community engagement is not easy work, but it is important work. Here are two initiatives in which social change leaders are pursuing a community engagement strategy as part of their effort to implement data-driven solutions.

A youth program in Providence | In 2012, the Annie E. Casey Foundation launched an initiative in partnership with the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet (CYC) , an organization that was then part of the mayor’s office in Providence, R.I. Working within the foundation’s Evidence2Success framework, the CYC surveyed more than 5,000 young people in the 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades about the root causes of personal and academic success—factors such as social and emotional skills, relationships, and family support. The CYC then convened community leaders and residents from two neighborhoods to discuss the survey data and to create a set of shared priorities. A diverse group of city, state, and neighborhood leaders helped oversee that process.

These shared priorities—which cover outcomes related to truancy and absenteeism, delinquent behavior, and emotional well-being—became the central point of focus for the initiative. Implementation teams, which included both residents and social service providers, established improvement goals for each priority. The teams then used Blueprints for Healthy Development , an online resource maintained by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to select six evidence-based programs that are designed to advance those goals. In addition, CYC leaders conferred with residents about resources and forms of assistance that the community will need to ensure the success of these programs. Implementation of three of the six identified programs is now under way, and the CYC will measure progress toward the improvement goals in future surveys.

From the start, CYC leaders worked to improve the power dynamics among stakeholders by communicating transparently about their decision-making process. “We tailored information to different groups to empower them,” says Rebecca Boxx, director of the CYC. “We engaged everyone in a shared framework that was new to all. For community residents, we said, ‘This data is you, your lives. You own that.’ There was tremendous power in helping residents own their role.” In effect, Boxx adds, the initiative has involved “flipping expertise”—in other words, placing community members “on equal footing” with public officials, social service providers, and the like. (To ensure that the CYC would remain an independent voice for local communities—one whose future would not depend on election results—CYC leaders eventually moved the group outside the mayor’s office.)

CYC leaders spent about 18 months engaging with community members and another 18 months implementing the initial set of three evidence-based programs. “It will take three to four years to start seeing community-level results,” says Jessie Wattrous, a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “There is a win for [city officials] in saying, ‘We are listening to our community and spending our dollars on programs that have been proven to work.’ You also have community leaders and residents speaking out about it.” The foundation recently launched Evidence2Success partnerships in Alabama and Utah that build on the lessons of the Providence initiative to pursue evidence-based programs in those states.

A health program in Milwaukee | At one time, Milwaukee had the highest African-American infant mortality rate in the United States. To confront that problem, several partners—including the United Way of Greater Milwaukee, the mayor of that city, and the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health —launched the Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families (LIHF) in 2012.

As part of the initiative, LIHF leaders invited researchers from universities, nonprofit advocacy groups, and the City of Milwaukee Health Department to share evidence about the causes of infant mortality and ways to reduce it. Many LIHF participants initially believed that unsafe sleeping conditions were the leading cause of infant mortality. But data gathered by the city’s Fetal Infant Mortality Review team showed that this factor accounted for only 15 percent of deaths and that more than 60 percent of deaths were the result of premature births. After researching evidence-based approaches to reducing the incidence of premature birth, LIHF participants agreed on a set of initiatives that focus on access to health services, fatherhood involvement, and other social determinants of health.

Previously, the City of Milwaukee and the United Way had partnered on an initiative that reduced teen pregnancy by 57 percent in seven years. (Milwaukee also once had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation.) Lessons from that initiative left these partners with a commitment to deep and inclusive community engagement. In the case of LIHF, those who oversaw the initiative began with a two-year planning process that involved convening more than 100 community leaders from all parts of the city.

In developing LIHF, leaders put special emphasis on achieving racial equity in the design and leadership composition of the initiative. At a launch meeting for LIHF, a group of more than 70 community leaders and residents spent an hour discussing racism and its impact on health among African-American women. Subsequent meetings have dealt explicitly with the role that racial equity must play in reaching LIHF goals. An African-American woman business leader cochairs the LIHF Steering Committee (the mayor of Milwaukee is the other cochair), and an African-American community activist serves as director of the initiative. To gain residents’ input and support, LIHF leaders also hired six community organizers who live in targeted neighborhoods and placed two people from those neighborhoods on the steering committee.

Engaging with Data

Data-driven practices and programs hold great promise as a means for making progress against seemingly intractable social problems. But ultimately they will work only when community members are able to engage in them as leaders and partners. Community engagement has two significant benefits: It can achieve real change in people’s lives—especially in the lives of the most vulnerable members of a community—and it can instill a can-do spirit that extends across an entire community.

As policymakers, elected officials, philanthropists, and nonprofit leaders shift resources to data-driven programs, they must ensure that community engagement becomes a critical element in that shift. Without such engagement, even the best programs—even programs backed by the most robust data—will not yield positive results, let alone lasting change.

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How to Write the Community Essay – Guide with Examples (2023-24)

September 6, 2023

Students applying to college this year will inevitably confront the community essay. In fact, most students will end up responding to several community essay prompts for different schools. For this reason, you should know more than simply how to approach the community essay as a genre. Rather, you will want to learn how to decipher the nuances of each particular prompt, in order to adapt your response appropriately. In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that, through several community essay examples. These examples will also demonstrate how to avoid cliché and make the community essay authentically and convincingly your own.

Emphasis on Community

Do keep in mind that inherent in the word “community” is the idea of multiple people. The personal statement already provides you with a chance to tell the college admissions committee about yourself as an individual. The community essay, however, suggests that you depict yourself among others. You can use this opportunity to your advantage by showing off interpersonal skills, for example. Or, perhaps you wish to relate a moment that forged important relationships. This in turn will indicate what kind of connections you’ll make in the classroom with college peers and professors.

Apart from comprising numerous people, a community can appear in many shapes and sizes. It could be as small as a volleyball team, or as large as a diaspora. It could fill a town soup kitchen, or spread across five boroughs. In fact, due to the internet, certain communities today don’t even require a physical place to congregate. Communities can form around a shared identity, shared place, shared hobby, shared ideology, or shared call to action. They can even arise due to a shared yet unforeseen circumstance.

What is the Community Essay All About?

In a nutshell, the community essay should exhibit three things:

An aspect of yourself, 2. in the context of a community you belonged to, and 3. how this experience may shape your contribution to the community you’ll join in college.

It may look like a fairly simple equation: 1 + 2 = 3. However, each college will word their community essay prompt differently, so it’s important to look out for additional variables. One college may use the community essay as a way to glimpse your core values. Another may use the essay to understand how you would add to diversity on campus. Some may let you decide in which direction to take it—and there are many ways to go!

To get a better idea of how the prompts differ, let’s take a look at some real community essay prompts from the current admission cycle.

Sample 2023-2024 Community Essay Prompts

1) brown university.

“Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (200-250 words)”

A close reading of this prompt shows that Brown puts particular emphasis on place. They do this by using the words “home,” “College Hill,” and “where they came from.” Thus, Brown invites writers to think about community through the prism of place. They also emphasize the idea of personal growth or change, through the words “inspired or challenged you.” Therefore, Brown wishes to see how the place you grew up in has affected you. And, they want to know how you in turn will affect their college community.

“NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world-class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience.

We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community. Please respond in 250 words or less.”

Here, NYU places an emphasis on students’ “identity,” “backgrounds,” and “diversity,” rather than any physical place. (For some students, place may be tied up in those ideas.) Furthermore, while NYU doesn’t ask specifically how identity has changed the essay writer, they do ask about your “experience.” Take this to mean that you can still recount a specific moment, or several moments, that work to portray your particular background. You should also try to link your story with NYU’s values of inclusivity and opportunity.

3) University of Washington

“Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW. (300 words max) Tip: Keep in mind that the UW strives to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints.”

UW ’s community essay prompt may look the most approachable, for they help define the idea of community. You’ll notice that most of their examples (“families,” “cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood”…) place an emphasis on people. This may clue you in on their desire to see the relationships you’ve made. At the same time, UW uses the words “individual” and “richly diverse.” They, like NYU, wish to see how you fit in and stand out, in order to boost campus diversity.

Writing Your First Community Essay

Begin by picking which community essay you’ll write first. (For practical reasons, you’ll probably want to go with whichever one is due earliest.) Spend time doing a close reading of the prompt, as we’ve done above. Underline key words. Try to interpret exactly what the prompt is asking through these keywords.

Next, brainstorm. I recommend doing this on a blank piece of paper with a pencil. Across the top, make a row of headings. These might be the communities you’re a part of, or the components that make up your identity. Then, jot down descriptive words underneath in each column—whatever comes to you. These words may invoke people and experiences you had with them, feelings, moments of growth, lessons learned, values developed, etc. Now, narrow in on the idea that offers the richest material and that corresponds fully with the prompt.

Lastly, write! You’ll definitely want to describe real moments, in vivid detail. This will keep your essay original, and help you avoid cliché. However, you’ll need to summarize the experience and answer the prompt succinctly, so don’t stray too far into storytelling mode.

How To Adapt Your Community Essay

Once your first essay is complete, you’ll need to adapt it to the other colleges involving community essays on your list. Again, you’ll want to turn to the prompt for a close reading, and recognize what makes this prompt different from the last. For example, let’s say you’ve written your essay for UW about belonging to your swim team, and how the sports dynamics shaped you. Adapting that essay to Brown’s prompt could involve more of a focus on place. You may ask yourself, how was my swim team in Alaska different than the swim teams we competed against in other states?

Once you’ve adapted the content, you’ll also want to adapt the wording to mimic the prompt. For example, let’s say your UW essay states, “Thinking back to my years in the pool…” As you adapt this essay to Brown’s prompt, you may notice that Brown uses the word “reflection.” Therefore, you might change this sentence to “Reflecting back on my years in the pool…” While this change is minute, it cleverly signals to the reader that you’ve paid attention to the prompt, and are giving that school your full attention.

What to Avoid When Writing the Community Essay

Avoid cliché. Some students worry that their idea is cliché, or worse, that their background or identity is cliché. However, what makes an essay cliché is not the content, but the way the content is conveyed. This is where your voice and your descriptions become essential.
Avoid giving too many examples. Stick to one community, and one or two anecdotes arising from that community that allow you to answer the prompt fully.
Don’t exaggerate or twist facts. Sometimes students feel they must make themselves sound more “diverse” than they feel they are. Luckily, diversity is not a feeling. Likewise, diversity does not simply refer to one’s heritage. If the prompt is asking about your identity or background, you can show the originality of your experiences through your actions and your thinking.

Community Essay Examples and Analysis

Brown university community essay example.

I used to hate the NYC subway. I’ve taken it since I was six, going up and down Manhattan, to and from school. By high school, it was a daily nightmare. Spending so much time underground, underneath fluorescent lighting, squashed inside a rickety, rocking train car among strangers, some of whom wanted to talk about conspiracy theories, others who had bedbugs or B.O., or who manspread across two seats, or bickered—it wore me out. The challenge of going anywhere seemed absurd. I dreaded the claustrophobia and disgruntlement.

Yet the subway also inspired my understanding of community. I will never forget the morning I saw a man, several seats away, slide out of his seat and hit the floor. The thump shocked everyone to attention. What we noticed: he appeared drunk, possibly homeless. I was digesting this when a second man got up and, through a sort of awkward embrace, heaved the first man back into his seat. The rest of us had stuck to subway social codes: don’t step out of line. Yet this second man’s silent actions spoke loudly. They said, “I care.”

That day I realized I belong to a group of strangers. What holds us together is our transience, our vulnerabilities, and a willingness to assist. This community is not perfect but one in motion, a perpetual work-in-progress. Now I make it my aim to hold others up. I plan to contribute to the Brown community by helping fellow students and strangers in moments of precariousness.

Brown University Community Essay Example Analysis

Here the student finds an original way to write about where they come from. The subway is not their home, yet it remains integral to ideas of belonging. The student shows how a community can be built between strangers, in their responsibility toward each other. The student succeeds at incorporating key words from the prompt (“challenge,” “inspired” “Brown community,” “contribute”) into their community essay.

UW Community Essay Example

I grew up in Hawaii, a world bound by water and rich in diversity. In school we learned that this sacred land was invaded, first by Captain Cook, then by missionaries, whalers, traders, plantation owners, and the U.S. government. My parents became part of this problematic takeover when they moved here in the 90s. The first community we knew was our church congregation. At the beginning of mass, we shook hands with our neighbors. We held hands again when we sang the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t realize our church wasn’t “normal” until our diocese was informed that we had to stop dancing hula and singing Hawaiian hymns. The order came from the Pope himself.

Eventually, I lost faith in God and organized institutions. I thought the banning of hula—an ancient and pure form of expression—seemed medieval, ignorant, and unfair, given that the Hawaiian religion had already been stamped out. I felt a lack of community and a distrust for any place in which I might find one. As a postcolonial inhabitant, I could never belong to the Hawaiian culture, no matter how much I valued it. Then, I was shocked to learn that Queen Ka’ahumanu herself had eliminated the Kapu system, a strict code of conduct in which women were inferior to men. Next went the Hawaiian religion. Queen Ka’ahumanu burned all the temples before turning to Christianity, hoping this religion would offer better opportunities for her people.

Community Essay (Continued)

I’m not sure what to make of this history. Should I view Queen Ka’ahumanu as a feminist hero, or another failure in her islands’ tragedy? Nothing is black and white about her story, but she did what she thought was beneficial to her people, regardless of tradition. From her story, I’ve learned to accept complexity. I can disagree with institutionalized religion while still believing in my neighbors. I am a product of this place and their presence. At UW, I plan to add to campus diversity through my experience, knowing that diversity comes with contradictions and complications, all of which should be approached with an open and informed mind.

UW Community Essay Example Analysis

This student also manages to weave in words from the prompt (“family,” “community,” “world,” “product of it,” “add to the diversity,” etc.). Moreover, the student picks one of the examples of community mentioned in the prompt, (namely, a religious group,) and deepens their answer by addressing the complexity inherent in the community they’ve been involved in. While the student displays an inner turmoil about their identity and participation, they find a way to show how they’d contribute to an open-minded campus through their values and intellectual rigor.

What’s Next

For more on supplemental essays and essay writing guides, check out the following articles:

How to Write the Why This Major Essay + Example
How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example
How to Start a College Essay – 12 Techniques and Tips
College Essay

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.

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How to Write a Great Community Service Essay

College Admissions , Extracurriculars

Are you applying to a college or a scholarship that requires a community service essay? Do you know how to write an essay that will impress readers and clearly show the impact your work had on yourself and others?

Read on to learn step-by-step instructions for writing a great community service essay that will help you stand out and be memorable.

What Is a Community Service Essay? Why Do You Need One?

A community service essay is an essay that describes the volunteer work you did and the impact it had on you and your community. Community service essays can vary widely depending on specific requirements listed in the application, but, in general, they describe the work you did, why you found the work important, and how it benefited people around you.

Community service essays are typically needed for two reasons:

#1: To Apply to College

Some colleges require students to write community service essays as part of their application or to be eligible for certain scholarships.
You may also choose to highlight your community service work in your personal statement.

#2: To Apply for Scholarships

Some scholarships are specifically awarded to students with exceptional community service experiences, and many use community service essays to help choose scholarship recipients.
Green Mountain College offers one of the most famous of these scholarships. Their "Make a Difference Scholarship" offers full tuition, room, and board to students who have demonstrated a significant, positive impact through their community service

Getting Started With Your Essay

In the following sections, I'll go over each step of how to plan and write your essay. I'll also include sample excerpts for you to look through so you can get a better idea of what readers are looking for when they review your essay.

Step 1: Know the Essay Requirements

Before your start writing a single word, you should be familiar with the essay prompt. Each college or scholarship will have different requirements for their essay, so make sure you read these carefully and understand them.

Specific things to pay attention to include:

Length requirement
Application deadline
The main purpose or focus of the essay
If the essay should follow a specific structure

Below are three real community service essay prompts. Read through them and notice how much they vary in terms of length, detail, and what information the writer should include.

From the Equitable Excellence Scholarship:

"Describe your outstanding achievement in depth and provide the specific planning, training, goals, and steps taken to make the accomplishment successful. Include details about your role and highlight leadership you provided. Your essay must be a minimum of 350 words but not more than 600 words."

From the Laura W. Bush Traveling Scholarship:

"Essay (up to 500 words, double spaced) explaining your interest in being considered for the award and how your proposed project reflects or is related to both UNESCO's mandate and U.S. interests in promoting peace by sharing advances in education, science, culture, and communications."

From the LULAC National Scholarship Fund:

"Please type or print an essay of 300 words (maximum) on how your academic studies will contribute to your personal & professional goals. In addition, please discuss any community service or extracurricular activities you have been involved in that relate to your goals."

Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas

Even after you understand what the essay should be about, it can still be difficult to begin writing. Answer the following questions to help brainstorm essay ideas. You may be able to incorporate your answers into your essay.

What community service activity that you've participated in has meant the most to you?
What is your favorite memory from performing community service?
Why did you decide to begin community service?
What made you decide to volunteer where you did?
How has your community service changed you?
How has your community service helped others?
How has your community service affected your plans for the future?

You don't need to answer all the questions, but if you find you have a lot of ideas for one of two of them, those may be things you want to include in your essay.

Writing Your Essay

How you structure your essay will depend on the requirements of the scholarship or school you are applying to. You may give an overview of all the work you did as a volunteer, or highlight a particularly memorable experience. You may focus on your personal growth or how your community benefited.

Regardless of the specific structure requested, follow the guidelines below to make sure your community service essay is memorable and clearly shows the impact of your work.

Samples of mediocre and excellent essays are included below to give you a better idea of how you should draft your own essay.

Step 1: Hook Your Reader In

You want the person reading your essay to be interested, so your first sentence should hook them in and entice them to read more. A good way to do this is to start in the middle of the action. Your first sentence could describe you helping build a house, releasing a rescued animal back to the wild, watching a student you tutored read a book on their own, or something else that quickly gets the reader interested. This will help set your essay apart and make it more memorable.

Compare these two opening sentences:

"I have volunteered at the Wishbone Pet Shelter for three years."

"The moment I saw the starving, mud-splattered puppy brought into the shelter with its tail between its legs, I knew I'd do whatever I could to save it."

The first sentence is a very general, bland statement. The majority of community service essays probably begin a lot like it, but it gives the reader little information and does nothing to draw them in. On the other hand, the second sentence begins immediately with action and helps persuade the reader to keep reading so they can learn what happened to the dog.

Step 2: Discuss the Work You Did

Once you've hooked your reader in with your first sentence, tell them about your community service experiences. State where you work, when you began working, how much time you've spent there, and what your main duties include. This will help the reader quickly put the rest of the essay in context and understand the basics of your community service work.

Not including basic details about your community service could leave your reader confused.

Step 3: Include Specific Details

It's the details of your community service that make your experience unique and memorable, so go into the specifics of what you did.

For example, don't just say you volunteered at a nursing home; talk about reading Mrs. Johnson her favorite book, watching Mr. Scott win at bingo, and seeing the residents play games with their grandchildren at the family day you organized. Try to include specific activities, moments, and people in your essay. Having details like these let the readers really understand what work you did and how it differs from other volunteer experiences.

Compare these two passages:

"For my volunteer work, I tutored children at a local elementary school. I helped them improve their math skills and become more confident students."

"As a volunteer at York Elementary School, I worked one-on-one with second and third graders who struggled with their math skills, particularly addition, subtraction, and fractions. As part of my work, I would create practice problems and quizzes and try to connect math to the students' interests. One of my favorite memories was when Sara, a student I had been working with for several weeks, told me that she enjoyed the math problems I had created about a girl buying and selling horses so much that she asked to help me create math problems for other students."

The first passage only gives basic information about the work done by the volunteer; there is very little detail included, and no evidence is given to support her claims. How did she help students improve their math skills? How did she know they were becoming more confident?

The second passage is much more detailed. It recounts a specific story and explains more fully what kind of work the volunteer did, as well as a specific instance of a student becoming more confident with her math skills. Providing more detail in your essay helps support your claims as well as make your essay more memorable and unique.

Step 4: Show Your Personality

It would be very hard to get a scholarship or place at a school if none of your readers felt like they knew much about you after finishing your essay, so make sure that your essay shows your personality. The way to do this is to state your personal strengths, then provide examples to support your claims. Take some time to think about which parts of your personality you would like your essay to highlight, then write about specific examples to show this.

If you want to show that you're a motivated leader, describe a time when you organized an event or supervised other volunteers.
If you want to show your teamwork skills, write about a time you helped a group of people work together better.
If you want to show that you're a compassionate animal lover, write about taking care of neglected shelter animals and helping each of them find homes.

Step 5: State What You Accomplished

After you have described your community service and given specific examples of your work, you want to begin to wrap your essay up by stating your accomplishments. What was the impact of your community service? Did you build a house for a family to move into? Help students improve their reading skills? Clean up a local park? Make sure the impact of your work is clear; don't be worried about bragging here.

If you can include specific numbers, that will also strengthen your essay. Saying "I delivered meals to 24 home-bound senior citizens" is a stronger example than just saying "I delivered meals to lots of senior citizens."

Also be sure to explain why your work matters. Why is what you did important? Did it provide more parks for kids to play in? Help students get better grades? Give people medical care who would otherwise not have gotten it? This is an important part of your essay, so make sure to go into enough detail that your readers will know exactly what you accomplished and how it helped your community.

"My biggest accomplishment during my community service was helping to organize a family event at the retirement home. The children and grandchildren of many residents attended, and they all enjoyed playing games and watching movies together."

"The community service accomplishment that I'm most proud of is the work I did to help organize the First Annual Family Fun Day at the retirement home. My job was to design and organize fun activities that senior citizens and their younger relatives could enjoy. The event lasted eight hours and included ten different games, two performances, and a movie screening with popcorn. Almost 200 residents and family members attended throughout the day. This event was important because it provided an opportunity for senior citizens to connect with their family members in a way they aren't often able to. It also made the retirement home seem more fun and enjoyable to children, and we have seen an increase in the number of kids coming to visit their grandparents since the event."

The second passage is stronger for a variety of reasons. First, it goes into much more detail about the work the volunteer did. The first passage only states that she helped "organize a family event." That really doesn't tell readers much about her work or what her responsibilities were. The second passage is much clearer; her job was to "design and organize fun activities."

The second passage also explains the event in more depth. A family day can be many things; remember that your readers are likely not familiar with what you're talking about, so details help them get a clearer picture.

Lastly, the second passage makes the importance of the event clear: it helped residents connect with younger family members, and it helped retirement homes seem less intimidating to children, so now some residents see their grand kids more often.

Step 6: Discuss What You Learned

One of the final things to include in your essay should be the impact that your community service had on you. You can discuss skills you learned, such as carpentry, public speaking, animal care, or another skill.

You can also talk about how you changed personally. Are you more patient now? More understanding of others? Do you have a better idea of the type of career you want? Go into depth about this, but be honest. Don't say your community service changed your life if it didn't because trite statements won't impress readers.

In order to support your statements, provide more examples. If you say you're more patient now, how do you know this? Do you get less frustrated while playing with your younger siblings? Are you more willing to help group partners who are struggling with their part of the work? You've probably noticed by now that including specific examples and details is one of the best ways to create a strong and believable essay .

"As a result of my community service, I learned a lot about building houses and became a more mature person."

"As a result of my community service, I gained hands-on experience in construction. I learned how to read blueprints, use a hammer and nails, and begin constructing the foundation of a two-bedroom house. Working on the house could be challenging at times, but it taught me to appreciate the value of hard work and be more willing to pitch in when I see someone needs help. My dad has just started building a shed in our backyard, and I offered to help him with it because I know from my community service how much work it is. I also appreciate my own house more, and I know how lucky I am to have a roof over my head."

The second passage is more impressive and memorable because it describes the skills the writer learned in more detail and recounts a specific story that supports her claim that her community service changed her and made her more helpful.

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Step 7: Finish Strong

Just as you started your essay in a way that would grab readers' attention, you want to finish your essay on a strong note as well. A good way to end your essay is to state again the impact your work had on you, your community, or both. Reiterate how you changed as a result of your community service, why you found the work important, or how it helped others.

Compare these two concluding statements:

"In conclusion, I learned a lot from my community service at my local museum, and I hope to keep volunteering and learning more about history."

"To conclude, volunteering at my city's American History Museum has been a great experience. By leading tours and participating in special events, I became better at public speaking and am now more comfortable starting conversations with people. In return, I was able to get more community members interested in history and our local museum. My interest in history has deepened, and I look forward to studying the subject in college and hopefully continuing my volunteer work at my university's own museum."

The second passage takes each point made in the first passage and expands upon it. In a few sentences, the second passage is able to clearly convey what work the volunteer did, how she changed, and how her volunteer work benefited her community.

The author of the second passage also ends her essay discussing her future and how she'd like to continue her community service, which is a good way to wrap things up because it shows your readers that you are committed to community service for the long-term.

What's Next?

Are you applying to a community service scholarship or thinking about it? We have a complete list of all the community service scholarships available to help get your search started!

Do you need a community service letter as well? We have a step-by-step guide that will tell you how to get a great reference letter from your community service supervisor.

Thinking about doing community service abroad? Before you sign up, read our guide on some of the hazards of international volunteer trips and how to know if it's the right choice for you.

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Research article
Open access
Published: 11 December 2017

Narratives of community engagement: a systematic review-derived conceptual framework for public health interventions

Ginny Brunton ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6940-712X 1 ,
James Thomas 1 ,
Alison O’Mara-Eves 1 ,
Farah Jamal 1 ,
Sandy Oliver 1 &
Josephine Kavanagh 2

BMC Public Health volume 17 , Article number: 944 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Government policy increasingly supports engaging communities to promote health. It is critical to consider whether such strategies are effective, for whom, and under what circumstances. However, ‘community engagement’ is defined in diverse ways and employed for different reasons. Considering the theory and context we developed a conceptual framework which informs understanding about what makes an effective (or ineffective) community engagement intervention.

We conducted a systematic review of community engagement in public health interventions using: stakeholder involvement; searching, screening, appraisal and coding of research literature; and iterative thematic syntheses and meta-analysis. A conceptual framework of community engagement was refined, following interactions between the framework and each review stage.

From 335 included reports, three products emerged: (1) two strong theoretical ‘meta-narratives’: one, concerning the theory and practice of empowerment/engagement as an independent objective; and a more utilitarian perspective optimally configuring health services to achieve defined outcomes. These informed (2) models that were operationalized in subsequent meta-analysis. Both refined (3) the final conceptual framework. This identified multiple dimensions by which community engagement interventions may differ. Diverse combinations of intervention purpose, theory and implementation were noted, including: ways of defining communities and health needs; initial motivations for community engagement; types of participation; conditions and actions necessary for engagement; and potential issues influencing impact. Some dimensions consistently co-occurred, leading to three overarching models of effective engagement which either: utilised peer-led delivery; employed varying degrees of collaboration between communities and health services; or built on empowerment philosophies.

Conclusions

Our conceptual framework and models are useful tools for considering appropriate and effective approaches to community engagement. These should be tested and adapted to facilitate intervention design and evaluation. Using this framework may disentangle the relative effectiveness of different models of community engagement, promoting effective, sustainable and appropriate initiatives.

Peer Review reports

Community engagement has been advanced as a useful strategy for improving people’s health and as a means of enabling people who lack power to gain control over their lives – and thereby improve their own health. In many countries, it is part of clinical guidance [ 1 ] and the national strategy for promoting public health [ 2 ], and is a prominent feature in the policies and mission statements of local healthcare services. Whilst high on the public health care agenda, there is inconsistency in the terms used to describe it, the meanings ascribed to it, and the rationales underpinning the stated ‘need’ for it. Related to this, the conceptual and moral breadth of community engagement poses challenges to those planning and commissioning health services: should they use community engagement in a given situation? If so, how should they do this? And how can they know which approach would be most suitable? In order to begin framing answers to some of these questions, we need to understand what community engagement is, where the concept came from, and how it is proposed to work. This will reveal how some of the different perspectives and agendas that have coalesced around the term “community engagement”; and how different approaches to engagement are thought to impact on people’s health.

To understand these issues, we conducted a systematic review of the literature around community engagement. The systematic review design is well-suited to the research questions. As well as addressing intervention effectiveness, systematic reviews present an opportunity to take stock and examine some of the assumptions underlying research activity. They can ‘recast’ the literature, by analysing how research is located within particular conceptual and ethical frameworks, and tracing the development of thought over time [ 3 , 4 ].

This paper presents the findings from a synthesis that examined the theory underpinning, factors involved in, models of change, and evidence for, community engagement in terms of its impacts on a wide range of health outcomes. This was one component of a larger multi-method systematic review project, which contained four different syntheses of community engagement in addition to the theoretical synthesis presented here: a map of theoretical and effectiveness community engagement literature, a thematic synthesis of processes, a meta-analysis of trials, and an economic analysis of costs and resources. The complete project findings are reported elsewhere [ 5 ]. In this paper, we report on the research synthesis which examined the theoretical and empirical literature to identify the key characteristics of community engagement interventions, organising them into a new conceptual framework which encapsulates the wide range of understandings and perspectives around community engagement, and how these are implemented in practice. Within this overarching conceptual framework, specific models were identified, enabling us to distinguish how different approaches might impact on people’s health.

The conceptual framework described here is part of a multi-method systematic review which aimed to identify: community engagement approaches that improve the health of disadvantaged populations or reduce inequalities in health; the populations and circumstances in which they ‘work’; and associated costs. Review stages included: stakeholder involvement; literature searching, screening studies for eligibility, critical appraisal and coding of studies; and synthesis. Each stage is described briefly below, with further detail available in the full report [ 5 ].

Aims and research questions

The aim of this paper is to describe the development of a conceptual framework and models arising from an iterative synthesis of both papers discussing community engagement theory and informed by the broader review. The research questions for theory synthesis were:

What is the range of models and approaches underpinning community engagement?

What are the mechanisms and contexts through which communities are engaged?

We define a conceptual framework or theory here to be a working hypothesis of key concepts, constructs and their potential interactions [ 6 ]. Models, mechanisms or theories of change are considered to be synonymous; these focus in on single specific hypothesised processes drawn from that wider conceptual framework to identify how one phenomenon influences another [ 7 ].

Stakeholder involvement

Community engagement researchers, policy-makers and other professionals were invited to take part in our Advisory group. They informed the conceptual framework by providing key research articles on community engagement, commenting on iterations of our developing conceptual framework, and advising on potential synthesis approaches.

To locate all possible research on community engagement initiatives, systematic reviews and primary studies evaluating community engagement interventions reporting health outcomes were sought from specially-selected registers of research, including: the Cochrane and Campbell Libraries; the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme website and HTA database; and the Database of Promoting Health Effectiveness Reviews (DoPHER). The majority of these specialist registers were populated using rigorous systematic review search methods. In addition, theoretical and “position pieces” on community engagement were sought using more iterative processes (including following citation trails and website searching). We adopted an innovative search strategy to locate this literature, utilising the structured data often presented in systematic review reports, as reviews inconsistently described employing a community engagement strategy in their title and abstract alone [ 8 ].

Screening for eligibility

To inform the theory synthesis, we identified first any theoretical literature from within our set of retrieved studies, adopting a ‘purposive’ search and inclusion strategy appropriate to gathering concepts, rather than the more traditional approach of exhaustively accumulating all literature on the topic [ 9 ]. ‘Theoretical literature’ was considered any research paper discussing theoretical issues around community engagement. Thus, potentially useful theoretical papers were ‘included’ regardless of whether they met other aspects of the inclusion criteria (e.g., they did not necessarily have to report relevant outcomes).

We next screened for intervention studies. To be eligible for inclusion in the broader review, studies had to meet the following criteria:

published after 1990;

a systematic review or primary research study;

an outcome or process evaluation;

an intervention relevant to community engagement;

written in English;

measure and report health or community outcomes;

characterise study populations or report differential impacts in terms related to social determinants of health; and

contain health or health-related outcomes, and/or process data.

Study appraisal and selection

Papers were included if they contributed to our understanding of community engagement’s theoretical foundation(s). This is in line with “purposive” sampling strategies often used in qualitative research. Here, the “logic and power of purposeful sampling lie[s] in selecting information-rich cases for study in depth” [emphasis in original, p.230 [ 10 ]]. For example, in the course of the review, we found many studies which examined the recruitment of ‘peers’ to deliver the intervention. We did not need to ‘include’ every study on peer delivery to inform the theory synthesis however, since once their key characteristics had been identified in the first few papers examined, additional examples of the same intervention strategy did not contribute any new concepts. Using this approach, team members identified a subset of theoretically-focused papers containing examplars for every community engagement strategy.

Coding and synthesis

Conceptual framework development and examination of theory.

Using a diverse literature to develop an overarching conceptual framework involved three main tasks: the identification of key concepts and theoretical stances; consideration of how they relate to one another – both within and between studies; and the development of an explanatory theory(the final framework), within which different models were located. This is an iterative process where initial conceptual frameworks were drawn up, ‘tested’ against existing and new literature, and revised. Using methods derived from framework synthesis [ 11 , 12 ], we began with one framework (see Fig. 1 ), which had informed our initial research proposal and protocol.

Initial conceptual framework

This was changed significantly during the review. As new theoretical and evaluation papers were assessed, the framework was examined to see: whether it could adequately encompass the new paper; if new detail was needed, or if a fundamental reappraisal of its structure was necessary.

The first task, identifying key concepts and theoretical stances, involved looking at each paper and considering its place in the framework. For example, we needed to understand how ‘community’ was conceptualised in each paper, and their members’ motivations for engagement. The data collected here largely populated the first and second columns of the final framework (Fig. 2 ). An important aspect of theory synthesis is the ‘translation’ of concepts between studies and settings, which also occurred at this stage. For example, ‘consultative’ activities needed to be labelled consistently across studies; this involved reading studies critically and considering whether a given activity really involved consultation, or was perhaps closer to ‘information provision’ when placed in the context of our emerging framework.

Final conceptual framework

Developing models

The second task involved consideration of the relationships between concepts. Here we linked chains of concepts together in order to encapsulate the key arguments made in the literature. For example, we needed to consider how a process of collective decision-making influenced people’s motivations for engagement, and how this in turn might lead to particular outcomes – including harms - for example, disillusionment when expectations were not being met.

The final phase involved both the development of an overarching framework (Fig. 2 ), and the articulation of specific models which navigated significant paths through the framework. Here, the conceptual framework acted as a system of constructs where some relationships were understood. We pulled out different constructs out of that based on theories (e.g. social justice) to test specific relationships. Authors did not always clearly specify their underlying theory, but their theoretical stance could be inferred based on the context of the study presented. The models were informed by the theory synthesis but operationalized by grouping studies together in different combinations based on their assigned codes for ‘public-identified health need’, ‘involvement in design’ and ‘involvement in delivery’. Multiple combinations were tested before the final operationalization was determined. This process was iterative, involving discussions within the team and our Advisory Group; the development of many ‘trial’ frameworks; and the graphical depiction of the final framework and models. During iteration, different types of intervention were selected purposively to test the framework and to check that its coverage of the approaches present in the included interventions.

Quality assurance

At each stage of the review (i.e. searching, screening, coding, synthesis), at least two researchers developed, tested and came to agreement on tools and processes using a subset of studies, then independently completed that stage of the review. Queries or disagreements on methods were resolved through discussion with a third member of the review team. Each review stage was conducted using EPPI-Reviewer 4 [ 13 ].

Included studies and papers

We purposively selected a total of 39 systematic reviews, exemplar process evaluations and theoretical papers that focused on community engagement and provided rich and unique information to develop the conceptual framework. These are listed in Appendix . In addition, a total of 319 included intervention studies of community engagement were also examined for key concepts and patterns of engagement. More details of the flow of studies are described in the full report [ 5 ]. Concepts from these reports were extracted into the conceptual framework development and simultaneously considered in the synthesis of theory and development of models. Please see the NIHR report for full details of the results of our searches [ 5 ]. From these, three synthesis ‘products’ emerged: (i) theoretical meta-narratives indicating how community engagement is conceptualised across the literature; (ii) theory of change models that operationalised the theoretical meta-narratives; and (iii) an overarching conceptual framework built on the findings from the first two products.

Significant concepts and definitions within community engagement

As outlined in the methods, the first task in the iterative development of our conceptual framework shown in Fig. 2 involved the identification and definition of significant concepts in the literature.

These were grouped into a set of dimensions which enabled us to explore and categorise differences between the community engagement approaches utilised by the interventions: the extent to which they were concerned with community engagement broadly or health outcomes more narrowly; who it was that identified the need for the intervention; the reasons as to why people might be motivated to become involved; how and where the community was involved in the design and delivery of the intervention; the conditions which mediated or moderated engagement; the types of actions and resources involved in engagement activities; the impacts of the intervention in terms of outcomes and beneficiaries, and their long term sustainability (e.g., programme continuation or the adaptation of programme ideas through other local infrastructure). Each included study addressed one or more of the concepts within each dimension, and across the set of studies we noted that interventions appeared to progress in an iterative fashion through these dimensions from defining the community to considering the impacts. The dimensions are depicted in the vertical columns of the framework shown in Fig. 2 .

Definitions

Community engagement occurs where a need is identified for a particular group of individuals (i.e., a community). Thus the process begins with the definition of both the community and their health issue. Community can be defined in many different ways. In addition to geographical boundaries, they may also be defined by social or economic characteristics, interests, values, or traditions. Such communities (i.e., those with a shared identity, such as the Bangladeshi community, or a shared experience, such as teenage mothers) were the focus of the majority of the included community engagement interventions.

Communities were more likely to define themselves as such, or they might be defined by people outside the community, often labelled as a population. This reflects some semantic differences in how communities were perceived, both by themselves and by external organisations. This distinction between the terms ‘population’ (externally defined) and ‘community’ (self-identified) is shown in the framework.

The health need may also be identified differently [ 14 ]:

a felt need, which is one directly identified by community members themselves;

an expressed need, which is inferred by observing a community’s use of services;

a comparative need, derived by comparing service use in a similar community; or

a normative need; derived by comparing measures of living conditions with a society norm or standard, often set by experts.

This taxonomy delineates different forms of need, which are conceptualised as being on a continuum that moves in stages away from expressly community-identified models (felt need) towards expert opinion (normative need). Across the set of included studies, the community was not involved in establishing need for most interventions: only one quarter of the studies described community involvement in identifying the health need.

Motivations

Multiple factors can motivate community members to participate in, and professionals to undertake intervention design, delivery or evaluation. These factors depend on the interplay between community engagement and health interventions. Community members might choose to engage for a range of health-related personal, communal and societal reasons, including: personal gains, including monetary/wealth, health and the development of new marketable skills and capabilities; benefits to their community; better community neighbourhoods; less crime; improved educational outcomes; or for the ideals of responsible citizenship, altruism and the greater public good [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ].

In other cases, those external to the community are motivated to develop a health intervention, driven by their professional responsibilities as, for example, local or state government officials, health care providers, or other community members. Community engagement is fostered here when those within a specific community are invited to participate by those with professional responsibilities. These external stakeholders can ask community members to participate for a broad range of reasons, including: ethics and democracy; the desire to provide better services and better health; for political alliances or to satisfy a political climate; and to leverage resources and increase the chance of sustainability [ 22 , 23 , 24 ] (Morison 2000 p.119, in [ 25 ]). Involving specific communities as stakeholders can help build public commitment to a health promotion agenda and can empower the public to advocate for change. Such involvement can also help determine whether or in what form a health promoting action is likely to be acceptable for implementation. It may be recognised that some local community groups may be more competent in delivering health promotion change or they may already be involved in other health promoting actions [ 26 ]. In other cases, there may be legislative or regulatory requirements for a broader group of individuals to participate; for example, in situations where statutory funding is forthcoming only when matched funding in cash or in-kind is provided by community partners.

It is possible that, even in highly engaged communities, the motivation to continue to participate in developing and implementing an initiative may diminish over time without sufficient financial or other recompense for participation. This may be particularly so for socio-economically deprived or financially constrained communities (e.g., those experiencing low retirement income or requiring paid childcare).

Community engagement initiatives that focus more on health interventions and less on community are often grounded in a specific theory employed by researchers to understand the ways in which people develop, think or act. Examples of theories that motivated intervention design include social learning [ 27 ], social cognitive [ 28 , 29 ], social ecological [ 30 , 31 ], coalition [ 32 ], diffusion of innovation [ 33 ], social network [ 34 ] or behavioural theory [ 35 ]. It is argued throughout the literature that public health interventions should be based on theory that is relevant to, and appropriate for, the population involved, because it can facilitate the examination of constituent intervention components, support the applicability of an intervention with different populations, and ensure a more successful and sustainable intervention through understanding how a community may be moblised [ 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ].

Community participation

The definitions, needs and motivations of communities provide a foundation to structure how community engagement is developed and delivered. Where community engagement is a key part of the strategy, members of the stakeholder community can be involved in the design of an intervention [ 42 , 44 ]. Conversely, where there is less community engagement and more emphasis on a health intervention, members may simply take part in its delivery [ 45 ]. The number of people taking part in the community initiative can influence the level of engagement that takes place [ 46 ]. These levels of engagement can be thought of as hierarchical, progressing from least to most engagement: receiving information; consultation; collaboration; and control [ 47 ].

Studies in this synthesis also varied considerably with respect to the extent to which community engagement is ‘embedded’ as a predetermined, planned part of a health intervention. It may vary from being the main focus of the intervention, as in local area regeneration programmes [ 15 ], to operating as an important secondary part of the intervention in which the main intervention is supported by, but not dependent on, community engagement. An example of this is a community-informed food labelling system offered within a complex community cardiovascular disease prevention strategy [ 42 ]. In other cases, those currently in positions of power may need to be ‘engaged’ in interventions in order to empower a disadvantaged community, thus enabling it to improve its own health [ 19 , 48 ]. The community engagement mechanism may also occur through intervention delivery, such as in the use of peers or lay health advisors to deliver health messages [ 45 ].

Several included studies discussed the contextual influences or mediators necessary for community engagement initiatives. These included communicative competence [ 22 , 23 , 24 ]; empowerment and control [ 49 , 50 , 51 ]; and attitudes by community members and providers towards what expertise was important and who held it [ 15 , 52 ]. The extent to which communities can engage appeared to be dependent on the level of financial and other resources available to support their participation [ 53 , 54 ].

The context in which a community engagement initiative or health intervention took place also influenced its impact on health. Contextual issues included the degree of stable funding and support throughout the project [ 15 , 55 ] and the level of certainty over future funding or mainstreaming opportunities [ 20 ]; the social, political, economic, geographic context and its impact on the community engagement or public health interventions [ 16 , 56 , 57 ]; and the influence of externally-imposed government policy and targets for achieving health [ 58 ]. The extent to which a community engagement initiative has to compete for resources and visibility with other national/local health promotion initiatives was also identified as an important contextual factor [ 21 ]. In addition, changes in the local economic climate may influence communities’ ability and/or interest in participating. The nature and impact of these influences may only be captured if a process evaluation is conducted.

Many of these conditions are thought to create (or fail to create) an environment for the development of virtuous (or vicious) circles. In this environment, some of the facilitators described above mutually reinforce one another and help the initiative to become self-sustaining. In situations where trust is lacking, or no previous history of collaboration exists, engagement can be difficult to achieve and will have little momentum in terms of sustainability [ 19 ]. These feedback loops are often seen in complex interventions and may bring disproportionate rewards. For example, at particular critical levels ‘tipping points’ may be reached, whereby a small increase (or decrease) in resource can bring about a disproportionate change in outcomes [ 59 ].

The way in which a community engagement activity takes place (i.e., the ‘process’ of engagement) is thought to influence how well that activity ultimately impacts on health outcomes. Several examples of process issues were discussed in the literature. These included:

clearly defined target groups, objectives, interventions and programme components [ 46 , 60 ];

adequate time for community members and other stakeholders to build relationships with one another, so that they can agree a ‘level playing field’ in terms of language, negotiation and collegial working skills [ 17 , 24 , 25 , 61 ];

learning of funding sources and developing skills to bid for future sources of funding [ 21 ];

the degree of collective decision-making [ 15 , 16 , 52 ];

planning for on-going simple communication between participants and providers [ 39 , 49 , 50 , 51 ], and between the community engagement group and the wider community [ 36 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 57 ];

adequate participant and provider skills training [ 16 , 17 , 25 , 36 , 45 , 46 , 49 ];

the amount and quality of administrative support required to ensure smooth project running [ 49 , 57 , 62 ];

activity timing, duration and frequency [ 39 , 58 , 61 , 63 ]; and

cash flow stability throughout the lifetime of the initiative [ 64 ].

While the included literature suggests that understanding and planning for key stages in the process of community engagement may impact on outcomes, it also suggests that who is affected, and in what ways, should be considered. For example, South and colleagues [ 65 ] suggest that a range of people can benefit from community engagement and/or public health interventions. These can be described as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ beneficiaries. Direct beneficiaries are those who take part in the community engagement (the ‘engagees’). In this case, the act of being engaged is the intervention for which outcomes are measured. These can be health outcomes, empowerment, self-esteem, skills development, level of interest, learning activities and gains [ 57 , 60 , 62 ].

In contrast, indirect beneficiaries are the wider community toward whom community engagement and/or public health interventions are targeted, or the service providers who engage with the communities [ 66 ]. Both of these indirect beneficiaries benefit by mutual learning. Researchers can also be considered indirect beneficiaries, in that further research and interventions can be perpetuated from a community engagement initiative. Government departments might benefit by being able to demonstrate that their policies made a difference (i.e., targets were met), or that a particular political priority was successful [ 66 ]. The intervention itself can benefit from the amount and type of community engagement: interventions can be sustained and improve with community engagement [ 66 ]. The type of outcomes measured on indirect beneficiaries can include health outcomes and social capital. Evaluated community engagement interventions may be cost effective, taking into account impacts on engagees and the community of interest. This is particularly the case when multiple health and non-health benefits of engagement are taken into account [ 20 , 67 ].

Some harms potentially resulting from community engagement were identified, especially when communities are less involved. These included social exclusion, cost overrun, attrition, and dissatisfaction and disillusionment [ 56 , 64 , 66 ]. It has also been suggested that community partners and decision-making organisations should collaborate to strike a balance between ‘soft’ relational outcomes and ‘hard’ policy impacts [ 56 ].

In determining these concepts as described by authors across the retrieved studies, we noted that some of them appeared to arise from a desire to engage communities, whilst others appeared to be driven by a desire to intervene in order to improve a community or populations’ health. These two areas are represented by the inverted triangles in Fig. 2 labelled as ‘Community engagement’ and ‘Health intervention’.

The two schools of thought within “community engagement”

Community engagement has been advanced as actions ‘involving communities in decision-making and in the planning, design, governance and delivery of services’ [ 68 ], and is a potentially promising strategy to promote health and healthcare [ 1 ]. Several strategies have been suggested to engage different communities to varying degrees. Some have suggested that involvement comprises consultation, collaboration, or community control, with the provision of information alone not considered a sufficient level of engagement [ 47 ]; others have suggested that community engagement taxonomies should also include information-giving [ 69 ]. Community engagement can occur alone or in combination with other initiatives; however in the latter case, its unique contribution to changes in outcomes may be difficult to establish [ 70 ]. Community engagement activities are consequently diverse, and in the UK include but are not limited to: service user networks; healthcare forums; volunteering; and courses delivered by trained peers [ 71 ].

Two clear perspectives, or ‘meta narratives’ emerged which explained why community engagement might improve people’s health: a health services, or ‘ utilitarian ’ perspective; and a ‘ social justice ’ perspective. Historically, interventions to promote health were driven by professionals, with little or no input from the targeted populations [ 72 ]; more recently, community engagement has become central to national strategy and guidance for promoting public health, because, from a ‘utilitarian’ point of view, it is thought that more acceptable and appropriate interventions will result, which may result in improved service use and outcomes [ 2 ].

As well as the ‘discovery’ of community engagement by the health services and policy community, the literature also describes a distinct tradition of community engagement which is rooted in ‘social justice’ and civil rights. Here the emphasis is less on an instrumental use of community engagement to achieve a given end, but on the empowerment and development of the community itself. These two perspectives, and approaches that bridge the two perspectives, are detailed below.

A utilitarian health systems perspective

Interventions that are based on a utilitarian perspective seek to involve communities in order to improve the effectiveness of the intervention. The intervention itself may be decided upon before the community is invited for its views; or, while the intervention itself is not designed by community members they may be involved in other ways, such as priority setting, or in its delivery. In utilitarian perspectives, health (and other) services reach out to engage particular communities that they have identified require assistance and the intervention is devised within existing policy, practice, and resource frameworks.

The large number of studies we found in which peers or lay people delivered the intervention exemplify utilitarian interventions. The content of these interventions did not usually change in their delivery; however, it was thought that peers could deliver that content in such a way that it would be more effective due to their credibility, empathy, community contextual awareness, and so on.

A social justice perspective

‘Empowerment’ is rooted in concerns about social justice and movements promoting social and structural change by supporting people to participate, negotiate, influence control and hold accountable institutions that affect them. It is considered socially desirable, equitable and addresses some of the social determinants of ill health, and thus will also result in improved health and reductions in health inequalities. Empowerment models require that the health need is identified by the community and that they mobilise themselves into action. An empowered community is the product of enhancing their mutual support and their collective action to mobilise resources of their own and from elsewhere to make changes within the community. From a social justice perspective, community members are empowered to determine for themselves the priorities and ways in which they want service resources to be deployed. While the ultimate aim may be improvements in health, the social justice agenda is broader than this, and concerned with making up deficits in power, democracy and accountability.

In this literature, terms such as ‘engagement’, ‘participation and ‘development’ can sometimes be used interchangeably, with the World Health Organisation defining community ‘development’ as: “A way of working underpinned by a commitment to equity, social justice and participation that enables people to strengthen networks and to identify common concerns and supports people in taking action related to the networks. It respects community-defined priorities, recognizes community assets as well as problems, gives priority to capacity-building and is a key mechanism for enabling effective community participation and empowerment.” [ 73 ].

‘Arnstein’s ladder’ is one of the best known models based on social justice, showing how different models of participation are more or less empowering than others (Arnstein 1969). It begins with essentially ‘non-participative’ ways in which those holding power can reach out to those who do not, and ends with ‘citizen control’, in which power to direct has been ceded or been devolved completely. In this model true participation only begins once power is delegated or developed, with other types of participation being dismissed as ‘tokenism’ and ‘non-participation’. It is important to recognise the ethical and political dimension of the ladder. As well as representing ‘effective’ ways to involve the public in public policy (and to improve the nations’ health), the top of the ladder represents more democratic and egalitarian approaches towards public service, whereas the lower rungs tend to be associated with authoritarianism and a lack of accountability.

Bridging the utilitarian and social justice rationales

These two perspectives often collide in the literature on community engagement, as authors take differing positions, depending on the tradition within which they are writing. The fact that there are two traditions of thought and objective in this literature means that the term ‘community engagement’ can be used differently by different authors, depending on their conceptual location, leading one researcher to conclude:

‘…the proliferation of meanings attached to the phrase “community participation in health”… has allowed it to be analysed as a political symbol capable of being simultaneously employed by a variety of actors to advance conflicting goals, precisely because it means different things to different people .’[ 73 ]

Many models, however, merge the above two perspectives, arguing for community engagement for utilitarian purposes as well as for social justice. Indeed, they reason that, since the relatively poorer health of disadvantaged groups is due to structural issues – over which they have limited control – an effective way of improving their health will be to cede power to these communities in a way that helps them to change their environment for the better. However the concepts of utilitarianism or social justice were rarely directly addressed by authors. An example of this can be demonstrated by Barnes et al. in which community volunteers provided an outreach, tracking and follow-up program in response to high under-immunisation rates amongst an urban New York population [ 74 ]. Here, community members were ‘committed and organised’; they identified the need for the program, led on the design and delivery of the intervention and collaborated on its evaluation, suggesting that these community members were empowered in doing so.

Popay et al. [ 75 ] argue that the ‘pathways from community engagement to health improvement’ is a good example of this model. In it, they argue, significant changes to people’s health outcomes require changes to ‘intermediate social outcomes’: improved social capital and social and material conditions. However, changes to these intermediate outcomes are only triggered once sufficient power has been ceded: information and consultation are not sufficient; only once a level of co-production has been reached do these begin to move, and it requires delegated power and full community control for the highest gains to be realised.

Models in community engagement

The theory synthesis building on the initial conceptual framework identified a wide range of dimensions by which community engagement interventions may differ from one another, and provides a structure to understand how different interventions may function and different components combine and interact as a whole. While there are many ways in which the different dimensions might be arranged, our theoretical synthesis suggested that those falling into the social justice and utilitarian theoretical meta-narratives were found to be important in the interventions identified in the review; and intermingling of these two were found throughout the literature. From this conceptual framework, we identified clusters of concepts that prompted us to develop three hypothesised models:

‘Classical’ or ‘traditional’ peer- or lay-delivered interventions

In these interventions, specific health needs and relevant populations are identified usually by normative or comparative methods, and peers or lay people recruited in order for the intervention to be delivered in the most appropriate way for the population. The delivery of the intervention is thus thought to be more empathetic and credible (and resulting outcomes better) because of delivery by members of the community. Communities do not participate in the design of the intervention, and the theory of change focuses on communicative and implementation competence rather than empowerment or people’s attitudes towards expertise. Beneficiaries are usually understood at the individual, rather than community, level, and the people delivering the intervention themselves have often been found to benefit significantly. Sometimes these interventions have been reported to be cost-effective compared to no-action and/or professionally delivered services [ 76 , 77 , 78 ].

Interventions with varying degrees of collaboration between health/other statutory services and communities

As discussed above, a wide range of models are concerned with engaging the community in intervention design and implementation. This involvement can range in the extent of community participation, empowerment and control, influencing service, intermediate social outcomes and health outcomes, illustrated in Fig. 3 [ 72 ].

Varying degrees of collaboration between health/other statutory services and communities From Popay et al. (2006) [ 76 ]

Need is usually identified by people outside the community (‘expressed’, ‘comparative’ or ‘normative’), but the theory of change includes specific community engagement in order to better align the intervention to the community’s needs and preferences. The extent of community involvement in the intervention can vary considerably: the framework describes a range of dimensions reflecting this variability (e.g., whether the community leads on designing or delivering the intervention, and who the beneficiaries are). The theory of change developed by Popay et al. [ 76 ] depicted in Fig. 3 reflects this model and suggests that ‘degree of engagement’ may be a useful analytical approach. “The diagram highlights four broad approaches to community engagement differentiated by their engagement goal: the provision and/or exchange of information; consultation; co-production; and community control. These approaches are not readily bounded but rather sit on a continuum of engagement approaches with the focus on community empowerment becoming more explicit and having greater priority to the right of the continuum where community development approaches are located.” [ 75 ].

Interventions based on empowerment

Sometimes a subset of the second model above, this set of interventions is distinguished from others because the need for these interventions was identified by the community itself [ 79 , 80 ]. The community will often have a collaborating role in designing the intervention and the underpinning theory of change is around empowering communities to make changes to their social and environmental locales [ 81 ]. These initiatives may not be focused exclusively on improving people’s health, as they may be addressing more issues – of which health is but one outcome. In terms of its contribution to our framework, empowerment is understood both as an outcome and as a ‘mediator’, as empowerment is thought to improve a range of interventions (as per the second model above) as well as being a specific aim of others.

The synthesis presented in this report is part of a larger systematic review, which comprehensively examined the models, practice, outcomes and economics of using community engagement to improve the health of disadvantaged groups. A major contribution of this work is its ability to compare different ways of providing community engagement and some potential underlying models. A variety of intervention strategies were identified which we suggest could be broadly understood as drawing on different combinations of both utilitarian (health systems) and social justice (ideological) perspectives. We have found no other systematic reviews that have synthesised evidence representing such a broad spectrum of community engagement models that span the utilitarian-social justice divide.

Our work has produced [ 1 ] a conceptual framework that illustrates the wide range of concepts thought to influence community engagement, [ 2 ] a range of resultant models expressing different concepts from the framework, and [ 3 ] the suggested underlying perspectives that drive those models. The meta-analysis examining the effectiveness of community engagement suggests that interventions developed from both utilitarian and social justice perspectives tend to demonstrate effectiveness [ 3 ]. Importantly, this also allows us to consider which community engagement approaches might be more effective under different circumstances, rather than constraining our thinking to models that conform to specific underlying theories.

That is, the conceptual framework and the models encourage a fit-for-purpose approach to designing community engagement interventions because they embrace diversity and promote thinking about dimensions of difference across health definitions, motivations, participation models, conditions, actions, and impacts [ 3 , 82 ].

As many authors have observed, ‘community engagement’ suffers from a bewilderingly large number of inconsistent and partially conflicting definitions [ 75 , 83 , 84 ]. We have not re-defined these, nor added a new one to the already extensive catalogue; rather, we have sought to understand the perspectives behind some of the more significant definitions, what they mean in practice, and to characterise them in terms of their different models. We hope this will complement existing definitions and aid future evaluations and evidence syntheses by suggesting that, rather than focusing on the overarching heterogeneous concept of community engagement, we may be better served by identifying the key characteristics of interventions and how these relate to their underpinning models. Indeed, they have already been used in examining the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of diverse types of community engagement in public health activities [ 5 , 85 ]. Moreover, whilst this was framework was developed in the context of public health, it has conceivable applicability to other areas including education and schools, policing and criminology, public transport services, the environment, and other areas in which the community could make a meaningful contribution or have a stake in the service provided.

We sought to capture all the concepts that were discussed by authors as important to community engagement interventions, then considered iteratively the theoretical underpinnings of the interventions that utilised community engagement in order to identify the models common to most of the interventions included in the review. This is meant to help researchers, community members and public health professionals to understand their own (often unexamined) philosophy underpinning the interventions they are considering. It also helps them to choose from a wider group of conceptual options than they might otherwise know about. This also provides those evaluating community engagement initiatives with a wider range of criteria (for example, were community members informed, consulted, or did they collaborate or lead?).

The theoretical synthesis, conceptual framework and the models presented here are useful tools for researchers, community members and public health professionals who are considering appropriate and effective approaches to community engagement. The theoretical synthesis makes clear the two schools of thought driving community engagement, the overlap of these philosophies in the operationalization of the resulting interventions, and the utility of considering the theory of change to understand these different starting points of the interventions.

Our new heuristic for understanding the dimensions of community engagement (i.e. the conceptual framework) should assist those developing interventions in the future to align their strategy with an appropriate theory of change. These conceptual tools should be considered, discussed, tested and adapted by researchers in order to facilitate intervention design and evaluation, and further theory testing.

Public health professionals could use the conceptual framework to capture specific aspects of the economic- and process-related aspects of community engagement. This will help to disentangle the relative effectiveness of different models of community engagement and so promote effective, sustainable and appropriate community initiatives.

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Acknowledgements

This report refers to independent research commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Any views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Health Service (NHS), the NIHR, the Public Health Research programme, or the Department of Health. We would like to thank the assistance of a number of people who contributed to this work. Katherine Twamley, Irene Kwan, Carol Vigurs and Jenny Woodman all helped with screening and document retrieval. Our advisory group gave us extremely useful advice and guidance, and on-going contact with some members has been very valuable.

This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under grant number 09/3008/11. The funders had no role in the design of the study, data collection, analysis or writing of the manuscript. However, they were consulted, along with Advisory Group members, in order to facilitate interpretation of the data. Here, all contributors’ perspectives were considered equally in data interpretation.

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Contributions

SO developed the original conceptual framework; GB, AOE, SO, JT and JK conducted most of the development of the framework to its current form, with input from the other authors and stakeholders. JT led on the initial synthesis of theories, resulting in the identification of the ‘social justice’ and ‘utilitarian’ perspectives; AOE led on the meta-analysis and operationalising the models; GB and JT led on final synthesis of theories as they related to the conceptual framework. GB and JT wrote the initial manuscript, undertook revisions, and coordinated the submission for publication. AOE provided detailed peer review comments. All other co-authors peer reviewed manuscript drafts. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Correspondence to Ginny Brunton .

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Brunton, G., Thomas, J., O’Mara-Eves, A. et al. Narratives of community engagement: a systematic review-derived conceptual framework for public health interventions. BMC Public Health 17 , 944 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4958-4

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Achieving successful community engagement: a rapid realist review

E. De Weger 1 , 2 ,
N. Van Vooren 1 ,
K. G. Luijkx 2 ,
C. A. Baan 1 , 2 &
H. W. Drewes 1

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Community engagement is increasingly seen as crucial to achieving high quality, efficient and collaborative care. However, organisations are still searching for the best and most effective ways to engage citizens in the shaping of health and care services. This review highlights the barriers and enablers for engaging communities in the planning, designing, governing, and/or delivering of health and care services on the macro or meso level. It provides policymakers and professionals with evidence-based guiding principles to implement their own effective community engagement (CE) strategies.

A Rapid Realist Review was conducted to investigate how interventions interact with contexts and mechanisms to influence the effectiveness of CE. A local reference panel, consisting of health and care professionals and experts, assisted in the development of the research questions and search strategy. The panel’s input helped to refine the review’s findings. A systematic search of the peer-reviewed literature was conducted.

Eight action-oriented guiding principles were identified:

Ensure staff provide supportive and facilitative leadership to citizens based on transparency;

foster a safe and trusting environment enabling citizens to provide input;

ensure citizens’ early involvement;

share decision-making and governance control with citizens;

acknowledge and address citizens’ experiences of power imbalances between citizens and professionals;

invest in citizens who feel they lack the skills and confidence to engage;

create quick and tangible wins;

take into account both citizens’ and organisations’ motivations.

Conclusions

An especially important thread throughout the CE literature is the influence of power imbalances and organisations’ willingness, or not, to address such imbalances. The literature suggests that ‘meaningful participation’ of citizens can only be achieved if organisational processes are adapted to ensure that they are inclusive, accessible and supportive of citizens.

Peer Review reports

Ageing populations with increasingly complex health and care needs, growing health inequalities, and the challenging financial climates in OECD countries, have long emphasised the need for the provision of better and more efficient care [ 1 ]. In an effort to tackle such problems, a diverse range of organisations, including healthcare providers, insurance companies, municipalities and patient representatives are collaborating to implement new models of care [ 2 , 3 , 4 ]). Community engagement (CE) is increasingly seen as a key component of such new collaborative models of care. Communities often have a more holistic view of health and wellbeing, thus enabling organisations to look beyond their own interests and traditional remits [ 5 ]. The assumption is that involving communities can act as a lever for change to bring a wider range of services together even including, schools and local businesses, which would then be more tailored to the needs of the communities themselves. Many suggest that such tailored and integrated services would ultimately lead to improved community health [ 6 , 7 ]. Others also believe that as citizens become more engaged and empowered to shape their local services, the management of their own health and wellbeing would also improve [ 8 ]. Many health and care organisations in the Netherlands have started implementing new CE interventions; however, there is limited insight regarding the best ways to implement successful CE initiatives.

Previous studies have evaluated different types of CE interventions that have been implemented with the aim of improving local health and care services or neighbourhoods’ healthy living infrastructure [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. Earlier literature reviews have focused on how CE interventions affect populations’ health and social outcomes [ 8 , 13 ] or organisational structures and processes [ 14 , 15 ]. Each of these studies has shed some light on the problems that prevent CE interventions from reaching ‘meaningful’ citizen participation. For example, earlier studies have shown how power imbalances and the inaccessibility of organisational structures and processes experienced by citizens can prevent CE interventions from producing the intended outcomes and can instead lead to mistrust between citizens and professionals [ 9 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]). However, while these earlier studies have been insightful, they do not provide professionals with the information they need to successfully implement CE interventions in their own contexts. This is partly because previous studies have provided limited insight into the ways in which the different contextual factors (e.g. existing service fragmentation) and underlying mechanisms (e.g. staff’s support and facilitation making citizens feel valued) influence CE intervention outcomes (e.g. levels of community trust).

To start providing such information, this rapid realist review (RRR) sets out eight guiding principles for ‘meaningful’ participation. The principles are based on a review of the peer-reviewed literature and are underpinned by an investigation of which CE interventions work, for whom, how, to what extent and in which contexts. The principles, along with the contextual factors and the mechanisms that influence the outcomes of CE interventions are useful for policymakers and professionals to explore when struggling with the implementation of their own CE intervention. The review specifically investigated the application of CE in health and social care, focusing on the macro and meso levels of CE, e.g. developing policies, designing, implementing and delivering health and care services, setting service and policy priorities. The review addressed the following research questions:

What are the action-oriented guiding principles by which community engagement interventions can be implemented successfully?

What are the mechanisms by which these principles operate? What are the contextual factors influencing the principles?

What impact do the interactions between contextual factors and mechanisms have on CE intervention outcomes?

This review applied the rapid realist review (RRR) methodology. The realist methodology aims to highlight the impact that interactions between the contextual factors and the mechanisms have on intervention outcomes [ 19 ]. RRRs aim to provide a similar knowledge synthesis as traditional systematic realist reviews, but within a considerably shorter timeframe to ensure the relevance and applicability of results for the stakeholders [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ].

The review was undertaken in consultation with a local reference panel. As this RRR represents the first stage of a four-year mixed methods multiple case study evaluating six community engagement interventions in the Netherlands, the local reference panel consisted of the six CE interventions’ stakeholders, including professionals, citizens and citizen representatives who will be further developing and implementing the interventions. The panel also included experts in the fields of health inequalities, citizen participation, and public health, to ensure the review addressed relevant gaps in the literature. The review followed five iterative stages, which have been applied and described by others previously [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]:

Developing and refining research questions

Searching and retrieving information

Screening and appraising information

Synthesising information

Interpreting information

Because there are such wide-ranging definitions and interpretations of CE, an important first step was to find one clear definition that the authors could then apply throughout each stage of the review. Based on a preliminary search of the literature and early consultations with the panel, the authors chose the following definition of community engagement:

‘Involving communities in decision-making and in the planning, design, governance and/or delivery of services. Community engagement activities can take many forms including service-user networks, healthcare forums, volunteering or interventions delivered by trained peers’ ([ 24 ], p. xiii).

The authors engaged with the stakeholders of the six interventions at the start of the review to ensure their key areas of interest were covered in the review, and also consulted with the other experts in the local reference panel to confirm that the review addressed relevant gaps in the literature.

In consultation with the library scientist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), and based on the chosen definition and the preliminary search of the literature, the review search terms and search strings were agreed (See Additional file 1 ) and applied in the electronic databases, Embase and Scopus. These two databases were chosen as they were deemed by the library scientist to be the most relevant to the review’s subject area. Furthermore, Embase and Scopus are two of the largest international databases with a focus on health and social research and include trade journals as well. Upon reviewing the results of these two databases, the authors felt that enough rich data had been obtained and so did not search any other databases in order to speed up the process to ensure the stakeholders received the relevant information on time and in line with their CE intervention implementation schedules.

The draft inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed based on the preliminary search and were tested by two reviewers (EdW and NvV). Based on this test, the reviewers decided to expand the original criteria to ensure closer alignment with the review’s scope and the chosen CE definition. The reviewers screened the papers in two stages. During the first stage, papers’ titles and abstracts were screened, for example, based on whether the CE interventions described involved citizens or communities in the decision-making, planning, design, governance or delivery of health and care services or policies. EdW and NvV applied these criteria to the titles and abstracts and rated papers: (a) ‘red’, if papers did not follow the agreed definition of CE and/or if topics fell clearly outside the scope; (b) ‘amber’ if this was unclear; or (c) ‘green’, if the papers clearly applied the same definition and discussed topics within the scope. Initially, EdW and NvV both screened the same 100 papers to ensure standardisation of the screening process. After this, the reviewers each reviewed a different stack of papers to speed up the screening process. EdW and NvV crosschecked and discussed the papers rated ‘amber’ or ‘green’ to ensure consistency in their approach. Additionally, HD sampled 40 papers—20 papers which NvV and EdW had both screened, 10 papers which EdW had screened and 10 papers which NvV had screened—to ensure EdW’s and NvV’s screening was rigorous, consistent and standardised. Papers rated ‘red’ did not continue to the second, full-text, screening stage (Table 1 ).

During the second screening stage, EdW and NvV assessed the full text of those papers that had been rated ‘green’ or ‘amber’ for methodological rigour using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) [ 25 ] and for relevance. Relevance was assessed by asking questions like whether CE was the paper’s main subject area and whether the CE interventions described operated on Rowe & Frewer’s [ 26 ] ‘Public Participation’ level. In line with the O’Mara-Eves et al. [ 24 ] definition, the authors used Rowe & Frewer’s [ 26 ] classification of public participation to assess whether the interventions described in the literature operated on the ‘public participation level’ whereby citizens are not merely receiving information from organisations (public communication level), or merely providing information to organisations (public consultation), but are actively engaged in dialogue with organisations (Table 2 ) [ 26 ].

Data extractions were conducted on the final set of selected papers using an extraction template (available upon request) . The template was used to extract data regarding the interventions’ strategies, activities and resources, and the context, mechanisms and outcomes directly stipulated in the papers. To aid the reviewers during the extraction process and to ensure consistency and transparency, the authors specified CE-oriented definitions of important realist concepts. The realist methodology is still developing and as such, realist evaluators continue to unpack and operationalise terms like ‘context’, ‘mechanisms’, and ‘interventions’ and how these interrelate [ 27 ]. The following CE-oriented definitions of the realist concepts were applied:

Intervention : refers to interventions’ implemented activities, strategies and resources [ 27 ] e.g., citizen advisory panel meetings, neighbourhood clean-up activities, or citizen learning opportunities.

Mechanism : the concept of ‘mechanism’ does not refer to the intentional resources offered or strategies implemented within an intervention. Rather, it refers to what ‘triggers’ participants to want to participate, or not, in an intervention. Mechanisms usually pertain to cognitive, emotional or behavioural responses to intervention resources and strategies [ 28 ], e.g., citizens feeling more empowered due to learning opportunities.

Context : pertains to the backdrop of an intervention. Context includes the pre-existing organisational structures, the cultural norms and history of the community, the nature and scope of pre-existing networks, and geographic location effects [ 28 , 29 ], e.g., pre-existing levels of trust between communities and organisations or previous experience of CE interventions.

Outcome: refers to intended or unexpected intervention outcomes [ 28 ] e.g. sustainability, quality integration of services (macro); citizens’ level of involvement in health and care services (meso); citizens’ health and wellbeing outcomes (micro).

Using completed extractions, EdW and NvV created Context-Mechanism-Outcome configurations (CMOs) in order to understand and explain why CE interventions work, or not, and to generate the action-oriented guiding principles. For this review, the authors only created CMOs if those contexts, mechanisms and outcomes were explicitly correlated in the papers themselves to avoid conjecture. After drafting the configurations, the mechanisms of the CMOs were first clustered per type of CE intervention in order to ensure that the eventual principles were underpinned by mechanisms found across the range of CE interventions and thus across different contexts—i.e. (a) citizens involved in health and care organisations or neighbourhood panels, forums, boards, steering groups, planning and decision-making committees; (b) community-wide volunteering and community group activities in health and care related subjects; and (c) peer delivery. After this initial round of clustering, NvV and EdW searched for keywords in those mechanisms and then thematically clustered the mechanisms according to those keywords—independent of the types of intervention—thus generating the guiding principles. As papers were able to contribute to multiple principles, EdW and NvV also checked that each principle was based on mechanisms from several different papers to ensure the principles were transferable across different interventions and contexts. The final draft of the clustered mechanisms was shared with the other authors to confirm the mechanism themes and to refine the principles. The mechanisms of the CMOs were chosen as the basis for generating the principles, because the question of what makes citizens want to participate or not, are central to the CE literature and to the local reference panel. This question is inherently related to the concept of ‘mechanisms’—what ‘turns on in the minds of program participants and stakeholders that make them want to participate or invest in programs’ [ 28 ].

Finally, the authors held a workshop in order to present the review’s findings, including the final draft of the principles, to the local reference panel. During the workshop, the panel discussed the applicability of the principles within their local contexts and whether they are experiencing similar issues in the development of their own CE interventions. Confirming that the final draft of principles and their corresponding mechanisms had face validity, the workshop provided rich anecdotal evidence, thus further refining and finalising the principles discussed below.

After the removal of duplicates, the search resulted in 2249 potentially relevant papers (see Fig. 1 ). After the first title and abstract screening stage, 205 papers were selected to continue to the second full text screening stage. After applying the full-text inclusion and exclusion criteria and removing a further four papers as they contained no information on contexts or mechanisms and excluding six literature reviews to ensure this review’s findings were based on primary data, a total of 20 papers were used for data extraction.

Flowchart of document inclusion and exclusion process

The majority of papers focused on CE interventions involving citizens in healthcare organisations’ or neighbourhood panels, forums, boards, steering groups, or planning and decision-making committees [ 9 , 17 , 18 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]. For example, [ 32 ] study described the Australian District Aboriginal Health Action Groups (DAHAGs), which included both Aboriginal community members and healthcare professionals who together, identified local solutions to important Aboriginal health problems [ 32 ]. Five papers investigated CE interventions involving community group activities or community wide volunteering ([ 11 , 12 , 31 , 41 ]; Schoch-Spana). For example, Hamamoto et al. [ 11 ] described how community volunteering and actions groups, together with the local Community Centre, developed and implemented a new healthy living infrastructure in the local neighbourhood. Only two papers described peer delivery interventions [ 10 , 16 ]. For example, De Freitas & Martin’s [ 16 ] study showed how Cape Verdean migrant mental health service-users were empowered and actively engaged in supporting and recruiting other service-users (Table 3 ).

A total of eight guiding principles was identified through the literature and enriched and triangulated by the panel’s input. Table 3 summarises the enabling contexts and mechanisms underpinning the principles that organisations can build on to ensure CE interventions are successful. It is worth noting that constraining contexts and mechanisms are largely two sides of the same coin—e.g. lack of previous positive relationships between organisations and communities (context) and lack of quick wins worsened residents’ feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness (mechanism) . The following section first describes each principle using the evidence from the literature review, including examples of individual CMO configurations underpinning the principle (full list of individual CMO configurations available upon request) . After each principle, the panel’s reflections will be summarised separately—the panel’s input did not change the wording of the principles and instead triangulated and enriched the literature findings (Table 4 ).

Guiding principle 1: Ensure staff provide supportive and facilitative leadership to citizens based on transparency

Supportive and facilitative leadership refers to organisational leadership that supports citizens in their roles and tasks without being too directive or restrictive. Such support should be based on transparency allowing both citizens and professionals to easily share information with each other. This helps to ensure that all those involved in CE interventions are clear on the expected outcomes [ 30 , 32 , 37 , 40 ]. One of the examples from the literature involves a hospital setting up a Citizen’s Advisory Panel not just to address the hospital’s significant deficit, but also to create community support for the required service changes and to foster closer relationships with the community. From the start, the Board was transparent about the difficult financial situation and stipulated that the Panel’s role was to make far-reaching recommendations regarding the Hospital’s operations and processes in order to make the hospital more efficient [ 30 ]. The Board supported the Panel, for example, by giving and receiving presentations and by enlisting the help of an external consultancy who facilitated the Panel in developing their recommendations. While the Panel felt anxious about the magnitude and complexity of their task and their own recommendations on how best to address the hospital’s significant deficit (context) , the supportive yet not directive facilitation and transparency of the Board ensured that the Panel remained positive and motivated throughout the process ( mechanism ). Ultimately, the Panel members stated they would engage in such interventions again (outcome) . Furthermore, the Board approved the majority of the Panel’s recommendations ( outcome ), which resulted in a balanced budget ( outcome ). While some in the wider community were angry about the service cuts, the overall response of the community was positive ( outcome ) [ 30 ].

As evidenced in Table 3 , CE interventions operate within a wide range of contextual factors relating to leadership. Enabling contextual factors include previous positive experiences of CE [ 30 ] and organisational structures providing separate points of connections between communities and local services (e.g. quarterly meetings, whole-area forums) [ 32 ]. Constraining contextual factors include engaging communities with pre-existing low-levels of community readiness to mobilise around a health or neighbourhood issue or citizens with deteriorating health [ 40 ]. If contextual constraints are not acknowledged, interventions will likely be met with resistance. For example, unsupportive leadership that is unable to release control to citizens living in low-income neighbourhoods, leads to those citizens feeling frustrated and disempowered [ 40 ]. However, the literature shows that CE interventions operating within constraining contextual factors do not automatically fail as long as such constraints are acknowledged and addressed within the intervention by supportive and facilitative leadership [ 30 , 32 , 40 ].

Local reference panel reflections

The panel acknowledged the importance of fostering supportive leadership and offering specific points of connection between communities and their local services. The panel proposed having one consistent professional in a leadership position whom citizens can contact if they need further information or support.

Guiding principle 2: Foster a safe and trusting environment enabling citizens to provide input

Creating forums where citizens and professionals alike feel comfortable enough to put forward ideas is critical to CE interventions’ success. Engagement processes and activities should, therefore, be adjusted to suit citizens’ needs and organisations should take steps to reduce practical as well as cultural barriers to enable their full participation [ 16 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 39 , 41 , 42 ]. Examples from the literature include holding meetings and activities when convenient to citizens, taking into account citizens’ language needs (e.g. less jargon), and ensuring activities aimed at ethnic minorities are culturally sensitive [ 16 , 34 , 42 ]. In Schoch-Spana et al.’s [ 42 ] study the enabling organisational infrastructure (context) helped management to create a safe environment for the community to ask questions during deliberative meetings, which helped to build trust and cohesion (mechanism) . Management’s efforts, in turn, enabled staff to dedicate time to building trusting relationships with the community (outcome) which then meant that citizens were more likely to come forward and volunteer their own time (outcome) . Luluquisen & Pettis’s [ 34 ] study highlighted that it is important for organisations to consider citizens’ potentially differing needs and cater to different groups so that safe spaces can be created for those different groups (e.g. a youth only steering group, separate from adult boards). Creating a safe and trusting environment is especially important in contexts of marginalisation and racism. Often, such communities are mistrustful of local services [ 42 ], especially if past engagement efforts have failed to bring any improvements [ 32 ]. Failing to accommodate citizens’ needs would result in citizens feeling intimidated by, e.g. professional meetings [ 41 ]. Before implementing any plans, organisations will need to invest time and resources into addressing these contextual factors [ 16 , 32 , 35 , 42 ].

The panel emphasised that local neighbourhoods do not consist of one homogeneous group of citizens with the same interests and needs. This means that local citizens sometimes have opposing views and priorities and that organisations should play a mediating role by, for example, setting up safe forums where such tensions can be openly discussed.

Guiding principle 3: Ensure citizens’ early involvement

Citizens should be involved as early as possible, though the point of citizen involvement should be discussed with citizens. Where possible, organisations should engage citizens in the identification and prioritisation of their own healthcare needs. In doing so, organisations ensure that their priorities and definitions of health are aligned with those of the citizens they serve [ 9 , 12 , 31 , 37 , 39 ]). Veronesi & Keasey’s [ 39 ] study showed how the early involvement of citizens was critical in overcoming initial staff resistance to the proposed reorganisation of an acute hospital. While staff was resistant to any change, the local community and patient representatives welcomed the chance to improve the failing local hospital and thus became active drivers for change. [ 30 ] study is particularly interesting, as the conflict of interest did not centre on the differences of opinions between ‘the organisation’ as a whole and ‘the community’. Instead, the organisation’s upper management seemed at odds with its staff, thereby creating a unique opportunity to leverage the community’s input to make the required changes. The literature includes several examples of how failing to include citizens early on negatively affected the outcome of CE interventions [ 9 , 12 , 37 ]). For example, Carlisle (2010) evaluated a Panel consisting of professionals and local community members tasked with tackling the social exclusion and health inequalities experienced by deprived local communities (context) . However, the Panel had already been operational for over a year before any community members were able to join (context ). Because the professionals in the Panel had already allocated funds and resources, the community members felt ‘like tokens’ on the Panel (mechanism) and were keen to ‘present a united front’ against the professionals (outcome) . This ultimately led to a tense and uncollaborative relationship (outcome) [ 9 ]. Organisations will struggle to involve citizens early on, if contextual power imbalances between professionals and citizens are not addressed and organisations maintain overall control of interventions’ projects and plans. Ultimately, citizens who are shut out of strategic and decision-making stages end up feeling disempowered and demotivated to continue their engagement [ 12 ]. Instead, the early involvement of citizens can build momentum and motivate others to join CE interventions [ 12 , 31 ].

While the panel recognised that early involvement of citizens is important, in the panel’s experience, citizens often struggle to participate if organisations have not yet worked out any concrete goals or plans, as they prefer having something tangible to discuss. They suggested organisations support citizens to turn their own ideas into workable plans and strategies.

Guiding principle 4: Share decision-making and governance control with citizens

Organisations should encourage citizens to take on governance and decision-making roles within CE interventions [ 9 , 12 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]). The literature includes many examples of how organisations maintain control of the management, governance and planning of CE interventions [ 9 , 12 , 31 , 33 ]). For example, in Carlisle’s study (2010), once the citizens had joined the Panel, the professionals continued to maintain control by monopolising the meetings by ‘wading through large quantities of complex paperwork’ and the tenant council of one of the interventions evaluated by Yoo et al. [ 40 ] maintained control by, for example, cancelling meetings at the last minute. The literature also highlights examples of how organisations can share control by amending interventions’ governance and management structures and processes [ 12 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. For example, Durey et al.’s [ 32 ] study showed that in the context of the community’s marginalisation and mistrust of culturally inappropriate mainstream health services (context) , enabling Aboriginal community members to choose their own representatives on the DAHAGs was valued by community members (mechanism) and led to more authority being placed in the hands of the community (outcome) . Renedo & Marston [ 18 ] took a broader view and recommended that organisations examine the way in which professionals view and discuss citizen participation and to enable citizens to shape their own roles and identities instead. This way citizens will not have to adapt to organisations’ ‘elite systems’ and are valued for their own unique input. Such sharing of control is harder to achieve in contexts of marginalised communities with lower levels of readiness and hierarchical organisational structures, and when interventions have been developed ‘top down’. In such contexts, engaged citizens quickly feel as if professionals dismiss their views [ 34 ]. Ultimately, as Lang et al. [ 12 ] highlighted, citizens’ willingness to participate in interventions significantly depends on the extent to which organisations are willing and able to share control.

The citizens and citizen representatives on the panel echoed the review’s findings and suggested organisational processes should be more tailored to citizens as they find it difficult to navigate organisational processes and structures. In their experience, citizens are often unaware of which organisations or professionals to approach with their ideas or what processes they are expected to follow.

Guiding principle 5: Acknowledge and address citizens’ experiences of power imbalances between citizens and professionals

Addressing power imbalances between citizens and professionals is crucial to CE interventions’ success. However, there are several factors, which contribute to citizens’ relative powerlessness [ 9 , 17 , 18 , 33 , 34 ]). Firstly, as we have seen, organisational structures and hierarchies are tipped towards professionals rather than citizens leading interventions’ most influential aspects as professionals continue to hold key decision-making and governance positions [ 32 , 33 , 34 ]. Secondly, studies like Renedo & Marston [ 18 ] and Lewis [ 17 ] highlights that the way in which professionals view and discuss citizens contains contradictions that maintain the institutional status quo. For example, Lewis [ 17 ] discussed how professionals dismissed and undermined engaged service-users of a mental health service, because of their having a mental illness. The professionals called into question the validity of service-users’ contributions by suggesting their mental health issues ‘made them unreasonable’. Renedo & Marston [ 18 ] explained that professionals’ contradictory discourse and expectations of engaged citizens limits citizens in the type and scope of contributions they are able to make—e.g. having professional-level skills, while at the same time being a ‘genuine’ citizen in the local area. Such discourses maintain a clear division between a ‘powerful us’ (professionals) and disempowered ‘others’ (engaged citizens). Constraining contextual factors, which may make it harder to address power imbalances, include disadvantaged communities used to being at the lower end of the privilege spectrum, and organisations remaining symbolic institutions of power and hierarchy [ 9 , 17 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]). For example, Lewis [ 17 ] showed that a lack of institutional status (context) can lead to citizens feeling out of place and unsure of how to contribute to organisationally run meetings (mechanism) . This led to some citizens feeling silenced (outcome) , while others felt angry and shouted out their views (outcome) , which in turn was dismissed by professionals (outcome) . Ultimately, CE initiatives will only be successful if organisations address power imbalances, share control with citizens and professionals and citizens view each other as legitimate and equal partners in the interventions [ 17 , 18 , 33 ].

The panel recognised the importance of the equal status between organisations and citizens. They felt that achieving such a balance would require open and honest discussions between organisations and citizens about their respective roles in a more equal CE structure.

Guiding principle 6: Invest in citizens who feel they lack the skills and confidence to engage

Organisations should offer learning opportunities to citizens who feel they lack the skills and confidence to engage. Without being offered the opportunity to learn the required skills and capabilities, many, more vulnerable, citizens will likely feel unable to effectively engage [ 10 , 12 , 16 , 18 , 32 ]. For example, Crondahl & Eklund Karlsson [ 10 ] evaluated a CE learning intervention, which aimed to empower socially excluded and discriminated against Roma citizens to become health promotion coordinators in their own Roma communities (context) . The training programme helped the Roma coordinators to develop a greater sense of control and empowerment (mechanism) , which led to increased self-acceptance and to a sense of positive Roma culture (outcome) [ 10 ]. De Freitas & Martin’s study [ 16 ] of a mental health provider’s advocacy project supporting migrants with mental health issues showed how culturally sensitive training programmes empowered disadvantaged service-users. The organisation recognised that the participants did not feel as if they had the required skills and delivered training aimed at raising their awareness about the causes of their disadvantage and the tools they could use to alleviate the causes. Additionally, the already engaged service-users were trained to deliver peer-support groups to other service-users. The direct peer recruitment enabled the marginalised service-users to recognise their own entitlement to participation and enable them to successfully recruit other migrants with mental health issues into the service. The peer supporters themselves increased their social interactions, improved their communication skills and adhered more to their own treatment plans [ 16 ]. Constraining contextual factors include organisations that maintain power imbalances, have unclear remits for citizens, and have tense relationships with communities. Organisations operating within such contexts will struggle to provide the right learning opportunities to citizens who do not already feel empowered; again highlighting the importance of first addressing such constraining contextual factors.

The panel agreed that in their experience it was difficult to engage citizens who are not already empowered. Most of their citizen-participants not only live in the area, but also work in the local healthcare sector. The stakeholders are still searching for the best ways of engaging more disadvantaged citizens, but suggested ‘buddying up’ vulnerable citizens with the already engaged citizens.

Guiding principle 7: Create quick and tangible wins

Quick wins are important for CE interventions to build and maintain momentum among citizens [ 11 , 32 , 34 , 40 , 41 ]. Hamamoto et al. [ 11 ] described how a local community health centre engaged thousands of citizens in tangible projects promoting active living in the area, e.g. a mother’s walking group, bicycle repair and distribution programme. Though the local community had pressing and visible socio-economic needs including a deteriorating infrastructure not easily lending itself to physical activity (context) , the early successes in the initial stages of the intervention provided momentum and energy for citizens to come together towards other common and achievable goals (mechanism) . This led to thousands of citizens to volunteer for health-related activities and youth programmes (outcome) . However, the community centre struggled to engage citizens in broader policy development (outcome) , partly because the Centre did not have enough supportive resources or clearly defined policy issues to mobilize the community around. Kegler et al. [ 41 ] evaluated communities’ participation in California Healthy Cities and Communities programmes and found that sites, which focused on tangible mobilisation efforts such as neighbourhood clean-ups typically, generated more spin-off activities, and had more citizens participating in projects’ implementation phases. Studies like Durey et al. [ 32 ] and Yoo et al. [ 40 ] suggest that quick wins are especially important for interventions where communities’ previous experiences of CE, or health and care services more generally, have been negative and failed to show any benefits to citizens , this is especially true for CE interventions with marginalised and low-income communities. In such contexts, a lack of quick, concrete improvements can worsen citizens’ feelings of powerlessness and will likely result in citizens being less likely to participate in future interventions [ 40 ]. While, quick wins which result in changes that improve services, help to create communities’ trust in the engagement processes and can trigger citizens’ dedication and ability to push through difficulties and obstacles [ 32 , 34 ].

The panel echoed Hamamoto et al.’s [ 11 ] findings and highlighted the difficulties in maintaining citizens’ engagement in interventions that had achieved the quick wins and were running smoothly. The panel mentioned that regularly relating to citizens how their input is being used and how it contributes to successful outcomes can be helpful in maintaining citizens’ interest. They felt that such transparency might also force organisations to actually use citizens’ input.

Guiding principle 8: Take into account both citizens’ and organisations’ motivations

Organisations should enable citizens to participate in activities and projects that truly interest and motivate them, instead of channelling their participation to other projects [ 11 , 12 , 16 , 17 , 36 , 38 , 39 , 42 ]. The community centre evaluated by Hamamoto et al. [ 11 ], for example, enabled citizens to solely provide input into those projects, which truly interested them, which meant that citizens remained engaged for the entire length of their specific project. As Van Eijk & Steen [ 38 ] argued, citizens cannot pay attention to every topic and are often engaged in an ad hoc manner, contingent on specific problems. For example, their study of a mental healthcare provider’s Client Council showed that citizens’ motivations for joining the Council were mostly personal—e.g. because they were a service-user or the carer of a service-user and wanted more social interactions with others in a similar situation. The implication was that as soon as that personal connection disappeared, their commitment to the Council decreased. In Lewis’ [ 17 ] study concerning a policy and planning committee operating within a hierarchical organisation (context) , service-users’ own negative mental health service-usage experiences motivated them to take part in the committee with the aim of improving mental health services and to find solidarity with others (mechanism). However, because the committee was ineffective in addressing the poor quality standards which were the cause of service-users’ negative experiences, the citizens felt they would be better off forming their own forms of active citizenship relating to mental health services (mechanism) . Eventually the service-users did split off from the committee and set up, for example, a mental health charity and a mental health social firm (outcome) [ 17 ]. Such examples show that organisations should be transparent about the problems the organisation is facing and about their own motivations, especially if it is their intention to make cost-savings, and listen openly to citizens’ negative experiences. Aligning motivations can enhance personal citizens’ personal connections with services and can enable longer-term collaboration between citizens and organisations.

The panel recognised the importance of aligning CE interventions with citizens’ own interests and motivations. In their experience, for example, citizens are less interested in CE initiatives focusing on an entire municipality; while initiatives centred on their local neighbourhood, attract more input from citizens.

As far as the authors are aware, this is the first review to develop guiding principles for the successful implementation of community engagement interventions. Using the realist methodology, the rapid review identified eight guiding principles and highlighted the different enabling and constraining contextual factors and mechanisms, which influence the effectiveness of CE interventions. The literature findings, which resonated with the Dutch local reference panel, provide policymakers and practice leaders with an understanding of the key principles, which promote the engagement of citizens in the health and care setting. The aim of this information is to enable professionals to implement their own effective CE interventions.

While this review has not examined the interactions between the eight guiding principles, they appear interrelated. For example, those in leadership positions play an important role in ensuring CE interventions are enacted in a safe and trusting environment for citizens, which in turn seems tied into the power imbalances between citizens and organisations. Future studies could examine the nature and extent of the principles’ interactions and how these can be used to reach more ‘meaningful participation’—for example by investigating ‘ripple effect mechanisms’ [ 43 ].

Even without the examination of principles’ interrelatedness, it is clear that the existence of power imbalances and organisations’ willingness, or not, to address such imbalances, is an especially important thread throughout the principles. The literature suggests that ‘meaningful participation’ of citizens can only be achieved if organisational processes are adapted to ensure they are inclusive, accessible and supportive of citizens, for example by placing citizens in decision-making and leadership positions and providing relevant learning opportunities [ 16 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. This holds especially true for interventions seeking to engage communities with lower levels of capacity and higher levels of deprivation. In such cases, organisations should first invest significant time and resources in developing positive and trusting relationships with communities [ 10 , 16 , 40 , 42 ]. However, the literature contains more examples of how failing to build more equal organisational structures results in worsening relationships and the deterioration of citizens’ empowerment. Studies like Carlisle (2010), Lewis [ 17 ] and Renedo & Marston [ 18 ] have shown that even though organisations implement CE interventions, ostensibly with the aim of involving citizens more deeply in their organisation, professionals continue to maintain their ‘business as usual’ approach.

Future studies will be needed to continue broadening our understanding of CE. Firstly, it remains unclear why professionals and organisations implement CE interventions, but then ‘maintain their business as usual’ approach. Renedo & Marston [ 18 ] suggest part of the problem lies in the professional discourse around citizen engagement, but new evaluations could question wider aspects of this problem by investigating other underlying mechanisms and contextual factors, which prevent organisations from fully adapting their processes and structures. As CE is expected to bring a wider range of services together specifically around citizens’ views and needs, new studies could investigate, for example, how service fragmentation and funding competition hamper professionals’ willingness to truly take on board citizens’ more holistic and potentially remit-transcending views. Some of the studies included in this review indicate that service fragmentation and a lack of funding aggravate uncollaborative citizen-professional relationships, especially if professionals place an emphasis on the self-sustainability of (marginalised) communities [ 31 , 9 , 33 ]. Secondly, while there have been some studies highlighting how CE interventions which address power imbalances can tailor specific health and care services or local neighbourhoods to citizens’ needs [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 39 ]; little is known about whether CE actually enables the implementation of new collaborative models of care centred on citizens’ preferences. Finally, too few evaluations have investigated interventions involving low-income or ethnically diverse communities. There are even fewer studies focusing on other vulnerable or disadvantaged groups like the frail elderly, LGBTQ citizens, or less abled citizens [ 13 , 44 , 45 , 46 ]. This could partly be because not many CE interventions with such target groups have been implemented, in which case new studies could examine why that is the case—perhaps the reason lies partly in the context of the disadvantage and marginalisation such groups face. Because contexts of power imbalances, marginalisation and discrimination are hugely influential, such studies will be key to ensuring our understanding of CE is more inclusive and complete and can be tailored more closely to different citizens’ needs. As the local reference panel pointed out, citizens are not one homogenous group with the same needs, priorities and preferences.

Studies using a wider-range of quantitative methodologies and those reporting on the more negative results or aspects of the studied CE interventions would help close such gaps. To date, most CE evaluations have been qualitative and based on case studies and have not explicitly discussed the studies’ negative results. These case studies have provided rich anecdotal evidence, but to further develop our understanding of which CE interventions work or not, for whom, how, in which contexts and to what extent, new studies should use mixed-methods in order to quantify findings, thus providing a richer evidence-base. The authors will attempt to address such remaining gaps in the multiple-case study going forward, using the principles and the underlying CMOs as the initial programme theories.

On a separate note, though the focus of this paper was not the application of the realist methodology, important questions arose during the review’s data analysis stage. The first issue relates to theory development using CMO configurations. While most realist papers clearly highlight that CMO configurations were key to the development of the theories under discussion, most do not actually describe how the CMO configurations then led to those theories [ 47 ]. Within the papers that do describe this analytical process, there seems to be no consistency as to whether the theories are centred on the contexts, mechanisms, or outcomes of the configurations. For example, previous evaluators have put interventions as related to outcomes central [ 21 , 23 ], others have placed only outcomes in the limelight (e.g. [ 48 ]) or outcomes and contexts [ 49 ], and similarly to Kane et al. [ 50 ], we saw mechanisms as critical for our guiding principles. The methodology’s inherent flexibility brings many, creative, benefits, however, it also raises important questions regarding the generation of results. For example, it is currently not clear whether we would have drawn the same conclusions if we had chosen context or outcomes as the core of this review’s analysis. For example, due to the review’s focus on mechanisms—i.e. what makes citizens or communities want to participate or not—and our aim of providing policymakers and professionals with the evidence to implement their own effective CE strategies—the outcomes within our individual CMO configurations often relate to citizens’ or communities’ behavioural changes and the impact on organisational processes, rather than say the impact on citizens’ health and wellbeing. However, the local reference panel’s valuable input indicates that our results have face validity.

Relatedly, the methodology’s flexibility and dynamic nature is again one of its key strengths as it provides rich and detailed information, partly because of its recognition that interventions and their contexts are complex and varying. However, there is a tension between the recognition that all contexts are in a way unique, and the generalisability of the results. This tension is only partly addressed by searching for the same mechanisms and outcomes in different contexts. Ultimately, if the methodology is to continue to evolve and improve, realist evaluators should not only be transparent about how they constructed CMOs and generated theories, but also why they choose that specific approach and endeavour to show that the results are indeed generalisable across different contexts and care settings.

Study limitations

This study has two main limitations. Firstly, though this rapid review’s literature search was systematic, it was by no means exhaustive in a conscious effort to speed up the process and to share the findings as quickly as possible with stakeholders. This limitation has been mitigated by collaborating with the local reference panel to confirm and supplement the findings. Secondly, while the realist methodology is helpful in uncovering multifaceted and complex issues like power imbalances in CE, the methodology is still developing, which means that key concepts are not always understood or applied in the same manner. Other researchers may therefore find it difficult to build on this review’s findings, however, the authors have attempted to address this limitation by clearly stipulating the applied understandings of key concepts and describing, in detail, how and why the CMOs and principles were developed.

By highlighting the contextual factors and mechanisms, which can influence the outcome of CE interventions, the eight guiding principles can hopefully guide professionals to develop their own successful interventions. While the principles are based on a wide range of contextual factors, professionals are encouraged to interpret and adapt the findings to the contexts of their own local settings and explore which activities and mechanisms would lead to the most inclusive and diverse CE interventions. Organisations should pay specific attention to sources of contextual power imbalances and find the most appropriate ways to empower, motivate and upskill citizens so they may take shared control of initiatives.

Abbreviations

Community engagement

Context-mechanism-outcome configurations

Action-oriented guiding principles

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The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the local reference panel for their valuable time, insight and guidance.

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Research design was developed by EdW and reviewed and approved by HD, KgL and CB EdW and NvV acquired, analysed and interpreted data. EdW wrote the paper and HD, KgL and CB critically reviewed all drafts and the final copy. All authors made substantial contributions to conception and design and read and approved the final manuscript

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De Weger, E., Van Vooren, N., Luijkx, K.G. et al. Achieving successful community engagement: a rapid realist review. BMC Health Serv Res 18 , 285 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-018-3090-1

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Narratives of community engagement: a systematic review-derived conceptual framework for public health interventions

Ginny brunton.

1 Department of Social Science, Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating (EPPI)-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education, University College London UK, 18 Woburn Square, London, WC1H 0NR UK

James Thomas

Alison o’mara-eves, farah jamal, sandy oliver, josephine kavanagh.

2 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Manchester, UK

Associated Data

The datasets during and/or analysed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Conclusions

Aims and research questions

What is the range of models and approaches underpinning community engagement?
What are the mechanisms and contexts through which communities are engaged?

Stakeholder involvement

Screening for eligibility

We next screened for intervention studies. To be eligible for inclusion in the broader review, studies had to meet the following criteria:

published after 1990;
a systematic review or primary research study;
an outcome or process evaluation;
an intervention relevant to community engagement;
written in English;
measure and report health or community outcomes;
characterise study populations or report differential impacts in terms related to social determinants of health; and
contain health or health-related outcomes, and/or process data.

Study appraisal and selection

Coding and synthesis

Conceptual framework development and examination of theory.

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Initial conceptual framework

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Final conceptual framework

Developing models

The final phase involved both the development of an overarching framework (Fig. (Fig.2), 2 ), and the articulation of specific models which navigated significant paths through the framework. Here, the conceptual framework acted as a system of constructs where some relationships were understood. We pulled out different constructs out of that based on theories (e.g. social justice) to test specific relationships. Authors did not always clearly specify their underlying theory, but their theoretical stance could be inferred based on the context of the study presented. The models were informed by the theory synthesis but operationalized by grouping studies together in different combinations based on their assigned codes for ‘public-identified health need’, ‘involvement in design’ and ‘involvement in delivery’. Multiple combinations were tested before the final operationalization was determined. This process was iterative, involving discussions within the team and our Advisory Group; the development of many ‘trial’ frameworks; and the graphical depiction of the final framework and models. During iteration, different types of intervention were selected purposively to test the framework and to check that its coverage of the approaches present in the included interventions.

Quality assurance

Included studies and papers

Significant concepts and definitions within community engagement

As outlined in the methods, the first task in the iterative development of our conceptual framework shown in Fig. Fig.2 2 involved the identification and definition of significant concepts in the literature.

Definitions

The health need may also be identified differently [ 14 ]:

a felt need, which is one directly identified by community members themselves;
an expressed need, which is inferred by observing a community’s use of services;
a comparative need, derived by comparing service use in a similar community; or
a normative need; derived by comparing measures of living conditions with a society norm or standard, often set by experts.

Motivations

In other cases, those external to the community are motivated to develop a health intervention, driven by their professional responsibilities as, for example, local or state government officials, health care providers, or other community members. Community engagement is fostered here when those within a specific community are invited to participate by those with professional responsibilities. These external stakeholders can ask community members to participate for a broad range of reasons, including: ethics and democracy; the desire to provide better services and better health; for political alliances or to satisfy a political climate; and to leverage resources and increase the chance of sustainability [ 22 – 24 ] (Morison 2000 p.119, in [ 25 ]). Involving specific communities as stakeholders can help build public commitment to a health promotion agenda and can empower the public to advocate for change. Such involvement can also help determine whether or in what form a health promoting action is likely to be acceptable for implementation. It may be recognised that some local community groups may be more competent in delivering health promotion change or they may already be involved in other health promoting actions [ 26 ]. In other cases, there may be legislative or regulatory requirements for a broader group of individuals to participate; for example, in situations where statutory funding is forthcoming only when matched funding in cash or in-kind is provided by community partners.

Community participation

Several included studies discussed the contextual influences or mediators necessary for community engagement initiatives. These included communicative competence [ 22 – 24 ]; empowerment and control [ 49 – 51 ]; and attitudes by community members and providers towards what expertise was important and who held it [ 15 , 52 ]. The extent to which communities can engage appeared to be dependent on the level of financial and other resources available to support their participation [ 53 , 54 ].

clearly defined target groups, objectives, interventions and programme components [ 46 , 60 ];
adequate time for community members and other stakeholders to build relationships with one another, so that they can agree a ‘level playing field’ in terms of language, negotiation and collegial working skills [ 17 , 24 , 25 , 61 ];
learning of funding sources and developing skills to bid for future sources of funding [ 21 ];
the degree of collective decision-making [ 15 , 16 , 52 ];
planning for on-going simple communication between participants and providers [ 39 , 49 – 51 ], and between the community engagement group and the wider community [ 36 , 49 – 51 , 57 ];
adequate participant and provider skills training [ 16 , 17 , 25 , 36 , 45 , 46 , 49 ];
the amount and quality of administrative support required to ensure smooth project running [ 49 , 57 , 62 ];
activity timing, duration and frequency [ 39 , 58 , 61 , 63 ]; and
cash flow stability throughout the lifetime of the initiative [ 64 ].

In determining these concepts as described by authors across the retrieved studies, we noted that some of them appeared to arise from a desire to engage communities, whilst others appeared to be driven by a desire to intervene in order to improve a community or populations’ health. These two areas are represented by the inverted triangles in Fig. Fig.2 2 labelled as ‘Community engagement’ and ‘Health intervention’.

The two schools of thought within “community engagement”

A utilitarian health systems perspective

A social justice perspective

Bridging the utilitarian and social justice rationales

Models in community engagement

‘Classical’ or ‘traditional’ peer- or lay-delivered interventions

Interventions with varying degrees of collaboration between health/other statutory services and communities

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Varying degrees of collaboration between health/other statutory services and communities From Popay et al. (2006) [ 76 ]

Need is usually identified by people outside the community (‘expressed’, ‘comparative’ or ‘normative’), but the theory of change includes specific community engagement in order to better align the intervention to the community’s needs and preferences. The extent of community involvement in the intervention can vary considerably: the framework describes a range of dimensions reflecting this variability (e.g., whether the community leads on designing or delivering the intervention, and who the beneficiaries are). The theory of change developed by Popay et al. [ 76 ] depicted in Fig. Fig.3 3 reflects this model and suggests that ‘degree of engagement’ may be a useful analytical approach. “The diagram highlights four broad approaches to community engagement differentiated by their engagement goal: the provision and/or exchange of information; consultation; co-production; and community control. These approaches are not readily bounded but rather sit on a continuum of engagement approaches with the focus on community empowerment becoming more explicit and having greater priority to the right of the continuum where community development approaches are located.” [ 75 ].

Interventions based on empowerment

Acknowledgements

Availability of data and materials

References informing the theory synthesis, conceptual framework and models ( n = 39).