Are you thinking about building a program or project aimed to create a more healthy, vibrant community? In our experience, the most exciting part of any new effort is engaging people in building the effort together.
Whether a group is building a single project / program or a full range of programs, using a fully engaged approach to building programs means that you are building programs with people, not for them. And that is very different from the standard model of program development.
That old model looks something like this:
Step a: Come up with an innovative idea
Step b: Do your homework – research the idea, research who else may be doing similar work
Step c: Develop a plan and a budget
Step d: Do some focus groups, to see if people resonate with the approach, or if it should be tweaked
Step e: Finalize the business model for the program, get seed funding and go for it!
A“Fully Engaged” approach looks more like this:
Step 1: Come up with an innovative idea
Step 2: Begin engaging anyone you can find who is related to the idea – people who will use the program, or be impacted by it, or fund it, or may have seen something similar elsewhere, and etc.
Step 3: Ask them for their thoughts and experience and wisdom and ideas. Ask them about similar programs they know about. Ask them to connect you to those people.
Step 4: Then ask all THOSE people for their thoughts and experience and wisdom and ideas.
Step 5: Invite those people to help you build the program together – perhaps as volunteers or as advisors or as partners in some way.
Step 6: Develop the plan, identifying potential partners for various portions of the work
Step 7: Develop those partnerships and go for it!
These steps are particularly meaningful for us at Creating the Future, as we are about to embark on our own “sleuthing” expedition, to grow our own programs. As we prepare to do so, we hope you will share your own experience with this approach!
• Have you had experience building programs / projects by engaging the people who will use them?
• What did that process add to the project?
• Did you learn anything that you might otherwise not have learned (or might have learned only too late?)?
• Were there things you learned about the engagement process itself? Where there tips / advice you would take into your next engagement effort?
We look forward to learning from your own efforts to engage your community in your work!