MODULE 3 - Section 4
Community Engagement
10 Minutes to complete section and related assignments
In this section, you will learn:
How to plan community engagement activities for teams
How to plan culturally-educating activities
When planning team engagement, it is important to select activities that are meaningful and beneficial to the community (i.e. long-term work already happening). They should also align with your vision for Short-Term Teams (think the Purpose, Priorities and Perspectives you created in Module 1). Finally, they should promote healthy community engagement (think When Helping Hurts kind of principles) and relationship building between the goer-group and host-community.
Create opportunities that extend dignity to locals, include their involvement and leadership when possible, and show teams how to see people, not just poverty.
Community Engagement Activities
Questions to Ask
We must carefully think through the relationship between our purpose for STTs, the proposed group and their demographic/skill set, the long-term work, and the potential opportunities for engagement in the community. That is a lot to consider!
Proactively consider the questions to the right and think through the variety of ways a team could healthily engage the community. Keep in mind that while the ideal answer to each question is a “yes”, a “no” does not automatically rule the activity out. It does mean you need to consider that aspect further to be sure it’s not an issue. However, if you begin to accumulate several “no’s”, you probably want to reconsider the activity. Finally, you may find that some of these questions carry more weight than others. A “no” to one question may have more implications than another for your context. What adjustments could you make in order to turn a “no” into a “yes”?
Finally, if you are feeling overwhelmed about creating the “perfect” engagement activities for a team know that, while we aim for the ideal, this is not an exact science. Though we rely on healthy poverty alleviation principles, understanding cultural dynamics, personalities, etc., our ultimate reliance is upon God! We do our best and entrust the work to Him.
Does the proposed Team Activity…
Support the existing work of long-term transformation?
Align with your Purpose, Priorities and Perspectives for short-term teams in your community?
Help spark new areas of growth where the community wants to expand?
Culturally appropriate for a team to be involved in?
Work for the team’s size and the ages of team members?
Consider any cultural gender restrictions?
Give team members the opportunity to engage side-by-side with the local community?
Extend dignity to the locals and/or allow for locals to lead/co-lead/participate in the activity?
Combine community needs and the gifts and talents of team members?
Cultural Engagement Activity & Tourism
The sights and sounds of your community can provide valuable visceral learning experiences. Through local fun and exploration, team members will have the opportunity to see, experience, and interact with the culture, local people, and the language. Team members can appreciate the history of the people and find value in interactions they have with those they meet along the way. While the focus of the short-term team is to learn and serve, half-day or full-day outings provide benefits beyond just ‘tourism’:
Learn various aspects of language, currency, art and the broader culture to build on their experience
Cement team unity/relationships made during the visit
A reminder of community assets and abundance (beauty of nature, resources, movement of the Spirit)
Offers an additional space to process their experience and integrate more of the community into their understanding
Gives team members additional opportunities to understand what it is like to live, work and play within the community. If anyone on the team is considering being a global worker, this gives them a vision of what it could be like to be a part of your community.
Team members may appreciate the opportunity to buy small gifts for donors
Though not required, consider adding additional value to this time by coordinating an activity that locals, hopefully those the team has already interacted with, could be a part of as well. This lets the team learn from locals about their community, culture, etc. and vice versa. It also affords the potential for deeper relationship building and increasing cross-cultural understanding.
