Title: Why is Community Engagement Important? - Bang The Table
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Content: As voters, communities have the power to make their voices heard. And elections represent a significant opportunity to drive change. Advocacy campaigns are at their most effective when local governments, municipalities and councils activate communities, mobilizing on issues that impact their everyday lives. For it is in the local, placed-based arena that community members can have their most direct impact on policy. Traditionally, local government advocacy priorities have been determined by executive-led approach – essentially, without community input (and often buoyed by third-party research and data at times, leading to advocacy campaigns that worked to benefit external agencies). Community engagement is important as it takes action to influence stakeholders with government, political or funding power to implement public projects and policies that primarily benefit individual communities and drive social change. Community engagement is critical to deepening democracies
Depending on the types of community engagement, and level of influence given over to communities in a public decision-making process, community engagement strives towards deliberative democracy which facilitates a collaborative exchange regarding a set of policies or actions. Researchers have observed a pronounced expansion in community organizing since the mid 1980s – where they have increasingly become a locus of engagement during governments’ deregulation of power. Broadly speaking, since the 1990s, we have witnessed a rapid expansion in formal, state-based initiatives to facilitate public participation in decision making, where communities are invited to engage beyond voting. The attendant mistrust or loss of faith in government and information on public policy through traditional and social news channels walks hand in hand with the shift from top-down governance to more horizontally organized governments.