Embedding engagement
Partnership working: suitable activities

You will need to be aware of the community engagement activities going on locally which link to your work. It may be that the Local Strategic Partnership has conducted a consultation audit, or at least has a broad idea of community engagement activity done by partners and in partnership over strategic issues. If this does not exist, it is worth finding out yourself by doing a snapshot audit.

Activities to check for include:

• Survey work e.g. corporate surveys such as a residents' survey or citizens' panel, or service-/theme-specific surveys (among people living in a particular area, which might have been conducted by a residents' association or a local ward councillor
• Other quantitative or qualitative consultation on service improvement done by individual organisations e.g. among hospital patients on safety issues around a large site, or on a housing estate; past community safety audit work done by a local authority
• Community conferences e.g. among voluntary sector organisations, Assembly meeting of a Local Strategic Partnership
• Community development work e.g. outreach work with young people
• Communication vehicles parish magazine, borough newsletter, websites, community newsletters, (e)mailing-lists
• Standing meetings e.g. area forums, community councils
• Community projects - such as community clear-ups, mother and toddler groups in a specific area

Organisations to consult when conducting this audit will include

• District/county Local Strategic Partnership executive
• Statutory partners (local authority (county and district), health trust)
• Voluntary/community partners - umbrella bodies (CVS, Community Council), local geographically based community groups, issue- or theme-based groups (e.g. Race Equality Council)
• business partners - Chamber Of Commerce, local large businesses, Small Business Federation

Think about asking the following questions :

• Which projects target specific audiences, which reach the community as a whole?
• Which will fit in well with the policing agenda?
• Where are there gaps in policing engagement that others' consultation can fill?
• Which activities can be "piggybacked" onto? Are there costs associated with this? Are they incorporated into planning?
• Can the police share certain resources with other organisations?
• Can resource sharing mechanisms for consultation and engagement be established between partners where they do not already exist, or be built upon? (This is likely to be successful if joint work "fits" the priorities of all organisations; perhaps through a process of priority setting via the Local Strategic Partnership, Local Area Agreements, etc.)

Targeting appropriate audiences

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE Surrey Police Authority has a community engagement and partnership panel, with the following headline aims: To develop and implement a strategy for the Authority's partnership working. To continually develop and implement the Police Authority Community Engagement Strategy recommending to the Authority costed options for community engagement. More information including the panel's full terms of reference can be found at http://www.surreypa.gov.uk/docs/ thecommunityengagementandpartnershippaneltofr.doc

Doing this initial audit of partnership activities will help you to establish where there are mechanisms for reaching out to specific groups - such as young people through a youth council, or older people through established groups and societies. You may, however, need to think about the following:

• Do the mechanisms which already exist for engagement truly reflect the wider population I want to talk with (a youth council, for example may have a membership which is skewed in a certain way, as might a detached youth work project)
• Can I use a variety of ways to contact a particular group (older people might be targeted through the local authority newspaper (this is more likely to be read by an older age group), social services, lunch clubs, day centres, also Age Concern and similar networks)
• Do I need to do outreach work rather than rely solely on existing networks? How will this be resourced? (door-knocking and survey work is often very time-intensive and may require specific knowledge about a particular community - for example, reaching the Asian community of a suburban town may mean working with community development and community/support organisation colleagues who know the most densely populated areas well)

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE Middlesborough Partnership has an agreed engagement framework with the following objectives: To ensure that throughout the Partnership there is a clear understanding of and commitment to engaging with communities about decisions that affect their lives. To establish a co-ordinated and consistent approach to community engagement in Middlesbrough. To ensure that community engagement in Middlesbrough is carried out to the highest possible standard. To ensure that Community Engagement is inclusive by giving every citizen of Middlesbrough the opportunity to express their views and that those views will be listened to and respected. To ensure that the outcomes of community engagement impact on decision-making and the way in which services are delivered. To plan and deliver services, strategies and policies that reflect the needs of the citizens of Middlesbrough. To provide a framework for sustained community engagement in the work of the Partnership. To ensure that the community engagement process is transparent and accessible to all.

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