Approach
It is recommended that you also read the section on Leadership and
Management as it provides guidance on leadership and management
in embedding sustainable development into your organisation. The
most important thing to bear in mind is securing top level
commitment within your organisation from the outset. In an ideal
world the action taken around community and business will be part
of a whole organisational commitment to sustainable development. As
such, it will be integrated with the overall vision, strategy,
action planning, resourcing and governance that exist around
that.
If you need to build a separate business case for enhanced
community and business engagement, however, the best place to start
is to set up a staff working group (or to use the sustainable
development group if there is one in existence). This should
include a range of people as well as someone from senior management
or a reporting line to senior management and should work across all
areas of sustainable development, not only community and
business.
There should also be a mechanism to capture the opinions of
external organisations and individuals as well as learners (and
perhaps involve them in the group at a later date). In its infancy,
this will help to make the business case to and lobby senior
management. It will also help align the argument for enhanced
community engagement with current and future provider planning and
activity.
From this, the group can help shape some broad priorities for
engaging with communities and business appropriate to the provider,
such as:
- improving engagement with local employers in specific
sectors
- improving security on site, for example decreasing vandalism
and graffiti to the benefit of local neighbourhoods
- attracting more learners from the local community and helping
them into local employment
- working in partnerships at the regional and local level to
improve public transport links for learners and staff
One very comprehensive tool that can help you establish the
profile of the local community and identify priorities is the step
by step Community Audit developed by
Renewal.Net, which can be applied to a range of organisations
and situations, not least the FE sector.
Planning
Once you have committed to becoming more proactive in community
and business engagement, the next step is to identify the key
stakeholders who will need to be included in the process. Some of
these will have been identified in the rationale stage. They may
also have taken part in the working group already or have been
consulted.
There are a very wide range of individuals and groups who need
to be included in any effective stakeholder consultation process.
They will have a wide range of differing roles, levels of interest
or viewpoints on the process as a whole and on the role of a
provider in the community.
You will already have views about which stakeholders to include
but it is important to take a very wide view at the start of the
process. It may also be useful to try to identify the
characteristics of your relationships with the various stakeholders
identified, the types of which may include staff, learners, local
businesses, suppliers, local voluntary organisations, pressure
groups, trade unions, disability groups, churches, sports
organisations etc.
Your approach to the different types of stakeholders may differ,
depending on a number of factors. Some could be defined as
“close range” stakeholders who have a direct and active
participation with you and your organisation already or who may be
interested in increasing their level of involvement. Others may be
“wider” stakeholders, with more peripheral or
occasional involvement with you and your organisation.
Having thought this through, it can be useful to identify all
key local (and regional) stakeholders and document this in a
diagram or table to show the nature of the relationship with a
commentary on strengths and weaknesses. It is also important to
identify named individuals at this early stage wherever possible
this approach will help to accelerate networking and active
participation by the provider and its stakeholders.
As a next step, you should map the key current / perceived needs
of the stakeholders. For example, local residents may want to use
your facilities for a meeting space, sports and recreation or
evening classes.
Action
To be successful, stakeholder and community engagement needs to
identify clear objectives that are appropriate for everyone
participating. Thus the objectives of the provider and those of the
stakeholders need to be clearly identified from an early stage,
together with agreed approaches defining their relationships.
Some providers will already be actively engaged with their local
communities and businesses (for example see the Pershore Group of
Colleges). It may be that your organisation has already
moved beyond making the business case for community and business
engagement. If this is the case, it may not be appropriate to use
all parts of this section of the guidance.
Once key stakeholders have been identified and some broad
methods of engagement established, it is important for you to
decide a route forward.
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