Kicking off your community participation planning

Community participation is an ongoing process that you can build into a project or service, rather than a single activity.

There are two key ideas to keep in mind as you start your community participation work:

1. Start as early as possible – at the very beginning: At the very outset of any activity, consider whose life this work affects, and how they might want to be involved. Think about who you will want to engage and how you will engage them. Once plans are already set, it’s much harder to persuade communities that you are genuinely open to their ideas. It’s also very hard to get meaningful engagement at short notice. You can find more information on planning your activities.
2. Be ready to learn, change and adjust: community participation activities won’t always go according to plan, and that’s ok. What matters is to trial, learn and adjust what you’re doing. All successful community participation activities start with small steps and involve changes along the way. Learning from those early activities, including hiccups, is what helps build our “community participation muscles”. It is useful to build flexibility into your plans at the start so that you able to adapt things later.

You can find more about developing a culture of participation in the case studies throughout this toolkit, and on dealing with difficulties.

Barnet’s five principles of community participation are:

1. We go where people are
2. We learn through doing
3. We listen
4. We are transparent, accessible, and open
5. We value community power

Below is a prompt question to help you think about when to start involving the community.

Find out more

For more details see our Community Participation Strategy.