Community education engagement planning

Behaviour change by others is a common desire for many agencies. Finding ways to actively engage community members is all to often seen to be a scary and intimidating business. Complicating factors include such issues as there being no one absolute answer to topics such as health and safety, and another is that many people either have a quite reasonable understanding of the topic anyway, or have good reasons to act the way they do. In a series of courses designed and run for the Country Fire Authority I introduced five engagement tools or techniques that would help the staff and volunteers run conversations with small groups on the topic of fire. As well as practicing to use the tools, the participants also developed their own plan documenting a community group they wanted to target, what the focus for the conversation should be (eg. Parents with young children and house fires) and which tools they might use to enable a conversation. This enabling them to take a planned and purposeful approach to engagement on community safety which they could monitor and evaluate themselves. The tools are Put yourself on the Map, Lucky Draw, Learning Matrix, On the Line and Three Best Bets.

 

non-engagement

Knowing about the Brisbane City ‘Your City Your Say’ engagement campaign, I was interested to see the above on the front page of The Advertiser, our local paper. It turned out to be every thing I can think of what engagement should not be.

  • No linkage to a real decision
  • ‘Opinion’ tick boxes with poor choices
  • No reason given for the survey (presumably to assist future editorial bias?) other than to gather opinions of Geelong residents.
  • No opportunities for suggestions for something different

All together, not something to encourage people for future engagement.

An Integrated Municipal Fire Management Plan

The increasing potential for fire related disaster due to 10yrs of drought is requiring even greater co-ordination between service providers and community. I have been privileged to assist the Cardinia Fire Management Committee to create a purposeful approach that will enable such a collaborative approach. One of the learnings from this exercise is that with the resources available it will take some years to fully implement the plan. In the meantime a start has been made and a purposeful approach documented.