The National Standards for Community Engagement have been developed with the involvement of over 500 people from communities and agencies through out Scotland. They are a practical tool to help improve the experience of all participants involved in community engagement to achieve the highest quality of process and results.
The standards can be used in both formal and informal community engagement. During the development of the standards for more formal settings such as community planning partnerships, community engagement was
defined as:
Developing and sustaining a working relationship between one or more public body and one or more community group, to help them both to understand and act on the needs or issues that the community experiences.
These formal arrangements for community engagement are very important, however, it should be noted that the standards are also applicable to less formal ways of engaging people and can be used to enable large numbers to participate.
In testing the standards a number of useful learning points were identified. These included:
- seeking agreement to use the standards from all those involved in the process;
- nominating a key person to lead on the use of the standards; and
- prioritising the standards to reflect the purpose of the engagement and experience of community partners and agencies.