Gaining community buy-in for your social impact network is a critical challenge for many network leaders. Whether networks aim to recruit emerging community leadership or partner with seasoned grassroots organizers, leaders can struggle to make an impact when their target communities face conflicts to get involved.
These challenges can get tougher when networks look to engage community members and institutional leaders alike. Power differences between governing bodies and community members often lead to disagreement, putting network leaders in the middle of tensions that can halt impact. Some of these tensions include institutional contributions to community problems and frustrations with network change, among other disagreements.
While the institutional-community divide is never completely resolved, leaders can prioritize which tensions to address, making the challenge more manageable. Recent scholarship (mine and others’) suggests empowerment theory as a way to balance institution-community involvement. Networks can use empowerment theory to determine how to work with communities and their institutions.
How does empowerment happen?
My research team has identified empowerment occurring in two ways: empowering organizations and empowered organizations.
- Empowerment through community involvement.
Empowering organizations focus on community participation and individual access to resources, usually through social engagement, information sharing, or relationship-building (Watt et. al, 2000). Organizations like these tend to take an involvement approach to their communities.
An involvement approach centers community decision-making authority. It centers their voices. To do so, accessibility to participation is key. For example, hosting events after work hours, offering stipends and childcare, and ensuring intrinsic reasons to participate (like social events and games) can increase the likelihood of community involvement.
Network leaders must center the voices of the disenfranchised communities they aim to help. All too often, representation of these groups is limited to a few in the room. To combat tokenism, or the untruthful performance of representation, leaders must ensure there is a critical mass of disenfranchised voices participating in making a change. Representation alone is not enough. With explicit norms of participation that center marginalized voices, and even with a trained facilitator, community members can feel confident in bringing their ideas forward for impact.
When accessibility and representation are addressed, leaders can host multiple opportunities for community members to participate through working groups, action teams, and boards.
- Empowerment through systems change.
Empowered organizations focus on the institutional influence of an environment, on behalf of a constituency (Green & Baker, 2022) These organizations tend to lean toward a systems change approach to address inequity.
Systems change involves leveraging local institutions’ resources to disrupt policies, privileges, and positions that create inequality. To accomplish disruption, network leaders must question the system in which the institutions operate. As they stand, how do the current institutions contribute to community disenfranchisement? What resources are available to challenge the current system?
With an informed goal-setting process, network leaders can challenge the systems in which the network operates to the advantage of a community.
To measure the success of these empowerment tactics in coalitions, my research team created the coalition empowerment measurement model.
The model above shows a spectrum of engagement and empowerment practices. Where does your network land? Whether your network works toward involving your community members or toward an institutional systems-change approach (or a blend of the two), making a transformational impact involves a few factors.
For involvement practices to have a transformational impact, community members from marginalized groups must have sustained and meaningful decision-making authority. For that authority to make a difference, a two-way communication approach can keep the dialogue moving forward and ensure needs are being met. In our study across 26 coalitions, we found that decentralized coalition governance, older coalitions, and lower governmental representation were key to involvement.
Transformational systems change practices require community participation, too. By getting members involved with goal-setting and evaluation, networks can start to better understand how to frame the social problem through the community lens. Our research found that higher government representation and the scale of the social system were notable factors for systems change work.
In the end, we found that environmental context and coalition design are important factors for both empowering and empowered organizations. So, a combination approach of involvement and systems change may help network leaders make the most social impact.
Handling participant conflict
Achieving impact requires understanding that neither institutions nor individuals hold the exclusive key to success. It’s about recognizing the strengths and addressing the challenges of both, ultimately leveraging the unique benefits each offers. With the right conflict management norms and personnel in place, network leaders can start to work toward systems change with their communities hand-in-hand. Flexing conflict management skills (like those below and more) can help you work through conflict while trust builds.
Conflict often is an expression of a missing need from one or more network members. By using conflict as an opportunity for learning and growing, networks can work through the conflict they determine is important for making an impact. Not all conflicts can be solved, but all networks can choose which conflict to prioritize.
If you want to learn more about these conflict strategies or need a facilitator to begin your network’s community involvement journey, we can help. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to learn how.