Community Research and Engagement

Community research and community engagement go hand in hand when trying to figure out what certain communities need and don’t need to become a more sustainable community. I think that community research has to be conducted prior to and during the process of community engagement. With community research you must do research that matters and makes sense by first figuring out what the community’s needs are and who, what and why the community needs these things. To form a strong backbone structure of the research of the community it is very important to find things such as local knowledge, partners, and groups to find out as much knowledge as you can about the community and get feedback on what needs to be done. After the research aspect is done, then I believe is when you can actually start planning and engaging in the community to implement different changes to better the community. The two major aspects that are needed in doing this are a good strategy and an ethical way of approaching the community and using proper tools and techniques to achieve the set goals. In class today we broke out into 3 different groups and came up with 3 different ways to keep communities interested in perusing different ways to make a community greener. Lots of new idea’s came up that I have never heard of before and was actually somewhat interested in such as a “welcome wagon”. A welcome wagon is for people that are new to the community and have just moved there and it is a way of promoting and introducing them to a greener community. This is done by going to meet the new people and brining them pamphlets, newsletters, maps, and other useful material that can show them where they can buy local products from farmers, eat at local restaurants that use local products, farmers market dates and times, ways to get involved in the community, where and how the transit systems work and it helps with engaging youth and elders as well. A few of the other example were to provide first time transit rides to help promote riding the bus instead of driving, as Colwood has a poor website a good idea would be to improve the local website to assist with anything people in the community might be interested about, have bulletin boards, newsletters and news papers throughout the community to inform people of events taking place, public meetings, online surveys, open house events and informal gatherings and events as a community group outreach. Implementing all of these ideas would be a key start for a turn in the right direction of a greener community. I know that not everyone in a community is going to be on board with the idea, but if you change the mind of at least one person and get them to ride a bus instead of drive, they will start passing on their knowledge and hopefully change the minds of 2 people. It is hard to change a whole community quickly, but the impact you make on one person could change the whole community over time and help in making a stronger and greener community. Now I ask, what will you do to help start the movement?