How can public administrators align community service with community goals?

Conducting assessments of the community is important because it helps public administrators to gain an understanding of the community's needs, priorities, and values. By doing so, they can identify areas where services are lacking and develop strategies to address these gaps. Additionally, assessing the community allows administrators to engage with community members and build trust, which is essential for the success of any community initiative. Ultimately, by aligning community service with community goals, public administrators can help to build stronger, more resilient communities that are better equipped to thrive in the face of challenges.

Assessing the community is first about assessing your privilege and perspective in relation to the community or group you are trying to engage. Do you relate to their lived experience ? How can you understand it? Work towards understanding how to be build trust, authentic communication, honesty and reciprocity. These genuine efforts will ensure that your community will be transparent with you on what they need and how you can support them to get government services, policy or program changes in place to enable thriving.

Launching a community service project demands a meticulous assessment by public administrators. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups are vital tools to understand community strengths, challenges, and opportunities. This dynamic process uncovers assets, identifies problems, and discerns community priorities and expectations for public service. Additionally, it reveals gaps and overlaps in existing services, resources, and partnerships, ensuring a tailored and efficient approach to address community needs.

Objectives should always be defined in partnership with those most affected by the policy decision. Be creative about this - think outside your box (or cubicle) and the many ripple affects of a policy change. Employ the skills of design, transformation and dreaming at this phase. Objective definition has a significant impact on how a problem is solved, so be careful, critical and open minded to what may emerge.

Before initiating a community service project, administrators must assess strengths, challenges, opportunities, and preferences. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups aid in understanding community dynamics. This process uncovers assets, identifies problems, and gauges expectations. Moreover, it unveils gaps and overlaps in services and partnerships, enabling a targeted, efficient, and community-tailored approach.

In partnership with your community be transparent on what you plan, how you will do it and resources. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do. Transparency builds trust, trust builds relationships. Focus on this phase on testing and failing fast. If you have an event, research or approach have an open-mind to feedback. Focus on what will make it fail and understanding what success would look like instead. Build story telling and reflection at each phase of planning activities. Learn authentically with your constituents/community not without them.

At this stage define your metrics of success - how will you know you solved the problem you set out to achieve? How will you capture the many nuances and varied impacts? What is your path of least regret? This cycle can be the most difficult to work through as there is not as much excitement - the program, or policy is in place and it should just work. This is the phase that will test if your relationship building, research and planning really makes sense. Maintain the same sense of openness as when you were setting objectives.

Reporting back is important to transparency in public administration decision making. Identify plain language ways to report back to community and are in the networks, channels and contexts that meet their needs. Depending on the audience, use in-person, virtual and social media tools to the best of your ability to translate your message. Also use this time to continue to monitor success, have you really achieved what you meant to in your outset? Is the general public who has not been engaged supportive or not of these outcomes? Why? Why not? Enjoy your success at this point. Use it to celebrate, reflect and rejoice in moving through the difficult of achieving an aspiration.