How can you ensure that your outreach initiatives have a long-term impact on the community?

Knowing your audience is key and you should never assume what they want. I also think that involving key community stakeholders in the design and execution of your outreach initiative is also important. Who better to 'gut check' your ideas than someone from the community you want to serve? Let's even normalize hiring a community member as a part-time consultant for your initiative.

Acknowledge that you don't have the answers for the community and that you are not giving them power. Work with community members, leaders, and gatekeepers to understand the relationships and appropriate ways of interacting. Listen when the community members identify needs, questions to answer, and interventions to develop. Great outreach strategies fail when they are launched on the community instead of developed with community.

Sometimes, asking community members what resources are already present is important as well. We never want to go into a community with a deficit mindset. If we know what the community has already created for their members, our role may be different like adding resources to their cause or supporting in other ways.

I agree wholeheartedly with this statement. There are too many assumptions that are made about a community. Because people may live in the same community does not mean they share the same values, beliefs, morals or experiences. We have to be truly intentional about how we serve our community and provide resources/services.

Get to know your audience through cultural competency and cultural humility. When going into any community, it is important to become culturally competent as organizations which is the process of building your capacity to understand communities through their cultures and effectively function and outreach within the context of their cultural beliefs, behaviors, assets, and needs. Cultural humility then emphasis less on knowledge and has a greater focus on fostering self-awareness, interpersonal sensitivity, an attitude of openness, and learning from differences. One of the best ways to become culturally competent and grow in cultural humility is to hire from within the community you are trying to reach.

Building critical and meaningful relationships is a great way to help ensure impact. The other is to tie this work to your strategic plan and ensure it is measured. You also want to connect it to other community initiatives because the more integrated the better.

We are never the expert in other peoples’ lives, no matter how many degrees or formalized training we may have. It’s in the messy process of collaboration, holding space for tension and disagreements, and digging deeper into a clarified vision where partnerships grow between outside entities and existing leaders and co-ownership can form. It’s in this local leadership and co-ownership where programs begin to have a sustained life as part of the community. With vested interest and multi-directional training (whereby community leaders teach implementation organizations and outside entities train community leaders), programs can often outlast seasons of limited resources or funding which are often the downfall of many initiatives.

Develop relationship-building routines and practices of feasible and meaningful duration and frequency. Build the routines and practices around the schedules and cycles of the different people you want to engage.

Relationship building is key because it helps build trust. Trust is critical when you are trying to implement change. Oftentimes people/organizations parachute in and leave, but true relationships are deepened overtime. Outside of the work, we must seek opportunities that can include social, recreational and faith gatherings that allow us to be active with the communities we serve.

Utilize trusted gatekeepers. Trusted gatekeepers can be community members or organizations that have already built trust in the communities. Trusted gatekeepers can become champions for the partnership or new initiative being launched. Caution: When building new relationships be transparent and do not over-promise what you can not deliver. If you are time bound, or bound to a limited budget let the community know these things up front. There will be mutual respect created when there is transparency.

When you identify goals, objectives, and actions for your initiative, make sure that they align with the goals of your organization AND the needs of the targeted population. This builds buy-in of the initiative at all levels. (Remember to include the population you will be serving in the design of the initiative!) Make sure that the goals and objectives are measurable and directly make an impact on the population served. The actions should feed into the goals and objectives. When identifying these three elements, make sure to identify any foreseeable challenges and opportunities. Use actions (programming and services) to mitigate challenges and seize opportunities. Don't be afraid of challenges...use them to develop better solutions!

Aligning your goals also speaks to sustainability; with greater integration with existing initiatives and programs you develop an interdependent portfolio of offerings that may provide multifaceted solutions to community problems/issues that have a multivariate origins.

I have discovered that goals which do not involve the community being served often do not lead to lasting impact. When organizations first hear from the community members regarding the needs that exist and outcomes that are desired, they are able to establish realistic goals that are owned by all.

What you measure matters. The goal-setting phase of a community outreach initiative directly ties into monitoring and evaluation metrics and determining success of the project or program. If process matters to you as much as the outcomes of the project, include process-oriented goals. For example, do you care that the process is community-led? If so, be concrete in defining what a community-led process looks like (goal) such as local leaders serving on an advisory board during the duration of the project, community members serving as paid consultants, researchers, or implementation administrators. Integrity to the process as well as the final delivery of services should be tied into the goals of the program from the onset.

I actually disagree somewhat, though I think it is a great idea to include those you are serving and having community input into solutions to address community problems, however, this should be issue specific as otherwise it would be akin to that feeling you get when your doctor gives you treatment options - you are relying on the expertise to help you make the decision and that expertise should advise and provide guidance, but, not inordinately place the burden on the community members alone.

I absolutely agree with this. Often times, outreach initiatives are not substantiated by the community because they lack a community voice. It is important that we meet the community where they are at. For example, I am leading the planning of a community outreach event in the Bronx NY with the hopes to engage adult men in conversation about health. At first glance, this event may not seem appealing. But we have worked with partners to bring free shape ups to the event space and create a shop talk vibe. We hope to add health and wellness to conversations in the barbershops and this is a first step!

Process improvement is extremely important in any initiative. Continual evaluation, through surveys, feedback, interviews, focus groups, etc., should be utilized to provide ongoing improvements that will further impact success. Don't be afraid of change; embrace it as an opportunity to strength the initiative. This again goes back to listening to the community who you are serving. If an objective was to provide x for the community, but their feedback shows that they desire and would benefit more from y, make the change. You'll most likely find that adapting to that feedback will lead to you making a larger impact than you had initially expected.

An effective community-led outreach initiative should incorporate an asset-mapping of the community during the planning and program design phases. This includes identifying all assets or forms of capital available in a community: social, transportation, cultural, religious, linguistic, financial, institutional. As you monitor the implementation of the program, inevitably you will come across misalignments between the goals and realities of the program. These adaptations may lead you to revise your goals and theory of change based on early findings. It’s in these stages that reliance on community’s assets as well as your own organizational assets can help pivot and adapt to unexpected circumstances or outputs.

Know your audience! From my experience, it’s very important to know your audience and know the people you’re trying to impact. Most people have heard it before or seen it before and don’t need another person regurgitating the same message. They want someone with fresh perspectives and ideas that will help and make everlasting change within their community and their lives. You may not share the same culture or beliefs however, to get your message across, you will need to find the middle ground between your goals, values and aspirations to achieve and succeed in connecting and achieving optimal outcomes. And be leader and speak from the heart.

Make sure to not wait until the end of an initiative to start the evaluation. An evaluation is most effective when it is utilized as a continual process that starts as you plan the initiative and is continued throughout the entire initiative. Imagine taking a class where the instructor never gives you a grade, never comments on your work or tests, and never gives you any indication of how well you are doing. If your final grade is a culmination of everything you have learned throughout the semester, are you truly prepared for the final exam if you don't know if what you learned was correct? The more often you evaluate the impact of the actions (services and programming), the more you can adapt the initiative for success.

What I found useful is for community initiatives in their evaluation of their impact systems, would benefit from a rigorous accounting through a comprehensive evaluation process that challenges their initiatives results; by placing the review under as comprehensive as possible context that affords reviewers an opportunity review the initiative under more holistic circumstances versus a snapshot that fails to take into consideration lateral effects or unintended consequences. As an example, initiatives such as AmeriCorps programs can be worthwhile, but, in a market/community where employment is in desperate need, these initiatives and their funds would be better deployed in providing employment opportunities.

During the evaluation phase of a program, revisit the initial monitoring and evaluation plan and your clearly defined theory of change which should have outlined quantitative and qualitative evaluation tools to measure the program’s success based on those goals, including intended and unintended impact. Consider similar data collection and evaluation strategies that you used at the beginning. The extent to which you are able to be comprehensively inclusive in your evaluation is often determined by your organization’s evaluation budget. Did it achieve what the community and your organization hoped it would? What could be done differently to enhance the program? Incorporate these learnings into a new and improved iteration of your program.

We often talk about co-design, but I prefer to use the term co-project management. Community needs to be involved in the design, development/build, implementation and evaluation. It is really important to have everyone in the room at the same time so that we can come up with mutual solutions. In my experience having engineers in the same room as people with disabilities means that we can come up with mutual solutions

Impact can be measured through benchmarks. If proper goals have been established from the beginning then measuring impact at the end should be smooth.

Many of these aspects for community building and collaboration hinge on trust. Does the community trust you? Do they trust what you are saying to them is true, and do they trust your judgement to take action? Do they trust that you will follow through? Without this component, built through these important steps, then true community collaboration cannot take place.

Employing people from community to undertake the engagement is a huge benefit. In my role, as a person with a disability in a senior role, I am able to cross between communities and am able to demonstrate that there is an appreciation of the skills of all people with disabilities. I am trusted because I know my community and they know me.

Working with community outreach means you are in the middle between the community and donors, and sometimes the two requirements are not aligning. It is very important to be able to intermediate between the two parties, try to make sure that the community feel that their inputs are being considered. However, never give false promises, you should always be truthful about your abilities and capacity.

People join your community in many cases so that they can benefit from your knowledge or research and have access to timely info they need. Stay relevant and connect to what your community members need, then provide it!

Include community in all aspects of the initiative, including process, oversight and outcomes, with paid positions. Relationships with community must be reciprocal. Ask yourself what is community getting in return? Have you asked community what is expected within that relationship of you? Are you ensuring a caring and non harmful engagement?