The multifaceted nature of community empowerment

I spent a really interesting day yesterday exploring the role of voluntary sector networks in supporting community empowerment. It was a research workshop feeding into the development of a new course for infrastructure organisations (such as CVSs, rural community councils and specialist networks of volutnary organisations) to help them to empower community groups. Changes, who facilitated the day, are now developing a new training course which we (South West Forum) are running on 23-24th June in Taunton.

We talked about how infrastructure organisations need to be effective at influencing local authorities to improve community engagement, and how they also have to be good at listening to their own members so that they can represent them accurately, particularly the most marginalised groups. For me there are essentially three main roles for infrastructure organisations in terms of voice and influence:

• influence public bodies to improve the relationship between voluntary and community groups and the public sector
• listen to voluntary and community groups and be open to influence from them
• help voluntary and community groups to influence public authorities themselves.

I think we tend to focus a lot on the first and the third of these roles, but sometimes we don't spend enough time on the middle one, making sure that we are really involving the very diverse voluntary and community groups in our area or membership. That said we also talked about how to do all this in the current context when we are all facing funding cuts, sometimes very severe, so it means we have less time and resources available. Hopefully we will be able to provide a framework which puts all this together so that organisations can improve what they do around community empowerment without needing lots more staff, volunteers and money to do it.

By the end of the day we were all pretty tired, having had a lot of brain-exercise! But I don't think I was alone in feeling energised and inspired too. Without wanting to be too mushy, it was a real priviledge to be in a room with so many people really experienced at the challenges and complexities of proper, effective community empowerment.

It also fired me up to use the Voice and Echo tools that the day was based around. I already know a bit about Voice, which is a tool to help community groups become more influential, but it really made me want to learn more about Echo, which helps public bodies be more open to influence. If there's enough interest I'd like to organise a training on Echo too.

How you can get involved:

• find out more about Voice and Echo
• attend the two-day Voice and Echo for Infrastructure organisations training on 23-24 June in Taunton
• attend a two-day Voice Facilitator Training on 28-29 June in Sheffield organised by CDX
• approach your local authority about using the Echo tool to improve community engagment (in the South West Berkeley Wilde and Wiltshire Infrastructure Consortium may be able to offer this training)
• read a blog from another of the workshop's participants, Lorna Prescott from Dosti in Dudley, on Changes Voice and Echo online network 

If you have any thoughts, comments or queries or are interested in doing more with Voice and Echo in the South West, comment below or contact me (01752 588994 or isabel@southwestforum.org.uk or talk to me on twitter at @swfisabel)