In this 2-hour interactive workshop we will explore how finding, engaging and involving people needs to be approached differently depending on your own unique setting. When the Ageing Better programme set out to involve people, partners realised early on that involvement in coastal and rural areas, compared to city and urban settings called for very different ways of connecting and interacting.
We will begin by looking at a range of settings, spending some time getting to know what your community landscape looks like. Then we'll explore who you’d like to reach and what’s currently working well, sharing some of the key challenges to understand how you’d like to improve your engagement and involvement practice.
We will demonstrate how different models of engagement and involvement can be of benefit. This will include outreach approaches; tapping into formal and informal community assets; how to use comms as a tool to find and speak to the people you’d like to reach; and how to include the people ‘not looking’ for you or less likely to engage with formal services and support.
Takeaways
This workshop will help you to identify the people you really want to meet as well as how to better engage and include them. We will also provide a range of ways to show how they can help you to bring people together, including pop-up events in less formal community spaces.
You'll learn engagement and involvement methods from examples of good practice taken from Ageing Better partners and GPM stakeholders, based in both more dispersed and more connected communities.
Understand the principles of community asset mapping through an activity that will help you to identify and plot out both your formal and informal community assets, thinking about the key components for an effective engagement and involvement strategy going forward.
This will help to focus on what methods and approaches would work best for you and the people you want to reach; as well as what your priorities and next steps need to look like.
What to expect: -
- An insight into how Ageing Better and GPM have developed and embedded a range of formal and informal engagement and involvement practices in different geographical areas.
- Discussion around some of the challenges, what you need to overcome them, and how our learning and support might help you
- A space for sharing ideas and signposting you to useful resources and practical guidance
- An open environment to bring your questions and network with others working in similar communities
- Practical ideas and approaches to take away and work with back in your own setting.
After the session
The Good Practice Mentor team are also offering an opportunity to work with us on a bespoke basis where we can facilitate the co-creation of a detailed community asset map specific to your own community setting, with your team and community partners. This will enable you to identify both your useful formal and informal community assets to help you to find, engage and bring together the people you want to reach in your own setting – we will share more about this on the day.
