Global Community Engagement Day

Here is our contribution to Global Community Engagement Day* in which people from across the World share their examples of great community engagement. There’s a hashtag #commengageday on Twitter, and an event on Facebook, both of which we’re following with great interest.

Spoiler alert: It’s all about people

At Drawnalism we have supported lots of community engagement initiatives over the years. Often these are events designed to help bring members of the community (people!) together. There can be many different reasons, such as:

• community building

• relationship strengthening

• providing feedback about a consultation or proposal

• collaborating to devise a cunning (village, town, neighbourhood) plan

• and many others!

As part of our contribution here are a few examples that we have been directly involved in. There are many more on our blog.

Here’s one very recent example:

@OneTeamGov

“We're a global community, working together to radically reform the public sector through practical action. We're driven by optimism and the desire to make things better, and united by a set of core principles.”

On 22nd January 2020, people from the OneTeamGov movement from across the world got together - both in-person locally and online globally - to share good practice and compare notes about a wide variety of issues relating to sustainability, the global climate crisis and all things green generally.

Local #OneGreenGov events took place across the world

There’s a great introductory blogpost - What does it take for government to go green? - written by Rhiannon Osborne on the Apolitical website. Lots of great insights have been shared on the #OneGreenGov hashtag on Twitter, and we love it when people talk about our stuff!

Drawnalism supported the London #OneGreenGov event with our In the Moment live drawing service.

The next couple of examples are about engagement at a more local level

Supportive Communities

A few years ago we worked with Hampshire County Council to create a video to help publicise their Supportive Communities initiative.

Engaging with a local business community 

At an even more local level, we worked with Winchester City Council on their local business engagement exercise, and supported their first ever unconference and hack event. For the unconference we provided a team of three Drawnalists, working alongside writers who published a liveblog. We wrote about that in our blog post When it is NOT business as usual.

Queuing to pitch a session at an unconference. Note: Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental ;-)

Rural communities

Our next example explores challenges and opportunities faced by small rural communities. Drawnalism worked closely with the Southern Policy Centre think tank to imagine and visualise a fictional village and a selection of inhabitants. We then captured the discussion during a workshop involving a group of people with a range of different perspectives on rural life. There’s more about that in our blog post Rural Communities — what the future might look like and the Rural Communities project website has lots more detail. 

Some of the participants at the Rural Communities workshop

That’s it for this post - the team at Drawnalism look forward to finding out about all the other great engagement initiatives shared during this year’s Global Community Engagement Day.

* Hat tip to Andrew Coulson and Becky Hirst for making Global Community Engagement Day ‘a thing’. It’s a great idea.