Services » Community Engagement
The Community Engagement Process (CEP) is a strategy for mobilizing communities around a given issue by engaging residents themselves in needs assessment and evaluation. PRA has extensive experience in mobilizing and training community residents to interview their neighbors on such issues as teen pregnancy, voting, community beautification, migration and other topics. In the process of this work, residents become involved and engaged in the issue, often staying on to actually work on the issue after the data collection is completed.
The CEP is a brief process, with field work lasting only a few days. A grassroots group of residents is assembled to decide what we need to know to address the chosen community issue. These residents help us create a survey questionnaire and they help us find a team of interviewers in the community. After training, these interviewers work in pairs to survey a carefully chosen sample of neighborhood residents.
These data are then analyzed by PRA staff and a report, including very few words, is brought back to the community for their review and comment. The interviewers, the original core group that designed the survey, and any of the interviewed residents who asked to see the data are convened to decide what to do next about the chosen issue. In the process, community residents become informed about the issue. More importantly, they become engaged.