One Size Doesn't Fit All

Tips for impactful civic engagement—from starting small to engaging the board

Impactful civic engagement efforts need not be large-scale, complex initiatives, Linda Nguyen, director of civic engagement for the Alliance for Children and Families, says. It’s okay, and even encouraged, to start small.

Based on their experience with civic engagement, Nguyen and Alliance members La Casa de Esperanza, Waukesha, Wis.; Family Services of Montgomery County, Eagleville, Pa.; and Impact Northwest (Impact NW), Portland, Ore., offer several tips.

• Start small—you don’t need to participate in a large-scale or complex initiative to have an impact.
  
  Sarah Hawks, director of advocacy and public policy at La Casa, leads La Casa’s Advocacy and Public Policy Initiative. She says, “Don’t be intimidated or feel like you have to have this big official program. There are little things that you can do: be present at government meetings or invite elected officials to your agency to talk with residents. It’s those small steps that can lead to bigger things.”
  
  These types of activities build relationships in the community that may prove beneficial down the road, Nguyen explains. Plus, they establish the organization as a player that’s invested in the community it serves.
  
  One of La Casa’s first civic engagement activities involved voter registration and mobilization, Hawks says. It was a way for La Casa to start small, as well as continue relationship building.
  
  “It gave us an opportunity to be out in the community,” Hawks says. “We conducted outreach at 10 or so different locations, and it was a way to become connected with voters. We heard the issues that they care about, and that helps us know what’s important to people. It brings us closer to the community.”
   
• Engage the board early on, and continue to involve them throughout the initiative.

Make sure you have buy-in from the board, Larry Fiebert, associate executive director at Family Services, says. When he and other senior leaders at Family Services began working on a civic engagement project involving area Korean and Asian Indian communities, he involved the board early on.

“When this started, we made a presentation to the board of directors to explain what we were doing and why,” he says. When phase one of the project was completed, board members received a copy of the final report. Board members have also been invited to community forums that have taken place as part of the project.

“It has enabled them to find out more about what the agency is doing,” Fiebert says. “But more importantly, they’ve been able to witness how the community has responded to our efforts. They see the impact of our work.”

• Be flexible—a civic engagement initiative is about the community, not about you.

Knowing your community will help you develop a plan for your organization’s civic engagement activities, Fiebert says. But when it’s put into action, be prepared for things to not always go as planned.

Renata Wilson, director of housing and safety net services at Impact NW, offers an example from her organization’s experience with a civic engagement project involving Eastern European residents. As part of the plans laid out by Impact NW, leaders had hoped to form a formal committee of Eastern European residents who would steer the project, largely on their own.

“We ran into the problem that people don’t necessarily want to formalize it,” Wilson says. “Nobody has a problem coming to the meetings, and we have lots of people who are involved in event planning and volunteering. Getting people involved is never a problem, but when it comes down to really formalizing it into a core group, the interest is just not there at this point.”

Scott Shlaes, director of development at Impact NW, adds, “These families are coming from very different cultures, and they’ve also experienced very different forms of government. A lot of these folks grew up under totalitarian regimes or communist regimes, so having scheduled meetings and lots of big group gatherings is very consistent with that old mentality and oppressive culture they grew up in. We had to have a more freeform approach.”

• Involve all staff, not just those directly involved in the initiative.

While La Casa’s Advocacy and Public Policy Initiative is, at its root, designed to lift the authentic voices of its clients and other community residents, the project also engages La Casa staff across the organization.

“We’re building a group of staff advocates,” Hawks explains. Four staff members sit on La Casa’s Ad Hoc Public Policy Committee, which develops the strategic advocacy plan.

Additionally, most months the organization holds a brown bag lunch session for staff. At least 20 staff members regularly participate. Through presentations and discussions, the sessions expose staff to civic engagement principles. “I think that helps to frame what a nonprofit can be doing in terms of advocacy,” Hawks says.

Staff members also are made aware of the availability of La Casa’s position statements on a variety of issues, including education and immigration.

“As our staff members are out in the community serving on different committees or meeting with our partners on different initiatives, sometimes questions come up about how La Casa feels about certain issues,” Hawks says. “Staff can refer them to our position statements on our website, which provides a consistent message on how we feel about different issues affecting the community.”

• Know that results won’t appear overnight.

Don’t get discouraged if results don’t appear immediately after a major milestone, such as the publishing of a report or hosting of an event, Nguyen says. Like any new organizational initiative, it can take time for clients and community stakeholders to catch on.

Hawks says that it has taken a few years for both elected officials and clients to view La Casa as a source of information for Latino and low-income issues. The wait was worth it, however, as recognition seems to be picking up steam.

“We’ve built relationships with our elected officials and we continue building,” Hawks says. “We’ve had local officials contact us about housing-related issues. As a result of our participation in an advocacy day in D.C., we’ve also been contacted by our senator’s office about immigration.”

She adds, “It’s starting to raise the profile of our work a little bit. I think a lot of our elected officials are starting to learn that we’re paying attention to these issues, we care, and we’re getting ready and we’re ready to take action.”

When civic engagement efforts are targeted to specific immigrant or minority populations, Alliance members La Casa, Family Services, and Impact NW offer additional tips for success.

• Be aware of the unique challenges experienced by different cultures.

Staff from each agency say that the success of their efforts have benefited from a commitment to, whenever possible, communicating with immigrant communities in the language residents are most familiar with—which often isn’t English.

At the community forums which are part of Family Services’ work, a translator is on hand so that audience members may ask questions in their native tongue and receive information in a way they will best understand.

Part of Impact NW’s civic engagement initiative with Eastern Europeans involves a web component, which enables participants to share information and network. That forum is set up in Czech and Russian.

Hawks of La Casa adds, “One of the unique challenges is always the immigrant experience. There’s sometimes a language barrier, and cultural views are different, including how we view our elected officials. At La Casa, we’re always very aware of what the immigrant community faces in terms of becoming civically engaged, and we try to overcome those barriers as much as we can.”

• Disaggregate cultures.

“At any of our events, there could be anywhere between 18 to 22 different languages and cultures,” Wilson says. “There is no commonality.”

Nguyen says, “The lesson here is that even within an immigrant community there are often unique cultures. Cultural competency is imperative, and organizations must resist the temptation to naively group cultures together for the sake of simplicity.”

Family Services was guilty of this in the past, Fiebert says. “Even among our highly trained, sophisticated staff, Asians were usually all lumped together, which didn’t provide any real helpful data. Koreans are different than Japanese and Chinese and Filipinos—and their needs are different. The range of problems is different. As a result of aggregating this data, the needs of these immigrant groups have been pushed under the carpet in some ways.”

The problem with lumping cultures together, Fiebert says, is that it masks problems. For example, if you consider Asians as one group, you may find low crime rates, high school success rates, relatively high family income, and a low divorce rate.

“But one group may have high alcoholism rates and high smoking rates or high rates of not having health insurance,” Fiebert says. “And another group may not have those problems but have high hepatitis rates or other types of problems. By lumping them all together it masks problems.”