LEAP and the National Standards for Community Engagement
The National Standards for Community Engagement are a set of measurable performance statements describing best practice. This case study illustrates the application of the LEAP cycle and principles in the development of the standards and provides an example of how LEAP can applied to policy influence and programme development. The Scottish Centre for Community Development, who were responsible for both the Standards and LEAP, identified the need for the standards from the feedback they received while delivering Working Together: Learning Together (WILT). The WILT programme had 750 participants, who were a mix of staff from Social Inclusion Partnerships (SIP), staff from agencies involved with the SIPs and community representatives. The experiences of these participants highlighted the general dissatisfaction with community engagement. This dissatisfaction was shared by outside agencies who reflected the same concerns that the quality of community engagement needed to be improved in order to increase the representation of community interests. The LEAP approach/framework was then used to support the process of identifying what good community engagement would look like and the steps that would be necessary to achieve this. A draft set of standards for community engagement were tested out in six sites. The feedback from these pilot’s experiences in using the standards influenced the final version and demonstrated that they have the capacity to assist in the improvement of practice. A support programme has implemented which offers specific events and additional support materials and this is being informed by the continuous feed in of monitoring information enabling evaluation against the outcomes that have been set for the programme.
The full length version of this case study can be downloaded.
