Community Engagement

Communities matter. They are a precious and dynamic coming together of people, potential and place. Each has a unique ‘fingerprint’. How we engage needs to be designed with purpose and care, informed by a deep knowledge and understanding of those fingerprints.
My work is informed by emergent strategy, ecosystemic thinking, human-centred design and socially engaged practice, stretching thinking and pushing against prevailing norms. At its heart is the reimagining of place as a vibrant, interconnected ecosystem of people and communities. By re-wiring ourselves more consciously into this social fabric, we can achieve more for the common good, amplifying the existing social, cultural and human capital to support community flourishing.
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Appreciative Inquiry, Arna, Norway
Appreciative Inquiry, Arna, Norway
Community Celebration, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Community Celebration, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Community Consultation, Calderdale Borough Council
Community Consultation, Calderdale Borough Council
Community Gathering, Touring Network Highlands and Islands, Isle of Eigg
Community Gathering, Touring Network Highlands and Islands, Isle of Eigg
Creative Crawley event
Creative Crawley event
Creative Crawley Stakeholder Group
Creative Crawley Stakeholder Group
Designing Public Value with Purpose, Wales
Designing Public Value with Purpose, Wales
Engaging Audiences in Death, for Dark Carnival, Isle of Eigg
Engaging Audiences in Death, for Dark Carnival, Isle of Eigg
Exploring Lived Experience, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Exploring Lived Experience, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Langa Arts Association, Cape Town, South Africa
Langa Arts Association, Cape Town, South Africa
Place Mapping, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Place Mapping, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Simen Langeland, Trine Sejrup, Socially Engaged Artists, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Simen Langeland, Trine Sejrup, Socially Engaged Artists, Taking the Initiative, Norway
Stakeholder mapping, The Point and Berry Theatres, Eastleigh
Stakeholder mapping, The Point and Berry Theatres, Eastleigh
The Point and Berry Theatres, Eastleigh
The Point and Berry Theatres, Eastleigh
Imagining Possibility, Taking the Initiative, Norway

Community Engagement

If you are an arts organisation, Local Authority or funded programme involved in community engagement, creative placemaking or urban development, I can help you as a Catalyst, Sense-Maker, Partner, Advocate, Facilitator, Programme Designer and Change Agent to:
  • Apply Design Thinking and other Human-Centred Process to programme development.
  • Develop a powerful Narrative of Intentionality to inspire stakeholders and mobilise support.
  • Facilitate the envisioning and designing of programmes for Social and Cultural impact.
  • Expand your understanding of the Social and Human Dynamics of Place at a hyperlocal level.
  • Unleash the collective wisdom, imagination and assets of the people and communities you serve through Meaningful Creative Engagement.
  • Support the development and embedding of Socially Engaged Practice.
  • Realise optimal Stakeholder Engagement throughout.
  • Facilitate Reflective Practice to support learning-on-the-go.
  • Embed the skills to Listen, Converse, Facilitate and Observe to elicit richer, deeper insights about the value and impact of your work from the participant’s perspective.
Do you want to know more about my flagship community engagement programmes?

Clients

  • The Point and Berry Theatres [Eastleigh]
  • The Place [Bedford]
  • Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse
  • Parc and Dare Theatre [Wales]
  • Australia Council for the Arts
  • Creative Victoria [Australia]
  • Creative Crawley
  • Creative Scene [Kirklees]
  • The City of Bergen [Norway]
  • Arts Council Wales
  • City of Cape Town Cultural Department [South Africa]
  • 101 Outdoor Arts
  • Belfast City Council
  • CircuitWest [Association of Regional Performing Arts Centres, Western Australia]

Wanted to learn more about my funded programmes of work?

Flagship Community Engagement Programmes

Designing Public Value with Purpose - International

Since 2012, I’ve worked with local authorities, arts councils and arts institutions internationally to help them radically re-imagine their community engagement policies, purpose and practice through my landmark programme Designing Public Value with Purpose. At its heart is a process that disrupts people’s world views, gently challenges dominant practice, asks important questions around public value, and shifts the paradigm from programme delivery to public service. This process paves the way to building more meaningful relationships, resulting in initiatives where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This has seen me work in the townships of South Africa, remote and regional Australia and across the UK.

Working with The Experience Business has been invaluable in supporting us on the journey of discovering what Civic Engagement means. Lisa makes it her business to really understand the organisation and has walked alongside us through the process of change, inspiring and challenging our professional thinking and practice which has enabled us to create foundations for significant change.

The key to success here is Lisa’s dedication to immerse herself in the ethos and culture of the organisation alongside a fun yet rigorous process to empower organisations to discover their own pathway.

Rebecca Ross-Williams
Theatre and Community Director, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse

The best conversations are the ones we have with people, not the ones where people speak at you. Our sector doesn’t communicate as well as it could with its communities because it doesn’t always clearly understand who they are talking to and why. Lisa adds tremendous value in unblocking this crucial, catalytic yet underdeveloped space.

Robin Jutzen
Department of Arts & Culture, City of Cape Town

We were very fortunate to participate in the Designing Public Value with Purpose programme. Lisa provided an open and honest space for us to bring key community stakeholders together to share, discuss, learn, think, create and connect. Lisa’s style ensured that we cut the jargon and began to understand our community through deeper connection and conversation. It has been a wonderful programme and we have really valued Lisa’s challenge, support and nurturing.

Caroline O’Neill
Strategic Arts & Culture Manager, Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council

Taking the Initiative – City of Bergen

Taking the Initiative is a bold experiment commissioned by the City of Bergen [Norway] to re-imagine how art, culture and creativity can stimulate individual and community flourishing at a hyper-local level, ignited by artists and powered by people. Informed by three international gatherings I convened called The Bergen Salons, the work is radical in that it subverts the usual structures and delivery mechanisms associated with a City bureaucracy. Designed to de-centralise power, de-instrumentalise practice and embrace emergent strategy, the programme embedded socially engaged artists in the City’s suburbs with no goal other than to support community flourishing. What emerged through these experiments was transformative for everyone involved, and the programme has inspired the City’s thinking in its bid to become European Capital of Culture 2036.

Thank you so much Lisa. It has really been a great pleasure to work with you. Everyone involved felt it was a huge learning curve. They now look at their neighbourhood with different eyes and with a more positive, openminded and emphatic mindset. This is the kind of collaboration that really makes a difference when you want to effect change both in people and at a grassroots level.

Siri Breistein
Project Leader, Audience Development, City of Bergen

With Lisa I am discovering the necessity of inclusion, the amazing work of socially engaged artists in facilitating thought and bringing the ideas of the community to the table and … the domino effect of artist’s work in opening up other ways of reaching the community. The learning proves that culture has a central role in finding solutions to societal challenges.

Vincent Odour Mrimba
Director of Cultural Delivery, The City of Bergen

Extending Reach Deepening Engagement – Arts Council Wales

This leadership development programme was commissioned by Arts Council Wales to drive significant change around community engagement and social impact. Working with 16 arts leaders across Wales, I engaged them in searching discussions around themes including power, relevance, networks and adaptive capacity. This helped them to re-vision their cultural and social value and develop new ways to understand and engage with their communities.

Being part of the Extending Reach Deepening Engagement cohort has made me think deeply about how to be relevant to our communities and deliver true value. I have been equipped with the ideas and methods to enact this change and feel excited about the future. I would recommend this programme to all arts organisations who find themselves stuck in the same routines and connecting with the same narrow demographic in their community.

Chelsey Gillard
Artistic Director, Torch Theatre

I found ERDE insightful, interesting and simply brilliant, upbeat, engaging, informative, relevant and the case studies superb … Game-changing!

Sue Davies
Milford Haven Museum

I expected Lisa would encourage our reflective learning journeys skilfully, but I didn’t anticipate the strength of passion for engagement that proved both motivational and inspirational.

Jen Angharad
CEO, Artis Community

Community Engagement Roadshow – Creative Victoria

I was invited by Creative Victoria, the state government body dedicated to championing, growing and supporting Victoria’s creative industries, to embark on a Community Engagement Roadshow delivering professional development workshops for over 30 Museums and Galleries on the subject of locally rooted, people-centred community engagement. After some initial resistance, participants began to engage with the alternative mindsets and practices presented, and through a carefully guided process, explored new ways to reframe their purpose, values and relationship with the local community. Many regarded this a gamechanger.

Working with Lisa has opened up new possibilities to really understand what our core purpose is and how to develop more productive community relationships around shared values and goals. Her calm, engaged and informed approach means she can ask the difficult questions that need asking and help us together to find the answers… and then things really took off.

Workshop Participant
National Wool Museum, Geelong, Australia

BRAW – Paul Hamlyn Foundation

A two year project, conducted in partnership with the Touring Network Highlands and Islands , designed to trial a new model of ‘slow touring’. Through it, we demonstrated how this approach had the potential to enrich the relationships between artists and rural communities during the devising stage, creating work and engagement initiatives with enhanced relevance and impact.

Artists were encouraged to develop their practice in the experimental space this project provided; each had visited their allocated community to understand better its uniqueness, be that human or otherwise … and develop deeper relationships with each place and the people who live there. BRAW invites them to respond to this in any way they feel is appropriate. There are no rules.

Jo McClean
Director, The Touring Network Highlands and Islands
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