Staying in touch
Principles
A healthy community organisation will not just take its mandate from the community - but will provide regular feedback to the community on how it is progressing.
Regular feedback in a variety of ways
Community organisations should always be looking for a number of regular and ideally low cost ways of feeding back information to the community. Good examples of this are
- producing newsletters
- using a community newspaper
- producing an annual report
- using what's on spots in local newspapers
- placing minutes and agendas on notice boards
- putting updates on community web sites.
This ensures that there is always a ready source of information available in the community about what the organisation has done- or intends to do. It also ensures that people know how to contact the organisation if they have an issue to raise, or if they want to get involved. Lastly, it helps to ensure that the wider community see the organisation as open rather than being a closed membership.
Opening up meetings
It may also sometimes be appropriate to create and publicise opportunities for the wider membership or community to attend some or parts of meetings of the committee or board. Similarly AGMs are in principle only for members but many community organisations seek to combine their formal AGM with a more public open event which becomes an opportunity to invite and involve the wider community.
Opportunities for interaction
Healthy Community Organisations will look at ways of developing interaction - feedback loops - with their community to seek suggestions on how they can improve services, projects and performance.
Additional special consultation
Healthy Community Organisations will also not just assume they have a mandate to act over large scale matters that may arise from time to time - and may seek further community views and guidance. In some cases it may be important to convene special community meetings to discuss the stance the community organisation is going to take over a specific issue e.g. windfarm development, housing development, or community land buy out where it is unclear whether the community organisation has a mandate to act on behalf of the community.