The best community engagement processes build lasting relationships and blend local knowledge and ideas with technical and systems expertise
Strong, lasting relationships with communities are at the heart of place-based work. The best infomed processes blend local knowledge and ideas with technical and systems expertise.. This helps establish social licence and provide a solid foundation for the realities of implementation.
But how do you create community relationships that build trust, accountability and creativity? How do you engage people in a great process? How do you take ideas to action? Where do you start?
In our experience, which includes major government, corporate and philanthropic consultations, we’ve found it helpful to prioritise three things when designing and running great consultation processes: start with authentic relationships, bring imagination to the table, and explore innovative mechanisms for bringing community voice into decision-making.
1. Start with authentic relationships
Aunty Vickey Charles, cultural lead at TACSI and Aunty in Residence, has a mantra to answer the common question “How do we start?”: She always replies with: “Relationships, relationships, relationships.”
While we might be tempted to start community consultations with a completed plan and clear direction, when we follow the advice of Aunty Vickey and other First Nations Peoples and start by building authentic relationships, we can establish consultation processes that prioritise trust, active collaboration and partnership. In time, this ensures that existing strengths of community are recognised through the process, and mutually beneficial ways of working are established.
2. Bring imagination to the table
To create a better future, we must be able to envision it first
Imagination is not just a creative tool; it’s essential for holding change, creating connection and realising potential. In our work, we’ve found we can create collective space to translate, connect and vision community perspectives if we deliberately foster mindsets for imagination, and follow a ‘Now-Future-How’ process.
3. Explore innovative mechanisms for bringing community voice into decision-making
Imagination can also be applied to the form community engagement takes. We’ve found that the value of engagement can be enhanced for communities, and organisations through engagement approaches that change the norms of how community is engaged, for how long, and the influence they have over decision making.
Great community processes don’t have to mean town-halls or advisory board meetings. Engagement from all sides can be amplified when we draw on best practice from around the world including:
- Community Connectors: Recruiting local people to build community connections, reach out to community members at the margins and hold conversations that unearth what matters to people.
- Community Innovation Teams / Codesign Circles: Establishing small (yet diverse) groups of local people to steward innovation work on behalf of their community. These could be informed by First Nations Knowledge systems and/or Western knowledge systems.
- Community Innovation Labs: A dedicated time and space for community to come together to engage in innovation work through facilitated processes. Labs may last days, weeks, months or years.
- Community Pacts: Establishing agreements between communities and local authorities that catalyse imagination into action.
- Co-governance Models: Establishing collaborative decision-making approaches where power and responsibilities are shared between different groups—often governments and communities.
- Participatory Granting: Processes for community members to make decisions on the way funds are distributed in community.
In addition, embracing these mechanisms can create new connections, mindsets, confidence and build momentum for impact beyond project lifetimes.
Free card resource
You can explore more patterns for community engagement in Creative Patterns for Engaging People and Place – a free card set of inspirational strategies on the TACSI Learning Hub.
Real world application
By prioritising relationships, imagination, and community voice, place-based work becomes more inclusive, impactful, and sustainable.
With Fire to Flourish, we drew on all three to deliver trauma-informed, community development processes and community-led responses to disaster resilience.
Whereas, in the Welcome Experience, we’ve used it to inform Regional NSW’s design of a new service ecosystem. Currently, in the Ballarat Saturation Model, we are working with Respect Victoria to bring community-voice into the ongoing design and implementation of the model.
Examples of our work in this area
Reflecting on the diversity of our work, we’ve seen four common patterns of how collectively we’ve helped social innovation happen in place, with community.
Imagination for Community Innovation
4 week course, starting 12 June 2025 Unlock your imagination across whole communities, in community groups and for yourself.
The Welcome Experience
Designing a community-based initiative to help regional NSW communities attract and retain essential workers
Supporting South Australians to age well
We listened to thousands of older people and consolidated what we heard into three strategic priorities necessary to reinvent how we age.
Our Town
Building the capabilities of regional towns in South Australia to develop community responses to mental health.
Fire to Flourish
A bushfire resilience program with the aim to grow the power of community-led action in bushfire recovery communities
Planting the seeds for better health and wellbeing outcomes
Learn how TACSI and the South West Hospital and Health Service co-designed a roadmap to enhance community-led wellbeing in Queensland’s South West.
