Social Engagement
About this Aspect
Social Engagement is a crucial aspect of any community energy endeavour. A project that seeks to create social value for a community in any given context needs to ensure that the targeted community is being heard, that their challenges and needs are recognized and that the project team is willing to engage with the community to achieve common goals.
With this in mind, this aspect explores the topic of social engagement at two levels:
- The engagement and creation of a Community Energy Project’s core team.
- The engagement of the wider community.
Forming a strong team to take on the challenge of leading the creation of an Energy Community and engaging future members and supporters of your community can be challenging. This aspect introduces some recommendations that can be taken into consideration during this process. You can explore key steps of building a strong, diverse team, and learn practical strategies for allocating roles and responsibilities within the group. Furthermore, you can find resources for creating effective communication plans and fostering collaboration through team-building activities. Lastly, you’ll also gain insights on how to engage with the wider community, build trust, and ensure the long-term sustainability of your group through reflection and adaptation.
Creating a Team
A crucial first step when creating a team is to ensure that you build a clear and common vision, a cohesive philosophy and group identity. In a team composition, the essence is the people, and qualities such as adaptability, flexibility and communication are valuable to ensure that your team is on a pathway to achieving your common goal.
Questions to think about and discuss:
- What is the mission and the objectives of the team?
- What are the goals that you aim to achieve by creating this team?
- Who is the target audience and who will benefit from your activities or be interested in your community?
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Setting up the team:
- Build your team: Consider what are the expectations and the roles of each member of the team and how to gather individuals that are a group that is interested in joining the team. That could be done through in-person conversations or with an open online call.
- Create an operational framework: Define the group structure, roles and responsibilities within the team along with the decision-making process you will follow.
- Create the team guidelines: To achieve clarity and consistency, it can be useful to develop a document that outlines the team’s goals, mission, values, and operational framework.
- Agree on a Communication Plan/ team meetings: Once the group is set, it’s important to discuss the communication style, meeting frequency, and the activities that will take place.
- Plan for a time and space for check-ins and reflection: Make efforts to collectively evaluate, assess and adapt based on feedback and information from the team’s members This is a crucial and helpful step to ensure the sustainability of your group’s development and aligned objectives.
Team Roles
To ensure the effective operation of your project, it is important to work with your team to clearly define each individual’s roles and responsibilities. While you are working together to achieve your common goals, tasks should be assigned within the team and everyone should understand their responsibilities. To prevent frustration and ensure an effective organisation, it is crucial to establish defined protocols. The allocation of roles amongst the members could be based on each of their availability, skills and knowledge.
Some of the main areas to cover are project management, financing, administration /coordination, and communication but those can vary according to your own needs based on the scope of your initiative and planned actions. Another element of effective teams is the establishment of explicit team norms that can aim to set clear expectations of how the team should govern itself, manage meetings, communicate, make decisions and set commitments. Something to take into consideration is the clear communication of the expectations of the team. These norms should allow the team to have open discussions about how things are going and should be updated or revised on a needs basis to improve working relationships. Usually, people have the tendency to join initiatives with great enthusiasm and a strong desire to participate, but as life and other commitments arise, capacities, availability and individual priorities can change and availabilities may not always align with your original plans. Hence, it’s important to communicate, set clear expectations, organise, and coordinate team members’ efforts as a team.
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Engaging the community
Energy communities coexist and are nurtured by the local community. Good relationships and open communication are beneficial for both sides as they are crucial in building trust with the community and in creating meaningful relationships that can help you support each other. Hence, reaching out and engaging with the community is an essential part and should be done in various ways and through different channels, based on the specific context. You can reach out and engage with the wider community through local media, social media, as well as local events, which can foster community involvement and offer opportunities for the locals to get involved. Through Media or person-to-person communication, depending on the circumstances, projects and updates about the progress of ongoing projects can be communicated. It’s also crucial to offer the space for open back-and-forth communication and citizen involvement that can lead to future actions, further support from the community and most importantly contribute to fostering a collective sense of ownership.
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A portuguese example
In the case of C-COOP, community engagement was emphasised as a crucial component in the process of organising Culatra into a renewable energy community and involving locals in the decision-making processes. In collaboration with the Culatra Island Residents Association (AMIC), the University of Algarve, the organisation MakeItBetter, and local and national government they launched a Participatory Diagnosis process during which, the island stakeholders co-decided on a new governance system for the participatory exploration of transition paths and appropriate solutions, taking into account the specificities of the island context.
Community Building Activities
Below you can find some team-building activities that will help strengthen your team by building a collaborative spirit and improving collaboration skills while having fun.
- Energy Mapping activity: divide into groups and think about the energy consumption map of your community. Could you brainstorm some solutions for reducing energy usage or increasing renewable energy? With this activity, you can encourage members to think creatively and collaboratively about sustainability.
- Human Knot: In this activity, everyone from the group stands in a circle and extends their right hand into the center to grab a random person’s hand. Then, they all extend their left hand to grab another random person’s hand. The group must untangle themselves without letting go of others’ hands. It’s a fun and nice way to break down barriers while working as a team.
- Two Truths and a Lie: This icebreaker helps team members get to know each other better. Each person shares two facts and one made-up fact about themselves, and the rest of the group tries to guess which statement is a lie. It’s a great way to spark conversation and build trust.
- Blindfold Obstacle Course: Pair up for this trust-building exercise. One person wears a blindfold while their partner guides them through a simple obstacle course using only verbal directions. It’s all about learning to communicate clearly and trust each other.
- The escape room challenge: Creating an escape room, where the members have to solve some puzzles to get out of the challenge, could enhance collaboration and critical thinking under pressure.
- The role reversal activity: The group members have to swap roles, with ones that they are unfamiliar with and don’t usually work with. This could be helpful, to step into other members’ shoes and see things from a different perspective, and enhance empathy.
Team building and community empowerment (for engagement) activities can help groups of people to share ideas and come closer together. An approach we like to deploy is tasking groups of people to work together for a common practical goal like building a small renewable energy powered device.