Every summer at Tamarack we embark on a new learning initiative to further our understanding of a community issue. This summer we’ve opted to learn how community engagement unfolds at the community level.

We’ve decided to share our understanding of this issue with communities through a two-part tele-learning series called Dynamic Community Engagement.

Important Resources/Links	Format
Dynamic Community Engagement Matrix
Comprehensive Community Initiatives
Community Engagement
Vibrant Communities Tools
Learning & Evaluation for Poverty Reduction
The Nimble Collaboration: Fine-Tuning Your Collaboration
Vibrant Communities Saint John's

The first call introduced dynamic community engagement as convening a comprehensive multisectoral effort to realize bold community visions and described a framework to organize different phases the process.

Our second call focused on one of the phases within the framework: Creating Community Will.

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Creating Community Will

We define Community Will as how much a community has the willingness and commitment to take on an issue of concern. Community Will is important in building interest and support for the development of community plans.

Community Will can erupt spontaneously around an issue of concern for a community or it can grow over time. It’s difficult to determine just how Will emerges, but we think we can better improve the chances of generating Community Will using a methodology that involves steps such as:

There are a number of tools that communities can use in order to generate community will. Note that these tools can be used throughout the community engagement process and are not limited to this phase of the matrix. They include:

Check out our page on Models & Process of Community Engagement for other resources.

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