Promoting Stakeholder Interest and Involvement

Abstract

As a sustainable community development (SCD) practitioner, one of the most humbling and frustrating experiences you can have is to call a meeting of community members for a town of 55,000–60,000 population and 30–40 people show up for the meeting. We have learned through the years that in order to influence real change in a community there needs to be engagement by a critical mass of the community’s residents and 30–40 people does not come close to a critical mass. A good turnout of community would be closer to 60% of the population. Lack of participation may be a matter of community member apathy or the feeling by individual community members that one person is not going to be able to make a difference. But a necessity for success is getting a large number of the population from the target community to engage and participate in the community improvement planning and action implementation. What is the best way to accomplish that?