Community Engagement is considered to be the cornerstone of Community Development. However our efforts often fail to allow residents and stakeholders to truly have an impact on the decisions that are shaping their communities. The Detroit CDS Community Engagement Fellows will share tools and strategies to promote resident-driven decision making.
Institutions of higher learning have a long history of doing things to and for communities, but are less experienced in working with communities. This session will explore the relational challenges and power dynamics found in engaging communities as we unlearn habits of paternalistic expertise and learn power sharing, participatory skills.
In this roundtable, we aim to increase understanding of known social dimensions of community resiliency and identify research questions we could collaboratively address, through transformative university-community partnerships, to strengthen community resiliency. Research from Rust to Green’s Living with Water initiative will be used to set the stage for this discussion.
A set of 14 videos displaying each of the seven Community Capitals Framework capitals in two communities were developed for classroom use. A presentation about the development and use of these videos will serve as a springboard to discuss new methods and technologies for community development education and practice.
