By Rob O’Brien

The first step towards establishing trust and building relationships through community engagement could be a polite greeting or a Post-It note away, leading engagement practitioners have been told.

In a series of talks, delegates at the Effective Community Engagement Conference in Sydney were also told about the benefits of running ideas over the dinner table before dealing directly with constituents.

Lucy Cole-Edelstein, founding member of the Australian affiliate of the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) said that simple approaches to gaining community trust were proven to be effective in building relationships through the consultation process.

“I often, particularly in the early planning stages when I’m developing documentation, take that to my dinner table and test it out on my family, because if they don’t get what I’m saying, nobody else will, it’s that simple,” she said.

“You have to gain trust and you have to behave with integrity: those things are really simple. You say it like it is, you do what you say you’re going to do and you are open and transparent. If things change, you say things change, you put up as much information as you can and you don’t hide things you don’t like.”

Ms Cole-Edelstein told delegates from local, state and Federal governments that it took a long time for trust and relationships to grow to allow people to disclose information.

“There is no doubt in my mind that engagement really improves how people understand what a project is about and what it is trying to achieve. That doesn’t mean we go into any engagement with the aim to convince people that it is right.

“The real aim is for people to understand what it is that you’re wanting to talk to them about and having the information they need to comment, and engage and respond to it.

“What is it that people need to know to tell you what they think?”

After 20 years of working with governments as an engagement expert, Ms Cole-Edelstein started up the consultancy Straight Talk to assist councils and public bodies with community engagement strategies.

Together with Warringah Council, Straight Talk has just completed Talk of the Town 2010 – a 21st-century town hall meeting that brought 500 community members together to discuss and deliberate on the future of housing in Warringah.

As a means of proactively engaging participants, Ms Cole-Edelstein said that asking residents to write their project concerns on Post-It notes at the beginning of a meeting was a good way to find out precisely what community members’ concerns were, and if they were being addressed.

It also demonstrated to people that they were being listened to, a common complaint from communities during the consultation or engagement process.

“You have to remember that you create the context: so even in a short period of time, how you meet and greet people as they walk into a meeting will really help to establish that relationship from the get-go,” she said.

“You have to be quite proactive about establishing the relationships.”

Ms Cole-Edelstein said that she considered the term ‘consultation’ a poor alternative to ‘engagement’ as there was a degree of remoteness implied.

“I like the term ‘engage’— ‘consultation’ implies that you’ll tell me what you think and I’ll consider it and move on. ‘Engage’, to me, suggests a higher level of responsibility in terms of the relationship.

“It always comes back to ‘how you would you respond: what would you expect of yourself?’

“And the same goes for your expectations about how people are going to respond – try and level with yourself about what is reasonable to expect in response – if it’s a big change expect people to be cranky, and it’s perfectly okay.

“Our job is not to convince people not to be cross, it’s about actually saying ‘There’s not a problem with you being cross – it’s only a problem if it gets in the way of how we communicate’.”

The Effective Community Engagement Conference was organised by Criterion Conferences