Naming the Features of a Relational Community Engagement Strategy: Prioritizing Desires, Not Problems or Needs
Note: This is part of an ongoing occasional series on understanding Relational Community Engagement Strategies for organizations that are committed to authentic social impact. Please read more about Relational Community Engagement here.
Like relational community engagement’s focus on people’s assets — their gifts and resources — not just the things or services they may need, a relational practice should prioritize the desires, dreams, and aspirations of those who live within our communities. People often targeted for need-based services or equity-based interventions are rarely asked what they desire or dream about.
Relational community engagement is desire-based. This is a concept I started to adopt from the writing of Eve Tuck, who in her 2009 essay, Suspending Damage: A Letter To Communities, wrote about what she termed “damage-centered research,” a research practice often directed toward “Native communities, city communities, and other disenfranchised communities” and those who are often “disenfranchised, overresearched but underseen.” Damage-centered research, Tuck writes:
operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultaneously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless.
The antidote to damage-centered research and the harm it can create by perpetuating a dominant narrative of brokenness is, according to Tuck, a “desire-based” research perspective. Desire-based research centers the desires, aspirations, and dreams of those researched rather than focusing disproportionately on trauma, problems, deficits, or needs.
I bring up damage-centered research because, whether or not you consider them research (though I do because new knowledge is usually being made or applied in new ways), community engagement and community development are often similarly damage-centered. Nonprofits, universities, and businesses often approach their engagement with communities, especially poorer communities with a question of “what can we provide these people? Which needs need to be met? What is broken that we can help fix?”
Think about what it would feel like to have an acquaintance who, whenever you met them, only asked you about bad things that have happened to you or constantly tried to give you money or gently used items even when you didn’t ask for them. Imagine this person never asking you about your plans, hopes, or dreams, never seeking your opinion on things that directly impacted you, or never celebrating your accomplishments or milestones with you. This relationship would soon feel more like having a caseworker than a friend.
For many communities — especially poor, under-resourced, BIPOC, urban, or rural communities — this is what their relationship feels like with their community partners. Exchanges and interactions seem transactional, motivated by charity, and patronizing. Even when these organizations say they are here to be a better partner, their actions always seem to assume the community is damaged and the organization is part of the cure.
Real friendships and authentic relationships prioritize dreams, aspirations, and desires. They assume that others are capable and complex individuals needing help occasionally and can advocate for themselves and act in their best interests. Real friendships and authentic relationships support the desires of those involved and celebrate accomplishments and attempts to achieve these desires.
One way to challenge damage-centered community engagement is to commit to desire-based practices that allow space for communities to openly share their desires and visions and then use these desires and dreams to shape the group’s practices and actions.
This does not mean that we should ignore needs or problems. A desire-based approach does not withhold access to resources or insist on “bootstrap self-reliance.” Instead, a desire-based approach acknowledges that while we all have needs, we also all have ways of addressing these needs while also paying attention to what is desired and hoped for. To use the adage of teaching someone to fish, a desire-based approach will provide a fish to a hungry person. It will also teach a person to fish if they wish. But it will also ask, “Is there something else you want besides fish?” Because that’s what we would do for a friend and expect a friend to do for us.