What Should a Relational Community Engagement Strategy Include?

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Naming the Features Needed to Develop a Roadmap to Deep Connections

Note: This article is part of an ongoing series exploring relational community engagement. Read more here about what relational community engagement is (also known as relational engagement) and some examples of how organizations can practice being relationally engaged with communities.

Relational engagement refers to an approach to community involvement and interactions that prioritize genuine, ongoing relationships over transactional exchanges. This approach challenges universities, nonprofits, corporations, and governments to pivot away from service or charity models designed to “help” communities by seeing only needs towards a form of engagement that instead seeks to develop and sustain holistic relationships within a community’s ecosystem.

For example, rather than merely seeking input or consulting community members with listening sessions or a limited series of design charrettes, relational engagement involves consistent dialogue, trust-building, and shared ownership in decision-making processes. This approach ensures that community members are valued as active partners rather than passive participants or consumers of services.

Relational community engagement is about moving beyond surface-level interactions to cultivate authentic, lasting relationships built on trust, reciprocity, and shared power. Implemented and practiced correctly, relational engagement is a pathway to leveraging community members’ abilities, expertise, and desires to create the community they want to be a part of.

Relational community engagement honors community members as co-creators in shaping their future, so a relational community engagement strategy should be designed to foster and maintain authentic relationships. Centering the practice of relational engagement also reminds organizations that the expertise, knowledge, gifts, and talents of residents and neighbors have tangible value and are vital to achieving any form of lasting structural change.

To better understand relational engagement and how to develop a relational community engagement strategy, I have found it helpful to share what features a relational engagement strategy should include. In other words, which elements make a relational community engagement plan authentically and legitimately relational instead of a community engagement plan focusing on treating people like transactions? How would you know if an engagement strategy is genuinely relational?

I’ve mapped what I consider to be ten essential features of a relational engagement strategy. These are the things that I look for in an organization’s community engagement vision or strategy is authentically relational or if it is primarily transactional. Here are the ten qualities that make a relational community engagement strategy relational. Relational community engagement should:

1. Cultivate Commitments to Shared Values

2. Map Community Assets and Identifies Flows of Power

3. Prioritize Desires, Not Problems or Needs

4. Collaboratively Imagine and Design the Future

5. Foster Shared Governance and Relational Accountability

6. Preserve Transparent & Accessible Communication Pathways

7. Build Collective Capacity

8. Integrate Participatory Evaluation & Learning

9. Define (and Question) Sustainability and Legacy

10. Center Gratitude, Hope, & Joy

A bit of a disclaimer: remember that these features are what I have come to consider as “essential” to relational community engagement through my own experiences and practices over the past decade or so. Somebody else may have different characteristics or other qualities they look for. I would also caution against interpreting this as a “top 10” list in which these features are ranked hierarchically. While some of these features may be more important at different times during a relationship than others, all will be vital at one time or another. Hopefully, this resource will help those interested in developing a relational community engagement strategy take steps to achieve this goal.