Community Engagement, Skills and Employability
Executive Summary
Community engagement is an activity that encourages the well-being of the community. The place where we live have many places and people who needs help and support from the sectors of the community who are able to improve their life. Students belong from those sectors and can learn a lot from these community engagements. ACU community engagement and ACU careers are platform where student takes part to help the community and learn new skills that can increase their chances of bright future. ACU arranges community engagement for their students to promote equal dignity for all the humans, respects, justice, and equity. The University Strategic Plan 2009 - 2019 supports the development of student awareness of social responsibility to the broader community. ACU community engagement and ACU careers recognizes the essential and even moralizing value and human rights. ACU community engagement tries to understand the people. Accurate understanding means hearing and showing with mind and with the intellect of someone to get to a difficult intellectual and emotional understanding of the opinions, hopes, desires, needs, and dispositions of the people. These activities help in improving and understanding, building positive connections, acting with humility, and affirming human dignity community engagement operates to rise in solidarity by these several in need, and to promote the general welfare of the communities.
Community Engagement Theory
Community engagement involves various people to various things and multiple people utilize the expression to represent quite varied methods. The word is applied, usually mutually, including others like ‘participation’ and ‘involvement’, and to define a variety of actions. Community engagement is defined merely as meaning the individuals who live in the same region with town re-development. This is easy to maintain yet hard to achieve: a variety of activities and methods will accomplish progress and on a sliding range of engagement that extends from providing information to people and demanding for their opinions, to providing communities a primary say in arrangements and some states authority over the prospective community ("Community work and social learning theory", 1981).
There is a wide-ranging variety of task examining the theory of proper community engagement that carries on functional experience and analysis throughout the world. Here this essay includes few of the great identified and effective theories for designing community engagement. Two circumstances will require contemplating when explaining the way to community engagement: how profound and how comprehensive direction you plan to continue. The decisions that execute these two pursers will be defined with what will assist you in managing the method and exercises that you practice and what it is you are attempting to perform (Matthew, 2016). Assuming the variety of potential aspects will be important as that will encourage to shape how you interact with regional individuals and what can be accomplished.
There are five pillars of the community engagement which we can get accomplished with the help of effective community engagement programs (King & Cruickshank, 2010), these are mentioned below:
1. Building Connections: With effective community engagement programs, the most important and valuable benefit we got is that we can build new and helpful connections. Connections are meeting with successful and strong people who can help you and guide you with your future development. Building connections are very important in order to be successful in this global world wherein each step you need guidance and help of the senior and experienced individuals.
2. Acting with Humility: Another thing that people can achieve by attending effective and helpful community engagement programs is Acting and humility. People got to know that success can only be earned not bestowed. Community engagement encourages people to act well in order to make good relationships that will directly enhance their behavior in a good way and affect their life and society positively.
3. Developing Understanding: Effective and helpful community engagement programs help people to increase their understanding abilities. These programs can change people by giving them space where they have to mostly listen to the concepts, ideas, and options of other people. This activity helps people to develop the ability of understanding things in the first place which make it easy to implement these concepts and ideas.
4. Affirming Dignity: Another thing that people can achieve by attending effective and helpful community engagement programs is dignity. People can affirm their dignity and become a source of dignity for other members of the community. These events and connections give people a level of satisfaction and a place to learn new things which increase their dignity in the society they are living in.
5. Pursuing Justice: Effective and helpful community engagement programs help people to pursue justice in the society they are living in. The voice of a group of people is better than the voice of a single person regarding any issue or idea. These community engagement programs also provide a platform to raise a voice on any social injustice or inequality around them. This will help people to promote justice in many aspects.
Community Engagement Types and Approaches
Community engagement brings a diversity of styles. It is proposed that there existed three general types of community engagement, but now one more is observed as a fourth type of community engagement. These four types are mentioned below (Egeland, Harmer & Stoddard, 2011):