A community engagement framework is a structured model that provides guidelines for how community engagement should be executed, offering principles, best practices, and toolkits to facilitate and evaluate engagement activities. These frameworks are designed to guide organizations, institutions, and individuals in building ethical, responsible, and effective relationships with communities as structures. They often emphasize core values such as equity, collaboration, integrity, and action, and can be tailored to specific contexts like public health, education, or government initiatives.
There are several general purposes for community engagement. One is citizen participation in municipal government planning and decision making. The seminal framework this is Sherry Arnstein's Ladder Of Citizen Participation (1969) from manipulation of citizens through citizen control. At least two of the frameworks discussed below use similar "ladders" of "maturity" to characterize levels of engagement.
Community engagement is part of many education and research efforts. At Washington University, the Gephardt Institute's framework is built on six core values: Inquiry, Empathy, Collaboration, Integrity, Equity, and Action, aiming to foster informed and responsible civic engagement. Its primary methods are asset mapping, from Asset Based Community Development and logic modeling. The Oregon Education Investment Board's framework is similarly grounded in values like integrity, transparency, collaboration, equity, and self-reflection and is structured around strengths. It focuses on an organization engagement with community.
Harvard Catalyst's Community Engagement Program uses the Active Community Engagement (ACE) Continuum of degree of difficult and public impact, which is a model similar to the Arnstein's Ladder, that goes from informing to consulting to involving to collaborating to empowering. It works through community advisory boards and partnerships and nine principles and related actions to climb up the continuum:
Define purposes, goals, and populations.
Know the community.
Go to the community.
Look for collective self-determination.
Community partnerships are critical.
Respect community and culture.
Mobilize community assets and develop capacity.
Maintain flexibility.
Commit to collaboration.
The Head Start Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (PFCE) Framework serves as a strategic roadmap for program planning and continuous improvement in a child's school readiness. It has two general goals that develop over time—relationships and responsiveness—and a series of items with various components, from foundations to impact areas to family outcomes and then child outcomes, that support those goals. As the name implies, this framework approach community as structure that includes a range of partners and supports parents.
In public health, community engagement is "considered a key component of intervention development, as it can leverage community members’ knowledge, experiences, and insights to create a nuanced intervention which meets the needs, preferences, and realities of the population of interest" (Clayton, et al., 2024). Three overarching models of effective engagement are peer-led delivery, varying degrees of collaboration, empowerment philosophies, and Community-Based Participatory Research. Specifically, the Framework for Reporting Adaptations and Modifications to Evidence-based Interventions (FRAME) is used to document goals, processes, and outcomes of how researchers collect and use input from community members.
A general purpose for community engagement is to gather data from a community to support its functioning. The no longer active Sunlight Foundation focused on open data initiatives. Its Community Engagement Impact Framework is a logic model for documenting and measuring engagement impacts. The Tactical Data Engagement an iterative framework for using data for community solutions. The Community Roundtable's framework, which focuses on building online communities, identifies four stages of culture change, moving from transactional to collaborative relationships, and uses measurable behaviors to assess a community's engagement culture. The Community Roundtable also provides a Community Skills Framework that includes Engagement as a "family" of skills.
Visible Networks' "Community Engagement 101" guide focuses on structured data gathering from various stakeholders. It summarizes several different frameworks, including Arnstein's Ladder, Asset Based Community Development, and Community-Based Participatory Research, as well as the Active Community Engagement, and the Collective Impact Framework. More than others, it emphasizes methodically analyzing and engaging the range of community stakeholders and having a detailed multi-step plan. It is explicitly oriented around a proprietary online tool for these purposes.
General best practices for community engagement include clear communication, inclusivity, consistent stakeholder involvement, ongoing evaluation, and a long-term commitment to trust-building. Use of online software to support and track community engagement is also a valuable practice.