Community Engagement Approaches

During the Brierley Hillness project we used nine different artistic mediums or participatory approaches to engage with a broad spectrum of local people – all designed to get them talking about Brierley Hill.

We had always intended to use different artistic medium to engage people; but to increase the number of people we were involving in the project we added an evening events programme hosted by Artspace, and interviewed people on the streets.

Sub Menus 

Depending on your interest, you can navigate around Community Engagement Approaches  in two ways; focusing on:

• The Approach we used (i.e. different artistic medium or activity)
• The Age Group (i.e. engaging with young people, older people, children…)

You can get an overview of both in the list below.

The Nine Approaches

• Approach One: Community Mural (engaging people from all age groups [12+])
• Approach Two: Creative Writing (engaging young people [16-25] and older people)
• Approach Three: Drama and Dance (engaging school children [primary], young people and older people)
• Approach Four: Music (engaging school children [primary and secondary])
• Approach Five: Reminiscence (engaging older people)
• Approach Six: Arts and Crafts (engaging under 5s and their parents, children aged 8-16 and older people)
•  Approach Seven: Photography (engaging adults of all ages)
• Approach Eight: Illustrated Talks and Performance Events (engaging young people and adults of all ages)
• Approach Nine: Interviewing in the Streets (engaging people of all ages)

Within each approach we tell you how we ran our workshops and the lessons we learnt from them.

Download Approaches to Community Engagement and Lessons Learnt for a slightly extended and print ready version (PDF). Download a TEXT ONLY VERSION Approaches to Community Engagement and Lessons Learnt (Word).

Why not share your approaches? Post other ideas and activities which work and get people actively engaged in talking about where they live.