Objective: Learners communicate with people from their community in order to gain information on their community’s specific needs for community participation.
Learning outcomes: Learners are able to perform a survey using provided questions and to analyze the gathered information.
Previous knowledge: Basic knowledge on what community participation is.
Duration: Depending on the amount of people being interviewed, at least 2 hour
Materials / Conditions: Survey questions provided in the resources
Methods / Techniques: Interviewing, evaluating answers
Learning subject: Citizenship/ Module 1: community life and participation/ Expert Learning

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Introduction:
In order to foster community participations, it is crucial to make people aware of the possibilities it offers, and to find out about the view people of the community have on participation.

Instruction:
1) Perform a survey on community participation in your own community. Use the questions provided in the material to interview different people on their view regarding community participation (if you want to, you might add other questions you are interested in, too). Try to interact with a diverse group of people from different age groups and different socio- economical backgrounds.

2) Analyze your findings and prepare a table representing patterns, similarities and differences in people’s answers. Aim to be as objective as possible!

3) Assess and discuss your findings (if possible in a group) and reflect upon them in order to find out how active people already are, where there are problems named by a larger group and if there are possibilities and resources to address these.

Resources:

Questions for the survey:
1. Have you ever participated in a project aiming to improve life within your community? (If the answer is yes: What kind of project was it?)
2. Do you think that being active and changing things within your community is partly your responsibility? Why or why not?
4. What kind of issues would you get involved in if given the opportunity? (For example: protection of the environment, healthcare, etc.)
5. Which issues within your community are in need of change? Where do you see room for improvement and how could these improvements be supported?

Possible results / Results:
A table representing people’s answers to the survey questions. New ideas on active community participation in one’s own community and thus possibly motivation to get active.

Related activities:

Author:
Isabelle Muschaweck