The PLAYbook of Community Engagement

Source: Training Development Resources/Community Engagement — Nexus Community Engagement Institute, "PLAYbook of Community Engagement" (2021)

A workbook-style, five-senses introduction to community engagement practice, built originally to replace the tactile/in-person parts of a training series that had to move to Zoom. Opens with a land acknowledgment (Dakota and Anishinaabe land, and the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants) framed explicitly as a commitment to disrupt the ongoing effects of colonization and slavery, not a pro-forma statement — modeling one way to handle acknowledgments with substance rather than as decoration.

Community engagement spectrum (useful shorthand for evaluating whether an activity is real engagement or just outreach): one-way information-sharing ("outreach") sits at one end; "engagement" — reciprocal, sustained, transformational relationships over time — sits at the other. The workbook frames community engagement as necessarily reciprocal and transformative, not a service delivered to a community.

Tema Okun's characteristics of white supremacy culture (referenced via the "Divorcing White Supremacy Culture" framework) are included with antidotes, worth having on hand for staff/org-culture conversations: perfectionism, defensiveness, sense of urgency, and power hoarding are named specifically, each paired with a suggested antidote and reflection questions ("which of these do you notice you ascribe to? What feelings does that invoke? What are your antidotes?").

Includes reflection prompts throughout (What does community mean to you? How fertile or toxic is the soil in your community? What seeds are you planting for the future?) designed for group discussion or personal journaling — reusable as discussion-starter material for group coaching sessions.