Community Interests And Priorities

As we’ve seen above, creating a meaningful civic engagement program starts with finding out what the youth in your community are interested in, how they would like their community to evolve, and what their priorities are for the future.

The techniques below can be used to surface the interests of the youth in your community.

Civic Imagination: A Technique for Finding and Solving Community Issues

(The following section was adapted and inspired from a book called Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Action Handbook, written by Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Sangita Shresthova, published in 2021.)

Civic imagination is an excellent approach for creating a foundation for civic engagement and identifying issues youth care about. Civic Imagination is the process of imagining, together as a community, the best that our community can be in different aspects, and then taking each of those dreams and seeing how we can translate them into tangible, prolonged, action.

Learn more about civic imagination and some of the practical steps to utilize it in our Civic Imagination Summary.

Research Based Methods

Creative and fun researched-based methods are also useful for surfacing community interests.

Investigators

Engaging youth as community investigators involves working with a small group of youth to research an issue within the community and make suggestions for how to improve it. It could include:

Identify an issue in the community to investigate
Conduct research around the root causes of this issue. This can be done by:

Talking to community members who are either affected by the issue, an expert on the issue, or have a valuable perspective to offer on the issue

Researching in the library using physical and internet resources. This can include finding similar situations in other parts of the country (or world!)

Develop ideas for improving the situation. Use a whiteboard and sticky notes to cluster ideas, or create “what if” simulations to generate the ideas.
Create some sort of final product to showcase what was learned and the suggestions. This can be in any media imaginable: a short video, a written piece, a visual poster. The sky’s the limit!

This exercise will help the youth not only articulate the issue in a better way, but also help the rest of the community become familiar with an issue its youth care about. From there, you can start involving other youth and community members in a civic engagement program focused on actions to address the issue.

Photovoice

Another fun and powerful activity is photovoice, a methodology from participatory action research (PAR). Photography can be an incredible visualization tool to discover and uncover civic engagement opportunities in your local area. We used this for the scavenger hunt activity in 1. This time let’s have the youth take the pictures. How does it work?

Have youth take their cameras (probably phones!) into the community and take pictures of things they care about, can be improved, or other things that they believe are meaningful.
After the youth are done, reconvene the group and have them share their photos and talk about what the pictures represent to them. Some useful prompts:

What issues come up the most?
Are there any surprises?
What issues capture the most interest of the youth?
What issues might capture the interest of other community members?

Technology tip: Have the youth upload their photos to a shared space (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive).

Author Events/Book Clubs as Civic Engagement Opportunity

Author events or book clubs exist in most libraries, and offer a wonderful opportunity to spark community interest in a particular issue and create a prolonged civic engagement program.

Rural/Small library tip: Take advantage of local talent (every community has writers!) or select a book that the librarian of someone in the community can lead a discussion about. You don’t need big name authors to have a successful event.

Check out the Leading Conversations in Small and Rural Libraries: Facilitation Guide. American Library Association. This guide is particularly helpful for providing a compassionate and inclusive space for conversation on difficult topics

Consider partnering with a school to identify books that are used in the classroom.
What could you do to spice up the event to make it more attractive for youth? Even serious topics can be made engaging. Perhaps have a debate coach (from the school?) organize a debate on the topic
Plan a follow-up activity (like the examples above) to generate more concrete ideas for doing something in your community.

Civic Engagement in Action

Tools for Designing Civic Engagement Services