Making community participation meaningful : a handbook for development and assessment

Community participation is now demanded of virtually all public sector services and programmes.

This handbook provides practitioners, community activists, regeneration managers, teachers and academics with the tools needed to ensure that community participation is effective.

The handbook is a companion volume to What works in assessing community participation? (The Policy Press, 2004), which documents the results of the road testing of two earlier frameworks for assessing community participation: Active partners: Benchmarking community participation in regeneration (Yorkshire Forward, 2000) and Auditing community participation: An assessment handbook (The Policy Press, 2000). Making community participation meaningful: outlines the key considerations necessary to ensure that community participation is effective; provides detailed sets of questions to enable stakeholders to assess the extent to which the indicators of success are being met; highlights a variety of resources that can be used by community groups to generate information and insight into the key issues; offers the real prospect of a commonly accepted assessment framework which has the authority to be adopted across sectors.