Community Engagement
Community Engagement
Within ILAS, community engagement is pursued as a valuable means of enhancing life-course experiences and outcomes for individuals and societies. It is also an essential mechanism to ensure the relevance of our work to people’s lives, across the six focus areas.
The community engagement work strand has been developed to allow different forms of knowledge and expertise to emerge and to be valued – whether this stems from particular population sub groups, policy makers, practitioners or local community actors. In recognition of the interdependency between ILAS and our external stakeholder communities, we engage in active efforts to both bring these communities into the Institute and to bring the Institute’s work into these communities. This helps to deliver and enhance mutual benefits.
Examples of different forms of community engagement across ILAS include community partnerships, stakeholder consultative committees, peer-research training, community-based and participatory research programmes, and volunteer initiatives It also includes providing state-of-the-art knowledge and policy analysis for advocacy and decision making.
Furthermore, a core objective of our community engagement work strand is to support external stakeholders in implementing positive change and to adjust to reform processes. This includes providing state-of-the-art knowledge and policy analysis for advocacy and decision making. It also includes supporting organisations and groups in gathering evidence on local issues and interventions.
With a focus on working in close and meaningful collaboration with all stakeholders, some of the ILAS collaborators include:
