The Harris’ Community Empowerment Guidelines

Released: Monday 20th June 2022

Image of Bob and Roberta exhibition at the Harris in 2021

What is Community Empowerment?

Community empowerment is about working alongside others and finding ways to empower them. In other words, treating everyone as equals without judgements.

Empowerment helps us to feel in control with the freedom and confidence to make our own decisions. For the Harris, working alongside others means working with the community of Preston. This way of working contributes to everyone feeling more confident that they are helping to improve services for themselves, which in turn makes our services more inclusive and relevant for everyone’s benefit.

Why we think community empowerment is important to the Harris?

Following our founder Edmund Harris’ wishes, we are developing services committed to enriching people’s lives with heritage and arts. Within our everyday work, we want to ensure that our local community is at the centre of our work. We want to be authentic in representing the diversity that is within Preston.

We don’t want to keep making decisions for others because we think we know best. We want to listen to our community and we want them to be able to talk openly with us to affect change. We recognise that all areas of our work need to be informed by people who use and care about the Harris but also by people who aren’t currently connected with us. We want to understand the reasons why members of the community aren’t getting involved with us and try and remove some of these barriers together.

Working in democratic ways will ensure that the Harris reflects the community it is part of. We have received lots of feedback over the years from local people who say that the Harris doesn’t represent them – that it only represents a narrow section of people. It is time to change this. Our aim is for community empowerment to become part of everything we do, becoming a natural way of working.

When were the guidelines created?

During lockdown 2020. The current guidelines are the 4^th version, being used for the first time now in 2022 and will be revised annually by the community to make sure they are relevant and up to date.

How were the Harris Community Empowerment guidelines created and who by?

The Guidelines were started using up to date research and best practice from within the sector of public engagement. They were then developed in consultation with colleagues in Preston who have experience of working directly with the community. These included:

Who will use the guidelines? The guidelines will be used by staff at the Harris from all teams and across all levels. We will also encourage our volunteers and freelance staff to embrace the guidelines and will champion the guidelines with external staff and partners.

How are the guidelines going to be used?

The guidelines will be embedded into all our projects at the development stage and used as prompts during the process. Project leaders will be responsible for ensuring this happens. All Harris employment specifications and new volunteer roles will feature a community empowerment criteria relating to one or all of the guidelines. We aim to challenge ourselves in the way that we work and we would like to be more accountable to our community.

EASY READ DOCUMENT
THE HARRIS’ COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT GUIDELINES
GUIDELINES IN ACTION