I need some assistance with understanding the development of community engagement, the types of community engagement, the skills required and how to develop personal and professional abilities from community engagement that support employability

Question Outline;

1. Discussion of community engagement theory with reference to the pillars of community engagement

1. Description of community engagement types and approaches including advocacy, community-based research, direct community engagement and project-based community engagement

1. Overview of the skills and challenges of workers and volunteers in community engaged services

1. Benefits to personal and professional self-development and employability 

Community Engagement - the process of collaboratively working with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of those people.

Its main purpose is a way of ensuring that the community members have access to valued social settings and activities, feel that they are able to contribute meaningfully to those activities, and develop functional capabilities that enable them to participate fully.

4 Pillars

Build Capacity - variety of approach are needed to support community partners ho are interested in developing skills and competencies for principled, sustainable, and reciprocal partnerships.

Reduce Barriers - to improve access to both physical and virtual spaces that can help partners use these pathways to navigate community.

Communication - this focus on improving awareness of the work of community-engaged individuals, research and education outcomes, available resources, and upcoming opportunities and events.

Action oriented Dialogue - tying funding opportunities to specific topics can encourage ideas to move towards projects, while sharing outcomes of conversations or the conversations themselves (e.g. in an online repository) can encourage others to connect to ideas while also informing actions going forward.

Step-by-step explanation

Community Engagement Type

• Community Building - this projects intentionally bring people together to simply get to know one another.
• Community Organizing - this projects bring people together with the goal of solving a community issue.
• Community Education - this projects provide instructional services or curricula, or serve to educate the public about a social issue (in a non-partisan way).
• Deliberative Dialogue - this projects intentionally bring people together to build understanding across differences.
• Engaged Research - this projects benefits the community by clarifying the causes of a community challenge, mapping a community's assets, or contributing to solutions to current challenges and also fits a faculty member's research agenda.
• Direct Service - this projects provide a service or product to an individual, group, or the community as a whole.
• Economic Development - this projects work on developing the regional economy in a sustainable way.

Skills of workers and volunteers in community engaged services

• Meeting Facilitation - is having a strong meeting process skills that you are being able to develop meaningful vision, mission, goals, objectives, group process, documentation and communication cycle are the foundational skills of any facilitated process.
• Consensus Building and Dispute Resolution - this lay building structures of trust. This ability to separate interests, needs and impartially structure a process that mediates differences is very different than a facilitation skill of ensuring equal voice and participation.
• Systems-thinking - this is require because without understanding how system work, facilitator may engage the community with a truncated depth perception especially when it comes to the critical processes of stakeholder analysis and power analysis.
• Empowerment Theory - it allows individuals to co-create solutions and in the process develop mutual trust, respect and a sense of community.

Challenges of workers and volunteers in community engaged services

• Cultural Differences - identifiable differences between cultures can interfere with attempts to collaborate.
• Power Dynamics - partnership in this area can be challenging because workers thinks hold more power than community and vice versa.
• Lack of Incentives - the needs for changes to policies and protocols around promotion and tenure appears on pretty much everybody's list of barriers to community engagement. 
• Operational Factors - this includes pressures related to other demands on peoples time, mismatches between the annual rhythms in academia and other sectors, lack of funding, and geographical distances between campuses and community settings.

Benefits

• Greater understanding on health issues and local priorities
• Improved community satisfaction
• Become more responsive on health services
• Greater accountability for public funds
• The development of better quality services.