This Friday our staff are gathering to review and make decisions about Bread for the City’s strategic plan. One of the five proposed strategic priorities is:

Institutionalize and strengthen regular, meaningful opportunities for client engagement.

You might be wondering what “client engagement” means, exactly. We’re still figuring it out ourselves. One of the steps we’ve taken is to ask our Client Advisory Board to define it. They didn’t agree on a definition at their most recent meeting on Monday, but started to map out some different aspects of the work. Here’s what they came up with, in no particular order:

- opportunities to give back to Bread
- make it easy for clients to support each other
- activities led or proposed by clients
- open dialogue with clients concerning improving existing services and providing new services
- support entrepreneurs
- activities that lead to long-term self-improvement and self-sufficiency
- leadership development
- art
- self-advocacy
- connecting clients with similar interests
- small groups sharing skills

The Client Advisory Board also considered a suggestion from me to focus their work through a Participatory Action Research (PAR) study of client engagement at Bread for the City. PAR is different from the typical research process for two reasons. First, it centers the experiences of people affected by the topic being investigated. The experts are those who know the issue most intimately. In this case it makes a great deal of sense for clients themselves to study the availability and effectiveness of BFC’s client engagement opportunities.

Second, PAR focuses on action. It is research that makes recommendations for solutions rather than merely studying problems. It’s political. PAR also recognizes that action that can be realized through the research process itself. For example, by asking clients about their awareness of or experiences with client engagement opportunities at BFC, participation in those very activities could increase.

This fuzzy but great cartoon from Praxis India demonstrates these two concepts better than I ever could:

Now what? How do we get started? It begins with a research plan, which sounds fancier than it is. The encyclopedia of informal education has a great overview of the process for action research, taken from the book Action Research by Ernest Stringer:

Look – building a picture and gathering information. When evaluating we define and describe the problem to be investigated and the context in which it is set. We also describe what all the participants (educators, group members, managers etc.) have been doing.
Think – interpreting and explaining. When evaluating we analyse and interpret the situation. We reflect on what participants have been doing. We look at areas of success and any deficiencies, issues or problems.
Act – resolving issues and problems. In evaluation we judge the worth, effectiveness, appropriateness, and outcomes of those activities. We act to formulate solutions to any problems.

Obviously, there’s much to be done to define client engagement and to support the staff and clients that have been doing it in big and little ways throughout the history of our organization. I look forward to future blog posts sharing our successes, failures, questions, and new relationships as we go.