What is community empowerment?

The communities we live in play a central role in our wellbeing. Strong, cohesive and inclusive communities can provide their members with psychological and emotional support; increase and widen the range of resources (material and intangible) people can access; improve people’s sense of belonging; and empower people to take collective action on those things that matter most to them.  

There are two key ways in which the public health system can enable communities to improve their mental health and wellbeing through a community empowerment approach. 

 

Co-production

Firstly, ensure that communities are empowered to take a central “co-production” role in the design, planning, implementation and evaluation of services, strategies, policies and interventions that affect them. This can improve communities’ and individuals’ sense of control, confidence and self-esteem, improving their wellbeing. The inclusion of communities in the decisions affecting them will also improve the concordance between services provided and the needs and wants of those communities including in the area of mental health and wellbeing. 

 

Community development

Secondly, prioritise community development work to facilitate communities to find their voice and work collectively to advocate for and take action on the issues that matter to them. This can help to increase the connectedness of communities, a sense of belonging, and the aspects of wellbeing discussed above. This is related to the concept of ‘social capital’, which encompasses the myriad benefits by which greater social connectedness brings benefits to individuals and communities. There is strong and varied evidence that increasing social capital can have significant positive impacts upon mental health and wellbeing.

Community development, empowerment, engagement and organisation are thus important for mental health and wellbeing both as means and end. The fostering of community and the transfer of power to that community improve mental health and wellbeing in themselves, and recent engagement work reveals that mental health and wellbeing is a clear priority for those communities to take action on

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)

 

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is an approach to sustainable community-driven development which is already used in Grampian and other parts of Scotland. The approach supports communities to develop local groups and networks, based on local assets including the drive, skills and experiences of residents, as well as the local environment, community spaces and local groups, charities, institutions and work places [59, 60]. Rather than identifying need in a community and addressing that need by service provision, the community develops a way forward based on the assets available to them, using what they have to improve local quality of life. Often local assets, particularly people as assets, can go unrecognised and be overlooked in public sector development. 

 

The benefit in focussing on asset-based community development has huge implications for improving local mental health and wellbeing, providing residents with local support networks, reducing loneliness, using or developing old skills or learning new ones, supporting others and improving quality of life. In addition, it has the potential to provide a sustainable solution for the community, which can develop over time to suit the changing needs of the community. 

 

Effective community empowerment is not a simple, quick, or one-time process. It requires us to build a sense of trust and reciprocity with our communities and to combat concerns that community-driven work is not being used as a way for the public sector to forego its own responsibilities. To engage properly with communities and include them in the decision-making processes that affect them involves a long-term commitment to work differently. 

 

There are also important challenges of avoiding inequalities in community work which may serve to widen inequalities of power and access to power within our communities. Effective, inclusive community empowerment will involve a significant, long-term investment of time and resource, especially in groups which have often been characterised as ‘hard to reach’ but may more appropriately be described as ‘easy to ignore’.  

 

A challenge for existing public sector organisations in supporting community empowerment is one of transfer of power from these organisations to communities. 

 

To facilitate this as organisations, we need to educate our workforce and develop new ways of working. Of course, some of this work is already ongoing within a number of organisations in the Northeast of Scotland, but there is still some way to go in order to make this core to our way of working. 

 

The links below provide further information on community empowerment, the existing evidence base, as well as Putting People First, a community empowerment programme of work coordinated by NHS Grampian. 

Published: 02/05/2025 09:50