Convening Knowledges - Community Advisory Boards - Blog
The focus for the first project in the NCCPE Convening Knowledges series was Community Advisory Boards (CABs). We worked with The Community Cast to explore what is known about designing and implementing CABs through a series of podcasts. In this blog, Nicola and Adam Gratton of The Community Cast reflect on the process.
Between May and July 2024, The Community Cast supported the first phase of the NCCPE’s Convening Knowledges Project. Convening Knowledges is about how we can connect diverse knowledge resources, network the people and organisations holding them, and challenge knowledge hierarchies. Phase 1 posed the question “What is known about designing and implementing Community Advisory Boards (CABs)?” The project gave The Community Cast the creative freedom to explore the use of an online resource, podcasting and storytelling as a platform for gathering and sharing knowledge.
Set up almost four years ago, against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic, The Community Cast has a simple mission of “Supporting communities to create the cast to tell their own stories and mould their futures”. We use a range of digital and storytelling techniques to make this happen. The team includes Adam Gratton, Founder and Director of The Community Cast, and Nicola Gratton, Consultant for Community Cast and Associate Professor at Staffordshire University with extensive experience of Community Engagement and Civic Universities.
The number of global podcast listeners almost doubled between 2019 and 2024 and almost half of listeners in the UK listen to podcasts to learn something new (Statista, 2024; Stojcheva 2023). Podcasting therefore felt like a potentially accessible way of gathering and sharing knowledge about CABs, one that could have an extensive reach across the globe.
Participation and inclusion of the voices of lived experience are central to The Community Cast’s mission. It was therefore important to the team that they held an initial consultation to understand whether podcasting and an online resource would be of use to public engagement professionals at the NCCPE’s Engage Conference held in May 2024. The consultation also provided us with an opportunity to start mapping the knowledge which already exists about CABs.
This consultation was extended to an online survey sent to the PEP network to gather a wider perspective on the existing knowledges as well as the gaps in that knowledge. We took this data from our time at the conference and survey and used it to underpin further research which included desktop research and a rapid literature review, providing the team with a range of accessible resources to be housed on the NCCPE website. This crucial research into existing resources helped to inform the focus and content of the four-episode podcast by providing a clear understanding of how such a series could best support both experienced practitioners and those new to designing and implementing CABs.
The podcast series drew on the voices of 10 individuals across the four episodes. All participants had experience of either leading, facilitating, or being members of Community Advisory Boards in a higher education setting and brought a diversity of perspectives and lived experiences of CABs in New York, Kenya, Canada, Central America, and the UK.
We are no strangers to CABs at The Community Cast. We have experience of developing and facilitating these over a number of years. However, our involvement in this project has broadened our perspectives. The variety of CABs, their purpose, principles, shape, and impact, was evident throughout the work, and while our research delved into the benefits and challenges of CABs for higher education, the scope of CABs globally is much broader than this. Higher education has much to learn from other models of CABs in other sectors, such as health, the wider education sector and the arts, especially in relation to accessibility, diversity and community influence.
The Appetite programme (funded by the Arts Council England: Creative People and Places) holds a monthly Supper Club, a community decision-making group made up of local residents who decide the programme for the place-based arts organisation, test out new types of art and evaluate their effectiveness in reaching new audiences. The group reflects many of the areas of good practice identified through our work on the Convening Knowledges project. The group is embedded firmly in Appetite’s strategy, it is flexible in its membership and provides a hot meal and a chance to network with like-minded people at every session.
Membership, diversity of perspectives, and power dynamics within CABs were raised as an area of focus through our consultation and literature review. A common theme from our podcasts was the need for accessible language and translating complex ideas into accessible information.
The Community Cast’s mission holds a nod to the place where it all started, in the close-knit working communities of the industrial city of Stoke-on-Trent and its clay and coal past. But our aim to engage and empower communities goes far beyond one city. Our more recent work has seen Community Cast raise the voices of communities regionally, nationally, and thanks to our work on the Convening Knowledges project, internationally.
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