69: Nuts & Bolts of Community Engagement Project Creation Part 1
Problem and Mission Statements
with Drake DRiscoll
What does community mean to you? Community is a sense of belonging, and that can mean many different things to different people. A community can be a group of people connected through a similar interest or geographic location and many other things. Today we will be talking about community engagement, and community engagement is when we work with and among communities to address a problem that is impacting the people involved.
So what does community engagement look like in the arts? Here at YCA, I am the Education and Community Engagement Manager, and part of my role is guiding our artists and creating their own personal community engagement projects. These projects are derived through conversations where the artists and I discuss what they're passionate about, what communities they wish to engage with, and what problems that they are hoping to solve. Most recently, we have conducted concert series in prisons, concert series at public libraries, and coming up, we have a classical music workshop at an Alzheimer's care facility.
During my time at Juilliard, I co-founded my own passion project. The VISION Collective is dedicated to forming relationships with and among refugees and new Americans by sharing and exchanging music between diverse communities. In our last five years, we have done many things, but three of those have been local workshops at immigrant organizations in the tri-state area, benefit concerts, both virtually and in person, and an overseas tour to Central Germany to four refugee settlements.
This three-part video series is meant to inspire you to develop your own community engagement project and give you the tools to begin the process. The first step is to define your problem. What are you trying to address? The second step is to craft a mission statement or a goal or overall purpose for your project.
Unfortunately, solution first project development is very common. People get an idea for a project that they want to implement and they run with it. Starting with the problem is actually more beneficial because later on when we're evaluating our progress, we can look back to that and see if we're actually addressing the needs of the communities involved.
Once you've defined your problem, I suggest creating a problem statement. When drafting a problem statement, you should understand what is actually considered a problem. Settle upon an underlying problem that needs to be eliminated before addressing other issues or solutions. Research the data that supports your claim that your chosen issue is a problem in the opinion of others.
And finally, organize the data, including the size and scope of the problem. Who is suffering? Where are the beneficiaries located? What are the geographic conditions compounding the problem? What are surrounding economic conditions and how is the problem causing harm to others? Throughout the course of this video series, I will be referencing the Melody Movement as an example.
The Melody Movement is a subproject of the VISION Collective that is not yet implemented, but hopefully will be soon. The Melody Movement problem statement is, “Displaced migrants face significant stresses on their mental health.” In my slightly biased opinion, this is a strong statement because it is concise, it is clear, and we have a lot of research backing up our claim that this is this problem is in fact a problem in the opinion of others. In addition to consulting studies on refugee mental health, my team conducted preliminary interviews with our stakeholders to confirm that our beneficiaries do in fact face stresses on their mental health and further understand our problem.
As I mentioned before, the second step of our process will be to craft a mission statement. Strong mission statements are short, they have an action verb, they define a target audience, and they have a measurable outcome.
When beginning to craft your mission statement, consider the following questions: What is the overall purpose of your initiative? What are you trying to accomplish and what exactly are you measuring? Project goals should include the intended results in general terms and specify the target population that you intend to serve. Having a clear goal helps fight the temptation to implement an interesting program that doesn't address the problem. It's tempting to have more than one goal, but I recommend that you articulate one clear solution to your problem statement. Other goals of your program may be long term outcomes rather than goals. We will discuss more on outcomes in the second video of the series. Phrase your goal in terms of the change that you want to achieve over the life of your initiative, rather than a summary of the services or activities that you are going to provide. And finally, don't make your statement so broad and general that it provides no guidance for your project.
Going back to the Melody Movement example, our mission is, “To improve the mental health of migrants by sharing and exchanging music between diverse communities.” This mission statement has an action verb, ‘improving,’ it addresses the target audience, which is ‘migrants,’ it is short, only one sentence in length, and finally, it also defines what we are measuring, which is ‘the mental health of migrants.’
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