Tales from the Trenches with Carol Hayward
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I have worked in community engagement for around 13 years. My degree was in Maths and Statistics but I found that while I enjoyed a bit of analysis in my early career, I really needed people interaction and after a few years in alumni management and communications, found myself in the role of project manager for local eDemocracy at Bristol City Council in the UK. This seemed to me to bring my analytical skills, communication experience and provide me with the people interaction bit that made it all feel worthwhile. I had a few years there working with UK government and European funding to plan, implement and evaluate a range of digital engagement tools and processes alongside more traditional community engagement activities.
My partner is a New Zealander so we moved here in 2008 where I continued working in local government at Rodney District and Auckland councils before moving into the health sector at the end of 2014. I am currently the Community Engagement Manager at Waitemata District Health Board which looks after hospital and community health facilities in the north and west of Auckland. I am also currently studying part-time for a Master of Business Administration and live on the North Shore of Auckland.
Tell us a bit about your organisation.
Waitemata District Health Board has around 7000 people delivering health care to the largest health board area in New Zealand. We are lucky to have one of the healthiest communities in New Zealand but face challenges with a growing population, an ageing population plus disparities in health with some of our communities.
The Board has two priorities – enhancing patient experience and better health outcomes which helps to signify the importance of patient and community engagement.
What does your role involve?
It’s a varied role and includes working alongside community partners who help deliver community engagement activities, the delivery of community engagement approaches or co-design processes on a wide range of topics including maternity services, wayfinding and health services planning.
In addition, I am actively involved in trying to improve the organisation’s health literacy and the way the organisation develops patient material and how it is communicated.
What would be a typical day in your working life?
Days can be very varied. Recently I have visited local schools and heard the students’ views on what healthy means to them as well as what would make them healthier. This has helped to identify actions that the DHB can do for example, we are looking to develop an app and improve our social media engagement to target young people. Today, I will be attending a health literacy consumer group to hear their thoughts on recently developed patient information and to see how well new checklists and processes are working.
Can you share some of the good and bad experiences you have encountered over your career and how they have helped you grow as an engagement professional and person?
In the early stages of my career, I had a lot of fun developing digital engagement approaches and using a tool called I’m a councillor, get me out of here. This was one of our strategies to help ensure that our elected representatives saw the benefit of digital engagement and also enabled us to connect them with youth through school activities. This was the start of my engagement career and I have since always aimed to ensure there are opportunities to provide feedback online – partly to help ensure transparency in the process but also to take into consideration that many people (myself included) prefer to provide feedback online.
One of the biggest challenges was when I was the consultation manager at Bristol. I was asked to manage a citizens’ jury on ‘what next for waste’. The process was requested by some of the councillors which made it a highly political process and I felt like a political football within the organisation with one councillor giving me quite a hard time and some of my colleagues ducking for cover. It was a really interesting process and I think it provided some great recommendations but also meant I needed to develop some personal resilience to manage the political nature of it.
Since I’ve been in Auckland, the highlights have been managing the enhanced engagement on the Unitary Plan which was some pre-engagement on Auckland’s statutory planning rulebook. This was the biggest piece of engagement I have been involved with so it was a really intense process but it was worth it knowing how much importance the planning team and elected members were placing on the community’s feedback. At the DHB, we carried out consultation on maternity services which meant a lot of targeted activities at Asian, Pacific, Refugee and migrant communities. Again, the enjoyment came from working with a team who really wanted to hear from the community and placed a lot of value on doing the process as well as we could.
If you are working on a project at the moment would you like to share the journey to date?
I’m actually involved in a piece of work in my local community of Birkenhead. The local residents association asked if I would be interested in getting involved in developing a community vision. During my time at the council, I had engaged with community led planning groups and I guess they felt I had some knowledge of the process as well as some experience of community engagement that would help.
I’m enjoying working on something that is important to my own community and am loving the freedom of being able to do it the way I want to. However, we are all volunteers and have a limited budget so it’s taking a little longer than we had originally hoped. I have used my professional connections to help where possible and have really enjoyed working with Delib, using their dialogue tool which has been great for getting some really good conversations going and building our understanding of the issues.
a. What principles did you find most useful in carrying out this project?
Being community led has been the most important principle. However, we have wanted to keep the right people informed within the council, businesses and other agencies so that we have their support when the vision is finalised. So, openness, transparency and partnership working has also been key.
b. Did you come across any surprises on this project?
It was reassuring to realise how much is possible on a shoestring when it’s something that the community feel is worthwhile getting involved with. I’ve been slightly surprised that I’ve had similar discussions with the other volunteers about the importance of broad community engagement and making sure we hear from all the different demographic groups in the area so that we feel that the vision we develop is robust and represents all of the different perspectives within the community.
What do you find is the most rewarding aspect of working in this field?
Being out in the community – particularly with community members who tend not to get involved as often. I always enjoy working with youth and supporting some of our diverse communities to engage. However, the most rewarding part is when you can ensure that decision-makers have heard the community’s voice and is acting on their feedback.
What do you see as the most challenging part of your role or working in engagement in general?
It can be disheartening when the teams you are advising don’t really see the value in engaging with the community. The process is either then focused largely on professional stakeholders or is a tick box exercise. I think there is a lot more we could be doing to empower the community but there have been less opportunities than I had hoped to be able to support this kind of approach.
What prompted you to enter engagement professionally?
I entered the profession by accident. As I mentioned earlier, my journey from statistics through communications into local government engagement made it feel like I’d finally found the right kind of role. I love what I do and I also love it when I feel like I’ve managed to influence different teams to take ownership of the engagement and when they don’t need my active support. However, there are still many frustrations which I touched on earlier.
What are the three biggest professional or personal lessons that you have learnt from working on this field?
1. It’s very easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone like yourself and to make it easier for them to participate but I am still learning about how to reach and support a wide range of cultural and demographic groups to get involved.
2. Celebrate the successes and use them as a way of showcasing good community engagement to help encourage other good practice.
3. Partnership is key – it’s all about building and maintaining good relationships with internal and external stakeholders that help to ensure you have reach into the community through someone the community trusts
What advice would you give newbies entering engagement?
Always put yourself in the shoes of the people you are trying to engage with and try to work out what would be important to you. Try and test your approach e.g. by checking in with friends, family and colleagues to make sure it is the right approach to take, that it makes sense and is easy to understand.