Community outreach what is

Their work can teach people how to adopt better health habits or motivate them to use education to achieve their life goals.

Depending on the focus of their message and the demographic they want to reach, social workers use various strategies to fashion an outreach campaign that works well. In all cases, it starts by identifying a specific goal and doing the work to achieve it. In general, community outreach breaks down into three areas. These areas focus on assessing and implementing change at the community level. Focus on the issue. This can range from improving health outcomes in the community to lowering child mortality rates or increasing voter registration.

Finding the right issue requires performing a community needs assessment to determine where help is most needed. The key in community outreach is to teach people how to address an issue so that they can take on the issue themselves and influence others to do the same.

Policy changes. Some of those who work in community outreach focus on influencing government officials to make policy changes needed to address specific issues. Carrying out a communications plan plays a vital role in this. To come up with a purposeful outreach, nonprofits need to establish a list of things they need and want to achieve.

What and how can it help the community? How will it benefit the organization? When do these tasks need to be done? How will the process be relayed to the people involved? Laying down these factors helps figure out what steps to take. Consult with donors, recipients, and other partners to see how your outreach program can be improved. Point out gaps in services, donors, or community building. With this, you can help turn these problems into avenues wherein you can propose plans and solutions to fix them.

Proper targeting is key! Keep your mission moving through an established cause. This lets you pursue and grow your efforts to greater heights. Further, there are also ways how nonprofits can better engage with the community working with donors and volunteers. As per Forbes , these include:. The KalyEskwela project, which aims to bring school to the streets, uses a mobile van with audiovisual equipment to hold alternative learning sessions.

Street children and youth are able to learn through modules guided by our street educators and Alternative Learning System or ALS. Helping kids and parents cope up with stress and issues faced while learning, this section provides psychosocial aid and counseling. Publications and media Research, strategies and reports. The Centre for Participation changes lives and communities through local opportunities in community support, volunteering, learning and partnerships.

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Other initiatives Community Transport To book your seat now call Get involved. Membership Become a member. Our vacancies. The strategies of the program are multiple. It helps students with academics, but also exposes them to the college experience including football games. The mentors provide after-school tutoring at the junior high, and also invite the younger students to campus once a month to learn about its resources and opportunities.

Parents are involved through parties and other events. The director of the program describes the outreach effort as a collaboration with "ally" organizations. The Office of Multicultural Affairs at the university sponsors the program, drawing volunteers and some funding from the student senate. Community organizations are essential to helping carry out activities, though.

The director works with representatives in the local school district, the Boys and Girls Club, and several churches to identify junior high participants and to continue developing beneficial outreach. If outreach is the primary strategy of an initiative, some combination of outreach methods is usually employed. In Massachusetts, a comprehensive, multi-faceted outreach program was used to close the gap between eligibility for health insurance and actual enrollment that was mentioned in the opening of this section.

This highly successful outreach program involved numerous stages, and paid community-based outreach workers were the backbone of the effort. The first step was to locate people who were eligible for health insurance coverage but not enrolled -- that involved some aggressive and creative outreach in the areas of raising awareness and connecting with people.

The next steps were to actually enroll eligible people in health care programs and then help them learn how to use their coverage. In the beginning phases, the outreach workers gave group presentations, distributed localized information, and held one-on-one meetings. As families were enrolled, the outreach workers followed through personally with their clients, making sure individuals understood and knew how to use the available services. This involved regular one-on-one meetings with family members and well-organized follow-up.

Sometimes that meant the outreach worker made phone calls to a doctor's office to check the status of a claim or helped a parent fill out paperwork. In one case, incorrect information had not been removed from a child's records; the outreach worker helped locate that error as the source of a problem denial of coverage and to correct the records. The worker also helped her clients find other health coverage options for the parents because although their children qualified for insurance, the adults didn't.

This outreach worker not only delivered service, but taught her clients a range of skills that built their self-confidence. The parents gained understanding of the health insurance system including the paper trail from doctor's office to insurer and, perhaps more important, developed problem-solving skills how to gather information, follow through, and persist to resolution of a problem.

The following guidelines and strategies for outreach are adapted from Outreach Works. While that program focused on health insurance coverage, many of the elements can be applied to other health promotion and community development efforts. Depending on the nature of your initiative and the type of outreach you think is needed, consider the following steps as you begin or expand your outreach.

Determine the purpose and methods of outreach for your initiative based on discussion above. Determine staffing needs. If you use trained outreach workers, it helps if they come from the community they work in and are familiar with its characteristics. Outreach workers can play a vital role in developing community trust and a good reputation "on the street.

They are better equipped to develop strategies designed to address the specific needs of your population, especially in minority communities. Whether your staff is paid or volunteer, they must be well-trained and knowledgeable. Provide training through modeling by other workers experienced in outreach, time on the job, a formal training program, supervised case review for education purposes, identifying resources for keeping current and distance learning, Internet access, or other innovative methods for workers in rural or isolated areas.

Choose physical space carefully if you need it. The location and feel of an outreach office sets a tone. Look for a space that:.

Plan your services or activities. Develop strategies and action plans using principles for effective program design. If a local, national or international organization can provide resources or programming such as for breast cancer awareness week , take advantage of their materials and marketing.

For an outreach plan, organizational preparation should include:. Consider potential partners. Partnering, of course, can influence your services or activities, so this step might come earlier in the sequence for your effort.

Again, depending on your purpose, find people and organizations to work with as your allies. Identify their motivations how they will "profit" and work to develop win-win partnerships. Depending on your initiative and target population, you can look for partners in:. Expand your outreach gradually. There are many possible avenues for outreach, so new outreach programs are wise to develop a prioritized strategy for raising awareness. The authors of Outreach Works suggest a gradual expansion of outreach by moving through "zones.

Start with activities that are easier and most comfortable and move toward less familiar and more challenging ones. Here are some sample activities for gaining and building on success in outreach:. Make the most of your outreach. Even if you have great sums of money for outreach which most of us don't , it is possible for outreach to fail if you don't understand the issues of access and barriers to access for your population.