Within ILAS, community engagement is pursued as a valuable means of enhancing life-course experiences and outcomes for individuals and societies. It is also an essential mechanism to ensure the relevance of our work to people’s lives, across the six focus areas.
The community engagement work strand has been developed to allow different forms of knowledge and expertise to emerge and to be valued – whether this stems from particular population sub groups, policy makers, practitioners or local community actors. In recognition of the interdependency between ILAS and our external stakeholder communities, we engage in active efforts to both bring these communities into the Institute and to bring the Institute’s work into these communities. This helps to deliver and enhance mutual benefits.
Examples of different forms of community engagement across ILAS include multi-agency and community partnerships, stakeholder consultative committees, training, community-based research programmes, and volunteer initiatives. It also includes the active collaboration between the Institute and SCCUL, a social enterprise company, to host the first social enterprise cafe, SAOL, within the ILAS building.
Furthermore, a core objective of our community engagement work strand is to support external stakeholders in implementing positive change and to adjust to reform processes. This includes providing state-of-the-art knowledge and policy analysis for advocacy and decision making. It also includes supporting organisations and groups in gathering evidence on local issues and interventions.
