By Jen Rogers, Involvement and Engagement Coordinator, Involve North East
Words have power. When engaging with communities, the words you choose can be the difference between a strong, lasting, mutually beneficial relationship, and a broken link between your organisation and a local community. In this series of blogs, we will discuss recommendations on what language to use – or to avoid using – when engaging with specific communities.
It’s important to note that language is ever-changing, and that the terms used are appropriate at the time of writing. Equally, not everyone agrees on terminology, which we will consider too. When in doubt, ask the communities themselves!
‘Hard to reach’ people and communities
In today’s blog we’re considering the term ‘Hard to reach’.
I’m sure we’ve all heard colleagues say – or said ourselves – that some people or communities are hard to reach.
Whilst we don’t mean it offensively, if we look closer at this choice of words, it is easy to see how saying this puts the onus of involvement on the community, rather than the organisation.
“‘Hard-to-reach’ implies that engagement is lacking because they don’t want to be reached. However, in the vast majority of cases, the communities are hard to engage because a level of trust and representation hasn’t been built between the public body and the community.” (Good Governance, 2020)
We must remember that organisations – both statutory and VCSE – have a position of power over communities. And for many within the communities often labelled as ‘hard to reach’, their past experiences with organisations have been negative, leading to mistrust.
The process of building (or re-building) trust can be aided through linking in with trusted figures within the community. Depending on the community, this could be a religious leader, someone in a profession that is highly regarded, or a local activist.
But what term should we use instead? There are many suggestions including ‘people experiencing disadvantage’, ‘underserved’, ‘marginalised’ or ‘seldom heard’ amongst others. All these terms emphasise that it is us as professionals and organisations who should be doing the ‘reaching’.
Most importantly we need to remember where our role in this dialogue ends. As organisations and professionals, we are here to advocate for those who struggle to get their voices heard, and to challenge institutional norms which may be harmful to a community. It’s not our place to speak for the communities themselves.
Look up and read more about this subject from the people it directly impacts. There are a few links below to start you off.
References & further reading:
I am not ‘hard to reach’ | UpRising
Engaging with the hard-to-reach | Good Governance (good-governance.org.uk)
