Hope as a basis for understanding the benefits and possibilities of community engagement

Community engagement is crucial to Australian Catholic University's mission. The university's Institute for Advancing Community Engagement is dedicated to forging partnerships with communities in Australia and overseas, with a strong focus on working with disadvantaged people to build capacity and create new opportunities. The Institute's activities include providing education programs for homeless and marginalised adults in Australia, and teacher training courses and health clinics for people in East Timor. The present paper discusses the documented outcomes of these and other initiatives and analyses them in terms of Hope Theory. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that those with higher levels of hope are more able to effectively make decisions and pursue their goals, and enjoy better physical health, psychological adjustment, and academic performance, among other positive outcomes. It is argued that increases in hope underlie the observed benefits of the Institute's community engagement work, and a strong array of empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning is provided in support of this view. The hope-focused perspective is presented as a key framework for understanding how community engagement projects, such as those of the Institute for Advancing Community Engagement, lead to positive outcomes for communities, and how the quality and sustainability of this work can be enhanced.

Community engagement initiatives take many distinct forms, and are evaluated in many different ways. Some initiatives aim to provide education, others welfare, still others healthcare, and so on. In assessing such efforts, researchers often find that the benefits of community engagement go beyond the discrete effects of the specific forms of assistance offered in these initiatives. Take, for example, a hypothetical program that offers education courses to disadvantaged community members. As expected, the students who participated in these courses become more educated, and thus more able to access employment or further education. The results of the program evaluation confirm this. But the participants also seem to have benefited from the program in other ways. The researchers suspect that a deeper, more encompassing impact has been made in the lives of the community members; one that goes beyond the stated aims of the program. What is this impact? In the present paper, it is argued that a key benefit of community engagement, common to all successful community engagement initiatives, is the increase of hope. We propose that hope theory offers a distinctive and useful framework within which community engagement can be understood, evaluated and expanded.