The Trouble With Community Engagement: From Power Sharing to Power Shifting Through the Community Bill of Rights

Reflecting a growing consensus that meaningful change doesn’t come without the involvement of those most impacted, funders have signed on to efforts to “listen,” “get proximate,” and “empower.” In this article, the authors draw on their lived expertise and research to describe how even well-intentioned community engagement efforts can become extractive, tokenizing, and undermine existing community assets. As a meaningful alternative, the authors suggest “centering community” as an orientation to all philanthropic work and the Community Bill of Rights (CBR) as a tool to guide the required change (Black et al., 2022). Drawing on case examples from healthcare, urban planning, and other fields, the authors suggest an imperative for philanthropy to join government and community change agents in using the CBR to shift its approach to one where community is treated not as a stakeholder but as the primary owner of process, outcomes, and futures.