Introduction

Our Community Inclusion Standard (CIS) Best Practice Guide is a toolkit for anyone delivering nature-based projects and seeking to engage with, include communities in their design and achieve social impacts.

It is applicable across the whole of the United Kingdom (UK) and allows professional verification and certification of a project's engagement and inclusion activity.

Primarily authored by Deciding Matters, following a co-design process, this guide supports the delivery and recognition of community engagement processes within nature-based projects, resulting in the delivery of meaningful social and economic benefits that promote the sustainable development of communities.

It is structured around 9 key steps:

1. Identify a project which is bespoke, purposeful and location specific
2. Ensure adequate funding and resourcing
3. Identify decision-makers and build in legitimacy
4. Address imbalance through equitable and inclusive design
5. Communicate effectively with different audiences
6. Plan accessible stakeholder recruitment and onboarding
7. Work reflexively and adaptively to meet community needs
8. Plan for longevity and lasting community relationships
9. Embed evaluation, learning and impact

The steps above have been identified through a co-design process with a range of stakeholders including developers, delivery teams, community groups, education institutes, charities, and more.

Community engagement is not a linear process, these steps are interconnected and will each be revisited at multiple stages throughout project design and delivery.

Each step is broken down into the following subsections:

• An overarching principle: highlighting what a project should be aiming to achieve through this step.
• Questions for project leads: a list of questions to be discussed (and answered) by the delivery team before a project commences to support delivery of a meaningful engagement process.
• Useful resources: links to external guides, frameworks, policies and examples of best practice.
• Suggested actions: a list of possible practical actions a project delivery team can undertake throughout their planning and delivery of a community engagement process. Not all of these actions will be relevant for every project but are intended to be used as a guide.  
• Evidence: a list of some possible options to evidence each step. The project delivery team should work with their community to determine what measures they will be using to evidence and evaluate their own project.  

During the initial planning phase, the delivery team should consider each aspect of the project, through scope and resourcing, promotion and recruitment, design and delivery, outcomes and implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.

There are best practice themes which weave through each step of delivery, and so there is some overlap in this Guide; this is a conscious decision to enable users to review a single step depending on their delivery needs and find all relevant information without having to review the whole document in its entirety each time.  

Community Inclusion Standard Best Practice Guide by Nature Finance Certification Alliance is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0