What is Community Activation ?
At Middle Path, we define “community” as when a group of people collaborates together to reach a shared goal. Community Activation is an approach that helps communities develop in empowered ways, so it can self-mobilize, self-organize, and determine the best way to reach its own goals. Originally developed by Middle Path, Community Activation consists of 4 different stages: Community Outreach, Community Engagement, Community Building, and Community Mobilization (see below).
Community Activation can be used by organizations and groups to help develop their communities by using empowerment and community-centered principles. While community mobilization is the pinnacle of a Community Activation process, it may not be the right fit for the specific context, needs, and goals of a community. Instead, a community may seek to implement other stages of Community Activation, like community outreach and community engagement.
How is Community Activation different from other forms of community development? Most community management is conducted through a top-down approach that emphasizes the community manager as the main decision-maker and enabler for making things happen in a community. For example, a community manager might facilitate most community meetings and interactions between members, such as by scheduling and hosting events that community members attend. In contrast, the Community Activation process focuses on creating organizational structures and an environment of processes and attitudes that empower the community to manage, direct, develop, and implement itself. Community managers (or we prefer the term “community stewards”) seek to lead from behind by pushing themselves out of the center, and creating more space for community members to engage and lead.
Why use Community Activation?
Here are some ways that Community Activation benefits an organization, company, or project:
– Increases an organization’s alignment with users’ needs and expectations
– Maintains the long-term relevance of an organization
– Increases an organization’s efficiency (e.g., leveraging volunteer contributions)
– Discovers new applications of an organization’s services
– Increases an organization’s benefit to society
– Reduces the risk of burnout of community organizers, managers, and leaders
How to use Community Activation?
Community Activation consists of 4 different levels (described below), and each contain different tools and emphases. Figuring out which level to use in your community, depends on its context and the readiness of your community members1. As your community evolves or changes, you may find that you can move between different levels of Community Activation. It may even make sense to use different levels in your community at the same time, especially if you are implementing new programs or activities. In the Community Activation Growth Pyramid in Figure 1, the levels are arranged by what is most broadly used, with the higher levels requiring more specific contexts to be applicable.
Community Mobilization
Community mobilization is the gold standard for empowered communities. Community mobilization is possible when community members feel able to make decisions, self-organize and take actions in a coordinated way on behalf of the community itself. In this level, you’ll see an effective governance structure with changing diverse leadership, active and enthusiastic members, well-documented community processes, and a membership that understands what their mission is all about. A mobilized community is easiest to manage because there are many leaders and do-ers in the community, and things hum along like clockwork.
Community Building
If you have gathered together a group of people around a common mission, and they are eager to work together, you now have the foundation for a community. In the Community Building stage, a community will focus on developing the organizational structures that support an environment of interactions that allow members of a community to interact effectively and independently without any help or intervention by a community steward. Some examples of structures include: working groups, collaboration platforms–like a Slack workspace or Facebook group, and collaborative documents and files (like a Google folder). This is a very busy stage for a community, since they’ll be working hard to create and develop new structures in collaboration with other members.
Community Engagement
Community Engagement is the development of mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and target external groups. This step consists of mostly gathering and convening people together. Community Engagement is made possible once a community has identified specific audiences for the community and ways to reach out to them, and has at least one mechanism to bring them on board. Some examples of mechanisms are signing up for a newsletter, following a social media page, or attending events. Community Engagement is the foundation of any community-based initiative, and is often where many communities find themselves stuck (i.e., now that I’ve collected all of these people together, what do I do next?). In this step, a community is often spending time encouraging and incentivizing people to join them, while fine tuning the value proposition that most resonates with the different audiences appropriate for the community mission.
Community Outreach
Community Outreach is the very first step of any prospective community. It is a stage when the earliest members are seeking to identify the best audiences for the community and trying to understand why these audiences might be interested in being a part of the community (i.e, identifying the value propositions). This will also be a time that a community is learning which outreach mechanisms work best with each audience, and how best to connect with them.
Here are some other ways to think about Community Activation
Foot notes:
1This approach is similar to how participatory approaches are used in rural development, as described in the paper by Pretty, J. (1995) Participatory learning for sustainable agriculture, World Development, 23 (8), 1247–1263
As a citation for “community activation”, a version of this webpage has been published here:
Virapongse, A. (2025). Community Activation: What is it?. Middle Path EcoSolutions. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15238155