Participation is only the beginning. Meaningful engagement happens when people return, contribute, build relationships, and begin to feel ownership.
Ownership requires organizations to loosen control. Communities need enough structure to feel supported, but enough space for members to shape what happens next.
People engage when it feels meaningful to them. Their motivations, capacity, and preferred ways of participating will not all look the same.
Trust depends on follow-through. Asking for input matters only if people can see that their ideas were heard and taken seriously.
The next step should not be an afterthought. Strong community engagement creates natural pathways from one interaction to the next.
Getting people through the door is one thing. Getting them to come back, contribute, build relationships, and eventually see a community as partly theirs is something else entirely.
That tension was at the heart of The Nonprofit Hive’s conversation on Beyond Participation: Rethinking Community Engagement, facilitated by Nicole Jamrozinski, Co-Director of Operations & Partnerships at The Nonprofit Hive, alongside Alice Aluoch of Global Health Council, Elijah van der Giessen of TechSoup, and Mesha Byrd of Scenario Six Collective.
Thank you to Bloomerang for sponsoring this conversation and supporting space for nonprofit professionals to dig into the realities of building stronger, more connected communities.
Why Meaningful Community Engagement Matters in Nonprofit Work Right Now
Nonprofits spend enormous energy creating opportunities for people to participate. We host events, build programs, invite feedback, recruit volunteers, create working groups, send surveys, and bring people together.
But attendance does not necessarily equal engagement.
As Alice put it:
“Participation is ‘I attended’. Engagement is ‘I came back’. But where we are right now is moving to or trying to figure out, how we move to investment and ownership, which really is ‘I helped make this community better for someone else’.”
That shift changes the questions organizations need to ask.
It is no longer simply: How do we get more people involved?
It becomes: Do people feel like they belong here? Can they influence what happens? Is there a meaningful role for them? And have we created enough space for them to make this community their own?
Those questions also force us to look at power. Who is invited? Whose ideas influence decisions? Who feels comfortable participating? And how much control are organizations actually willing to give up?
Rethinking Community Engagement Beyond Participation
Ownership Requires Organizations to Loosen Their Grip
One of the strongest tensions in the conversation was also one of the simplest: nonprofits often say they want community ownership while continuing to orchestrate almost everything.
Elijah described his measure of success this way:
“When community members see a problem and step in to start solving it without asking me for permission, that’s the community I want.”
But getting there requires restraint.
“Community Managers are helpful by nature – our default behavior is to respond,” Elijah explained. “So we forget to step back for a moment to create a space for others. If we don’t leave a void (however painful it may be to us!) for others to fill, our members will never step into a leadership role.”
Mesha framed this as a practice of power-sharing. Organizations have to learn to “share the room” and trust people enough to participate in ways that have not been fully planned in advance.
Structure still matters. But there is a difference between creating a container and controlling everything that happens inside it.
Meaningful Engagement Has to Feel Meaningful to the Person
It is easy to design engagement around what an organization needs: volunteers, committee members, event attendees, survey responses, donors or advocates.
The panel challenged nonprofits to reverse that perspective.
Mesha emphasized creating experiences that are useful to people and realistic about their capacity. For one person, engagement might mean attending a one-hour meeting. For another, it could be answering a survey, having a 30-minute conversation or eventually taking on leadership.
Elijah similarly encouraged organizations to understand the individual motivations behind participation rather than assuming everyone wants the same thing.
That also means accepting that not everyone who enters a community will stay.
The goal is not to push every person toward maximum engagement. It is to create meaningful ways for people to participate at different levels, while making deeper involvement possible for those who want it.
Trust Is Built Through What Happens After We Listen
Listening is often treated as engagement in itself.
But Mesha pointed to a harder part of the equation: what happens after people tell us what they need?
“When people see that you listened and responded, and really invested in their ideas, they’re gonna trust you more.”
Organizations can run listening sessions, surveys and community consultations, but asking for input creates an expectation. If nothing changes and people never hear what happened to their contribution, engagement can quickly become transactional.
Follow-through is part of the relationship.
It does not mean organizations can act on every suggestion. It means being transparent about what was heard, what is possible, what is not, and what happens next.
Over time, that consistency is what helps turn participation into trust and trust into belonging.
The Next Engagement Starts Before This One Ends
Anyone who has run a nonprofit event knows the feeling. You reach the end, breathe a sigh of relief, and immediately turn toward the next deadline.
But that can also be the moment when community momentum disappears.
“You shouldn’t wait till the end of a convening to think about what’s next,” Mesha said. “I think the convening should set you up for what’s next.”
Alice described it similarly: “Every interaction should actually create a bridge to the next one.”
That does not necessarily mean immediately asking someone to do more. The next step could simply be another conversation, an introduction, an invitation to reconnect or an opportunity to continue exploring the same interest.
The important part is that continuity is intentional.
Instead of asking how to re-engage people weeks later, organizations can begin thinking about the next relationship point before the first experience even happens.
Belonging Cannot Depend on Being the Loudest Person in the Room
Community engagement often privileges people who already know how to participate.
They are comfortable walking into networking events, introducing themselves, raising their hands, joining committees and offering opinions.
Alice cautioned against designing communities exclusively around those behaviours.
“You don’t have to see yourself as a community person to actually belong in a community.”
For some people, the first step is simply being given permission to stay awhile.
Mesha similarly talked about the “real personhood” involved in entering a new space and trying to understand where you fit. People may need time before they are ready to contribute or lead.
That is why meaningful community engagement needs multiple pathways. Some people may want to lead a chapter or join a committee. Others may answer a survey, share a resource, attend occasionally or connect one-on-one.
Those forms of participation do not have to be treated as lesser versions of community.
What This Could Look Like in Practice
For nonprofit leaders and community builders, the challenge is not necessarily to create more engagement opportunities. It may be to look more carefully at the ones that already exist.
Where are people given genuine influence rather than simply asked for input? What happens after someone attends their first event? Are there different ways to participate depending on capacity and comfort? Do people know how they can become more involved if they want to?
And perhaps most importantly, is there enough space for people to build relationships with one another without the organization always sitting at the centre?
Alice described the goal for Global Health Council as moving from people saying, GHC connected me, toward something deeper:
“This is my community, and I have a role to making it valuable.”
That is a fundamentally different measure of engagement.
What This Conversation Leaves Us Thinking About
Meaningful community engagement is not a single invitation, event or participation metric.
As Nicole reflected toward the end of the conversation, it is a series of signals: you are welcome here, your contribution matters, and there is a meaningful next place for you within this community.
Organizations can create the invitation and build the infrastructure. They can make introductions, offer pathways, listen, follow through and remove barriers.
But eventually, thriving communities become bigger than the organizations that convene them.
Perhaps that leaves nonprofit leaders with a different question to consider:
Are we designing engagement primarily to keep people connected to our organization, or are we creating the conditions for people to become meaningfully connected to one another?
Meet the Participants
Nicole Jamrozinski, Co-Director of Operations & Partnerships at The Nonprofit Hive, facilitated the conversation, bringing a community-builder and event perspective to questions of belonging, reciprocity and what happens after people first connect.
Alice Aluoch, Director of Membership & Operations at Global Health Council, brought experience building connection within the global health community, including creating lower-barrier opportunities for professionals to develop relationships beyond traditional meetings and events.
Elijah van der Giessen, Canada Country Manager at TechSoup, brought years of experience with volunteer and community-led spaces, challenging organizations to think differently about ownership, motivation and their willingness to step back.
Mesha Byrd, Founder and Collaborator at Scenario Six Collective, brought a focus on intentional community engagement, power-sharing, trust and designing participation around the needs and capacity of the people organizations hope to engage.
