Funded through the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), VCU’s Center on Society and Health and the Engaging Richmond team collected community-level data through multiple “community conversations” in the city of Richmond, VA in order to better understand civic engagement and volunteering at the local level. The “Community Conversations” helped to:
- Identify examples of how volunteering and civic engagement, “at the community level,” are manifested
- Identify factors that promote or inhibit the realization of these activities
- Identify practices that can potentially strengthen the capacity of local communities to foster civic engagement and volunteering
- Enhance the capacity of communities to measure these activities and their outcomes
- Assess the relative feasibility of various data collection strategies for community level Civic Engagement
This project was part of a larger feasibility study focusing on the methodology CNCS considered employing in subsequent efforts to assess civic engagement within American communities.