Ways to Harness Community Participation

Now that you and your Citizenship Team have embraced the Citizenship Through Sports Alliance concept, your next mission is to spread the word throughout the community and develop alliances with targeted groups. To accomplish this, there are two energizing and effective activities that will help keep your team motivated -and attract other participants: training seminars and the staging of a Community Citizenship Summit.

Both activities will serve to:

• Introduce the concept and rationale of your group's efforts to heighten citizenship in your community to a number of key audiences
• Bring a number of individuals together who represent various aspects of the community
• Work together to build a functional definition of citizenship for your community
• Determine collaborative methods that:
• Promote the values of citizenship
• Identify volunteer needs
• Provide citizenship-experience opportunities throughout the community
• Coordinate volunteer and other citizenship efforts
• Identify and create community-wide projects that spotlight citizenship and its rewards

Before those two activities are discussed, however, following are potential target audiences that you may wish to "court" in order to reach the objective of community support and participation. The identified groups below are pertinent to the Citizenship Training Seminars. Details about staging the Community Citizenship Summit and targeted groups will be discussed in another section of this Website entitled "Community Citizenship Summit."

1. Teachers and coaches. Stress to these important adults of influence the fertile environment they have in which to demonstrate citizenship to students.



2. Parents and grandparents. What parent doesn't want their child to be a good citizen? Tell parents that at the seminar you'll give them "10 ways to turn great kids into great citizens."



3. Business leaders. Good citizens benefit business. Promise business leaders that the seminar will provide them with several different opportunities to become involved in your citizenship program, and they'll be viewed as good corporate citizens.