Talking and doing trust in community relations

Abstract

Trust is at the heart of the relationship between organisations and their community stakeholders and underpins all community engagement (CE) practices. There is, however, very little research that examines this relationship in practice. This reflects the fact that community relations is still an emerging field of practice and not easy to define. It remains unregulated with no formally recognised training requirements. Practitioners tend to work from a ‘personal orientation rather than one grounded in social research or theory’ (Kemp 2004, p. 9). Community relations work is consequently not always seen as ‘professional’ in the traditional sense (Kemp 2004, p. 9) and the role of community relations within organisations can be (and often is) low-profile. This is reflected by the frequent location of its practitioners in other departments such as public relations or external affairs, a situation which probably accounts for it being associated in the public arena with ‘PR spin’ (Kemp 2004, p. 9).

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