Community Engagement Workers L&D

Community Engagement Workers

The Community Engagement Worker (CEW) role was developed for people with lived experience of vulnerabilities. This could look like mental health, addiction, learning disabilities, neurodiversity, homelessness or criminal justice system experience as some examples. Your lived experience* would be used to support others who may benefit from community support in addition to treatment and other interventions. 

As a Community Engagement Worker, we act as advocates and help to agree goals with service users, support in accessing relevant services and we provide emotional and practical support. Using wisdom through our own experiences, we inspire hope and belief in our service users.

Some aspects of the role can include:

• Supporting and promoting recovery from vulnerabilities and challenges

• Co-ordinating action plans with the service user to promote change and access support

• Emphasise hope and optimism in engagement methods using techniques such as motivational interviewing and rapport building

• Working with local community resources to obtain the best outcome for the individual

• Data recording to maintain accurate service user journey documentation and to assist continuous service improvement

As a Community Engagement Worker, you have access to support within your direct team of CEWs, all of which have differing backgrounds and levels of experience but are always there to support each other. Each employee has a line manager and clinical supervisor who they will meet with regularly, but can contact on any occasion for support; as well as that, there is the wider Liaison and Diversion (L&D) team which consists of clinical leads, the duty team and qualified practitioners and facilitators that can provide support and advice throughout your career. 

Alongside the mandatory training, there are numerous opportunities to access and complete other training courses to develop your skills and support your progression whether that is within the role, or for further career progression and you will be supported by your team, manager and clinical supervisor throughout it all.

No two days as a CEW are the same and no two service users are the same either, even when they have the same support needs and being part of their life changing support work can be extremely rewarding and provide a sense of proudness amongst yourself and the wider team and all success stories are recognised and praised amongst the whole team.

*Lived experience is the things that someone has experienced themselves, especially when these give the person knowledge and understanding that people who have only heard about such experiences cannot have. Community Engagement Workers can use shared experience to enable trust to develop. (Gillard et al., 2014)