Your external community is made up of the larger community around you, such as neighbors and other community members. It is imperative that you make allies with people in your larger community, city, county, health jurisdiction, and/or your state, to help ensure that things do not escalate with the larger community either.

Most of the best practices for building internal community, such as being transparent and accountable, are equally true for building your external community, but there are some specific skills for building external community. These include:

• Map your community—Starting from the central location where you provide services, make a map of each block in the surrounding area. Look for community assets (schools, churches, stores, community organizations, clinics, parks, etc.), places where there might be potential participants, and issues you or your participants may encounter. If you can, walk these blocks and talk to folks about the neighborhood, your work, and any services that might be available to them, such as community cleanup of bio-waste.
• Offer tours or open houses—Offer regular tours to community members. This helps with transparency and builds community trust while demystifying harm reduction services. NOTE: Many organizations choose to do this during a time when they are not providing regular services in order to protect participant confidentiality.
• Practice public speaking—Find community groups like Toastmasters or other ways to practice public speaking and connect these opportunities to the leaders you cultivate. Telling your and or your organization’s story can be critical in so many ways.
• Build a presence in social and other media—Make sure your organization has a social media presence and, where useful, one in the regular media as well. Where possible, it is most useful for you to post things that are constructive, educational, and/or helpful to the community. Never miss an opportunity to broadcast about your achievements, no matter how small.
• Create the position of community relations liaison—Have someone at your organization ready to act as a spokesperson if a reporter approaches you for comment on current events impacting your clients, and make sure local journalists know that person is available, along with contact information.
• Have regular events—Holding regular events to celebrate successes, get to know constituents, and raise funds helps build your organization’s public profile and external community.
• Be compassionate with everyone—It’s essential that harm reduction organizations extend the same compassion to everyone they come in contact with, in order to build community trust—even among those they may have a knee-jerk negative response to. Not only do you not know who might become an ally, it’s important to ensure that you can never be accused of bias towards people who might become problematic to the organization.
• Be positive—People are more attracted to organizations that are positive and uplifting, so try to build a positive message into everything that you do. It can be tempting to be cynical or reactive, OGs warn, but a temporary good feeling of righteousness can lead to years of headaches.
• Look for organizations and coalitions with aligned values—Seek out organizations and coalitions with values that are similar to yours when building alliances or partnerships.
• Participate in professional and national organizations—Participate in professional organizations to get ideas, access to resources, build alliances, and credibility.