Sustainance of Community Engagement – Is it a Feasible Feat?

Community engagement is given much importance nowadays in Malaysia, especially in line with Institutes of Higher Learning's tripartite mission, the third mission being able to engage with communities. It is not surprising because community engagement offers enormous benefits for regional and societal development. Community engagement relies heavily on partnership and mutual reciprocity between different stakeholders such as communities, universities, non-government organizations (NGOs), field experts and funding organizations. In order to sustain the engagement initiatives, it is important to know who are the ‘owners’ or stakeholders of the program. The current gap on community engagement is on evaluation and measurement of the impacts towards the stakeholders, mainly the community that are being engaged with. This paper addresses the gap by providing a discussion on the stakeholder approach on evaluation of community engagement initiatives. The evaluation using the stakeholders approach will not only create a holistic evaluation process, but it will also assist in fostering a sense of ownership of the community engagement program.