Collaboration: The process of working hand-in-hand with equal partners, cooperatively, to develop a product that is not owned by any single individual. 

Collaborators: People who participate in the process of collaboration. While collaborators' involvement in a process may wax and wane, they must be treated as equals among all collaborators. Making sure collaborators have the same amount of power as the others is crucial to practicing a just form of community engagement.  

Community: The people who live in and are invested in a shared, specific, culturally-designated locality; the people themselves, not just their elected, appointed, or self-appointed leaders. The boundaries of a community are often unclear and change over time and from person to person. For example, when working to increase the funding of local schools, the community may include students, school district employees, and parents but it may also include everyone who lives in the school district since changes to the quality of local education will have rippling effects, from the health of people to the health of the economy and beyond. In the case of a water system, everyone who uses a shared water system may be considered to be in community with one another, even if they would not consider themselves to be members of the same cultural or religious community.

Engagement: Involving those people who would be affected by a project in every step of that project; opening the opportunity for collaboration to the community. Being engaged in your community means taking part in decisions, showing up for meetings, paying attention to other people's situations and doing your part to improve life. When community leaders engage their constituents and neighbors, they can find strong partners and supporters. 

Leverage: To use existing assets to receive something new. There are several different ways that this term can be applied. For example, having grant money from one source can be leveraged to receive another grant from a different source since the second grant provider may be more willing to give money to a project if they know it will enhance an existing project (rather than be the initiating funds for a start-up project). For another example, imagine that instead of grant money, the "asset" is people motivated to make a change. If a sizeable enough group of people were mobilized to attend a city council meeting in support of a certain measure, they may leverage their combined voting power to convince a majority of city council members to vote in favor of the measure.   

Mobilize: To organize people into a group unified by their desire to achieve a goal. This is most effectively done when community members educate and activate one another, creating an exponential growth rate.  

Regional collaboration or partnership, sometimes called regionalization: The collaboration of two or more communities or utilities in the same geographic area, by forming formal or informal partnerships. There is a wide range of regional collaboration types, ranging from informal cooperation, and contractual assistance or contract services, to shared governance and full managerial and/or physical consolidation.

Water burden: The percentage of household income that goes towards drinking water bills and sewage disposal services. A recent study on household water affordability in Kentucky showed that there is large variation in water bills across Kentucky, with the largest bills primarily located in Eastern and Western Kentucky. It also showed that areas with higher water burdens tend to have higher than the average water bills, and that repairing and replacing failing infrastructure - in the short-term at least - drives up water bills.

This guide was created by Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a nonprofit organization that is a network for scholarly and community collaboration to build economic futures based on local assets, values, and vision. We believe that people understand their own places, environments, and communities in ways that are essential to good public policy and good science. As a link-tank, we focus on connecting local knowledge with specialized expertise.