Community Engagement using World Café: The Well London Experience

The Well London programme was launched across twenty boroughs in London during late 2007 to improve the health and well-being of residents living in some of the most deprived communities in London. Well London employed a multi-stage community engagement process which informed the overall project strategy for each intervention area. In this article we establish and describe the key principles that guided the design of this innovative community engagement process. Principles included building collaborative partnerships, working with whole-systems, privileging community knowledge and working with the deficit of experience in each area. The article then describes in detail how these principles were operationalised throughout the preparation and delivery of forty World Cafes, which were the first open community activities of the Well London community engagement process. Finally, this article reflects on and summarises the lessons learned when employing innovative, inclusive and transparent community engagement for health promotion.