Surfacing, spreading and sharing community capacity to lead and innovate
There are some 10,000 ‘places’ in Australia and only a handful who are the focus of direct community-led investment. From sharing decision-making responsibilities to self-determining local outcomes there is growing interest in the potential for more impactful policy, strategic planning and implementation by building place-based capacity for community-led change but limited direct investment in building community capacity on the ground. In order to realise the potential of community-led innovation we need to invest in activities that can surface, spread and share its benefits across Country.
But when so many priorities are set outside community, how do we build authentic relationships? How do we know which communities and when they are ‘ready’? How do we establish social licence and distribute money to community quickly and equitably?
We’ve seen firsthand, in projects including Our Town and Fire to Flourish, that when direct investment supports the spread and sharing of community capacity to lead and innovate, communities can tackle long-established place-based challenges. This could involve better coordination of local services and shifting relationships with government, but more often progress is made by strengthening existing community-led networks and sparking new in-community actions.
We’ve supported progress in these contexts by:
- Starting with local and First Nations Peoples knowledges and building from existing strengths
- Holding true to principles that prioritise cultural safety, inclusion and connection
- Deepening social connections with a focus on vertical social capital and diversifying local-system relationships
- Anchoring around social innovation – building capability to innovate, orchestrate and demonstrate through creativity, entrepreneurship and systems thinking
- Drawing on local and international best practice and evidence – eg participatory granting, co-governance, and participatory decision making.
- Networking places to draw on each others learning and capabilities
Real world application
In our experience, strengthening community capabilities to lead and innovate can activate change that enhances resilience, deepens social capital, respects and evolves with Country, and ensures equitable futures.
In communities that we’ve worked in across regional Australia, community members have identified focusing on the following capabilities as key to community-led change:
Cultural safety: Enabling diverse peoples to work safely together. “I now feel encouraged and supported to step out and do proper acknowledgments. I feel connected with what I am saying when I do so.”
Community-led action: Mobilising decisions around local ways of being, knowing, doing and valuing. “What we did here is more important today than when we started and will flow through to the next communities as they co-design more solutions.”
Holistic resilience: Imagining preferred futures while planning for interconnected natural, social, built and economic impacts of challenges. “Our approach to perceived community issues has permanently changed to a more holistic view incorporating the principles across the natural, social, built and economic environments.”
Network and adaptive learning: Increasing social capital, movement building and weaving knowledge across complex local-global networks. “One of the things that really struck me was the variety of approaches to recovery from bushfires and how people think of it in a different way.” “…what’s happening here is happening elsewhere… So the needs of our community are also the needs of other communities.”
Social innovation: Addressing system barriers by experimenting with new ways for old problems: “the deep change lives in the process.” “Our story will continue…wiser, more ready and better for the whole experience.”
A focus on capability building doesn’t mean we need to reinvent the wheel
There is a strong global movement of people building the infrastructures and practices for communities to lead into the future including co-governance, participatory granting, and community-led innovation. Drawing on this work, and adapting it for local context can help speed up local activation.
And these capabilities can be integrated at different stages of an initiative: strengthening existing efforts, as seen in Hands Up Mallee; co-designing new initiatives with community members, as seen in Fire to Flourish; or embedding them structurally for long-term impact, as demonstrated in Our Town.
Examples of our work in this area
Reflecting on the diversity of our work, we’ve seen four common patterns of how collectively we’ve helped social innovation happen in place, with community.
Our Town
Building the capabilities of regional towns in South Australia to develop community responses to mental health.
Catalysing regenerative capabilities in place
Co-creating and delivering three Local Learning Labs in place to catalyse regenerative capabilities in place.
The Regional Innovator’s Network (RIN)
The Regional Innovation Network turns learning and innovation in the regions on its head.
The Welcome Experience
Designing a community-based initiative to help regional NSW communities attract and retain essential workers
