4 ways we can work together to realise the potential of place

The best consultation processes blend local knowledge and ideas with technical and systems expertise whilst building strong, lasting relationships with communities. 

In our experience, which includes major government, corporate and philanthropic consultations, we’ve found it helpful to prioritise three things when designing and running great consultation processes:

1. Relationships: start by building authentic relationships through processes that prioritise trust, active collaboration and partnership

2. Imagination: bring creativity to the table as essential for holding change, creating connection and realising potential.

3. Voice: explore innovative mechanisms for activating community in decision-making.

These three priorities are scalable to different breadths of response and can be used to inform place initiatives at their outset - or to improve on existing projects.

With Fire to Flourish we drew on all three to deliver trauma-informed, community development processes and community-led responses to disaster resilience. Whereas, in the Welcome Experience we’ve used it to inform Regional NSW’s design of a new service ecosystem. Currently, in the Ballarat Saturation Model we are working with Respect Victoria to bring community-voice into the ongoing design and implementation of the model.

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 - and to do that well we need to invest in activities that can surface, spread and share its benefits.

We’ve made progress in these contexts by:

• Starting with local knowledges and building from existing strengths 

• Holding true to principles that prioritise cultural safety, inclusion and connection 

• Building 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 towns to draw on each others learning and capabilities 

These capabilities can be brought into existing initiatives as we did in Hands Up Mallee or initiatives can be designed alongside community members as we did with Fire to Flourish or to structurally embrace these ways of working as they were with Our Town. Approaches can be designed to be locally specific, or as replicable models that can be adapted to the unique potential of every place.

More and more, governments, PHNs, not-for-profits, philanthropy as well as communities themselves are committing to place-based responses to address complex whole-of-community challenges including wellbeing, violence, disaster response, gambling and addiction, housing and early childhood outcomes. 

But when your focus is everything, where do you start, and how do you move at a speed appropriate to both the complexity and urgency of the situation? 

In our experiences, designing holistic place-based responses – which include addressing domestic and family violence with PHNs, and disaster responses with philanthropy – we’ve found it helpful to anchor the conversation, understanding of the current situation, and response at at least three levels: whole person, whole community, and whole system. 

• A whole person focus recognises the entanglement of big issues in the lives of individuals and families across generations and the unique insight people’s lived experience gives them into potential new opportunities.  

• A whole community focus is critical to understanding the diversity of needs and opportunities in the local area - across cultures and demographic groups , developing community based responses that can work at scale, and creating an authorising environment for broader shifts in the formal service-system.

•  A whole system focus is needed to generate shared understanding about the current state, desired futures state and identify levers for change - set priorities for action -to create enabling conditions for change through resourcing,  infrastructure and cultures.

These three levels frameworks are scalable to different breadths of response and can be used in the design of initiatives at their outset - or to improve on existing initiatives.  

With Brisbane South PHN we used a version of the framework to develop holistic responses to domestic and family violence from within the primary care system. Whereas, in Our Town we’ve used it to develop whole community responses to support community wellbeing.

The forces shaping the second quarter of the 21st century are creating unprecedented challenges and opportunities for social cohesion across Australia: more frequent and intense weather events, technological disruption of local economies, gender-based violence, ageing in place, collective wellbeing and extremisms of all kinds.

Many experts predict that these forces will accelerate inequality - unless we do something about it. The opportunity as we see it is to create the time and space to reimagine the future of our communities with processes that are  grounded in likely realities, imbued with a sense of possibility and informed and inspired by change that is already happening in communities around the world. 

In our work we’ve found that processes that support communities to envision and act on new futures:

1. Connect diverse populations to forge new and unlikely relationships

2. Expand sense of possibility so that what seems unthinkable today becomes a sensible choice tomorrow

3. Embrace multiple knowledge and perspectives in a way that deepens understanding of past, present and future possibilities.

4. Influence strategy and resource allocation to focus on tangible change and making preferred futures a reality

5. Inspire collective action and provide proof of what’s possible

These are principles that can be used to inform short engagements as we did with WWF or longer more intensive processes that we completed with communities through Fire to Flourish and are shaping up through the National Futures Initiative.