How TACSI can support the development of holistic place-based responses

A whole person perspective 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 new opportunities.  

Whole person understanding requires methods for seeing the current situation and future opportunities from the perspective of individuals and small groups that are trauma-informed, strengths based and culturally aware. With Brisbane South PHN that meant creating an anonymous phone line to build understanding of women experiencing violence, with Fire to Flourish it meant creating principles-led codesign circles that could build trust and cross-cultural understanding through the design process. 

Whole person responses often include supporting widespread take-up of trauma informed, strengths based, culturally aware practices across service delivery and creating new forms of peer-to-peer support that can be responsive to complexity. 

A whole community perspective is critical to understanding the diversity of needs and opportunities in the local area. Across cultures and demographic groups, it’s key to develop community based responses that can work at scale, to create an authorising environment for broader shifts in the formal service-system.

Whole community understanding often includes collaborative processes that use story and imagination to develop a shared vision for the future and identify opportunities for change grounded in community strengths. 

In Coober Pedy, this meant learning from the community in ways that worked for groups, families and individuals including long yarns, tangible ways to imagine the future together, putting on group feeds and joining in on the day-to-day. 

For Local Learning Labs this meant meeting participants where they are at, working with their own knowledge and experience of their region, connecting with peers who have different interests and capabilities, and leaving them feeling more confident and capable to take the next steps that work for them.

Whole community responses that effectively activate community resources for change include platforms for peer-to-peer support at scale, R&D support for community developed innovations to spread and scale, the creation of new groups, governance, deliberative processes for governance and granting that give community genuine agency over power. 

Achieving this often means shifting the mindset of leaders in the formal service-system to embrace the value of community-driven responses as a complement to professionally delivered responses. 

Where we’ve seen the potential of community level responses, compromised communities have been drawn into governance and participation with the service system – and opportunities to realise the unique potential for community to do the things professionals can’t – has been overlooked.

A whole system perspective 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.

Whole system understanding requires a systems thinking approach that moves from an understanding of the past, to the articulation of preferential future and back into determining priorities for action in the present. These are social and creative processes bringing together diverse perspectives, including people’s lived experience. This often requires careful facilitation of the expectations of participants, rebalancing power dynamics, bringing together diverse expertise whilst supporting people to admit they don’t know what works, experiment with new responses and keep learning as they embrace a portfolio of responses. 

Whole system responses require ongoing coordination we’ve seen work in the Good Death Impact Network (GDIN), a network we have supported to  convene since 2018, and the four network practices that our GDIN work has helped us put into practice: togetherness, in-betweenness, emergence, and wellbeing. These practices create a fertile ground for shifting systems by cultivating deep, authentic connections, a shared understanding of systems and collective intelligence.

In our experience this three level framework for understanding and response – person, community, system –  is scalable to different breadths of response and can be used in the design of initiatives 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. 

We’re currently working in Ballarat to inform the design of a place-based saturation model for primary prevention of intimate partner violence, as we did to inform the design of a model for community-led resilience in the Fire-to-Flourish initiative. But equally, the framework could be used to support gaps and opportunities in connecting existing responses, as we have done by scaling a model for connecting local primary care systems with FDSV services with PHN’s across the country.