Supporting Community Action: Lessons from Australia

1. Supporting Community Action:
Lessons from Australia
Ingrid Burkett, IACD

2. Quick overview of community development in
Australia
- History: Adoption of frameworks from elsewhere, but a
fundamentally different context
- Much more stark urban / rural practice differences
- Disadvantage / Poverty: locality based, but also identity
based
- Vast distances makes for some diversity in practice
traditions across states
- CD workers predominantly in community organisations
rather than government

3. Towards An Ecology of Organising
- Not only about
‘big’ and ‘small’
organisations;
- Different
functions within a
broader
‘development’
agenda
- Valuing the
difference rather
than quashing it

4. Social Service
Organisations
Community
Organisations
People’s
Organisations

5. Illustrating the ecology of organisation:
the case of working to address financial exclusion

6. People’s Organisations are
at the heart of real change
•
Informal learning from and
with peers
•
Relationship development
is as important as ‘hard’
outcomes
•
Leadership development
and confidence building is
transferable
•
People’s organisations are
not ‘for ever’ but the
relationships and effects
can be

7. Lessons from supporting emerging people’s
organisations
- POs need a strong ‘connecting’ point, catalyst, or need to form
- POs built from existing relationships are easier, stronger and
longer lasting than if there are no existing relationships
- In economically focussed POs, money isn’t the best ‘glue’ on its
own
- Strengths and assets of groups need to be identified and valued
from the get-go
- Ongoing engagement with POs is a delicate art - there has to
be an internal heart beat for a group to really keep going

8. But people’s
organisations need
to be connected
to pathways...

9. We don’t always
know what we
don’t know....
so community
action doesn’t
always naturally
emerge out of POs

10. How much of the
struggle can we juggle?
Image Source: Atelier Populare,
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/april/may-1968-a-graphic-uprising

11. The case of
enterprising
communities...
if the
pathways are
not there,
people can’t
move out of
disadvantage

12. Work with us to find
pathways
Work with us to find
pathways
It wasn’t just about working with grass-roots
enterprises, it was about ensuring that they could
thrive in the system and actually lead to impacts.

13. The pathways had to
lead out of welfare...
Building stronger networks of people’s
organisations or linking POs to COs did not
change the viability of enterprises....what was
needed was horizontal and vertical linkages to
different habitats / ecologies...

14. Stretching the Ecology for Community Economic
Development
State and Federal Government
Local Government
Big Businesses
Medium-sized Businesses
Small Businesses
Micro-enterprises

15. Mapping the system...

16. Visual Mapping and Engaging People in Mapping Systems
can not only help to build on community assets....it can
create a picture of possibility for everyone involved.

17. SEE how parts link to the whole...
SEE gaps and opportunities.....
IDENTIFY challenges.....
START to design innovative responses....