Applying place-based approaches to strengthen social and community support systems

Applying place-based approaches to strengthen social and community support systems

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As strategic partners of Spring Impact, we have been pleased to coordinate an international study of place-based approaches to early childhood development this year with support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. The term ‘place-based’ was new to us, but it soon became clear how this way of thinking and doing underpins much of our work.

Place-based approaches shift the focus of development practice from projects and programs to place, meaning a particular sub-national geographic area such as a county, district, or municipality. The logic underlying these approaches is that wellbeing is closely tied to geography, and that improving the situation for people living there requires adaptive, responsive, and cooperative action by a diverse array of actors. Instead of prescribing a particular set of activities to address a complex social need or problem, place-based approaches compel a wide range of people from different sectors and sections of the community to ask, ‘How can we work together to make this a better place?’

This logic links social impact to locally-driven action. If wellbeing is closely tied to geography, and improving the situation for people living there requires adaptive and responsive action, then no one is better positioned to drive that action than the people most closely connected to that place. While many approaches to social and economic development value local participation and empowerment, place-based approaches frame local leadership, information, and decision-making as absolutely crucial to success.

This resonates strongly with our experience in social development settings. For example:

Stronger Communities for Children

The Stronger Communities for Children (SCfC) initiative strengthens capacity in remote Aboriginal communities to give children the best start in life. Working closely with our partners at Ninti One, and funded by the Australian Government, we have aimed to ensure that local people have a real say in decisions made about service delivery. In 2017, Community Works conducted a literature review on Collective Impact that informed the strategic framework used by Ninti One to design and implement SCfC. Since then, Steve Fisher has worked closely with local communities to plan, monitor, evaluate, and learn from the initiative. Their guide for measuring local change can be viewed here.  Listen to community board members discuss their experiences with SCfC here.

Mental Health Friendly Cities  

Community Works has supported the Mental Health Friendly Cities initiative since its inception as a key partner of citiesRISE, a global platform for transforming mental health policy and practice. The initiative focuses on urban municipalities as drivers of change, places where cross-sectoral cooperation to integrate measures for improving mental health can lead broader systems change. Mental Health Friendly Cities facilitate and leverage leadership by young people to change the narrative around mental health, improve access to support, foster social cohesion and create environments that are conducive to wellbeing. Coordinated action at the local level and sharing of knowledge across cities are crucial factors in identifying proven solutions and accelerating their uptake.

Grant Activity Reviews

In partnership with Ninti One, Community Works has been reviewing a government-funded program for socio-economic development in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia. These reviews are ‘place-based’ in the sense that evaluation teams take a holistic, cross-sectoral approach to understanding the impact of the program in specific remote areas, and determining strategies for improvement that build on local strengths and target the needs and aspirations of local people. Part of Community Works’ role in this work has been to prepare briefing reports that equip evaluation teams with rich contextual information about each place they visit, including local history, demographics, health and education data, culture, and topical issues that should be factored into the review process.

In each of the examples above, we work with our partners to take an in-depth, holistic look into particular places and how they function, in order to empower local people to drive programs and services that produce social benefits for the whole population. 

At Community Works, we understand that strong, healthy and empowered communities are basic building blocks for development. In our experience, place-based approaches are especially powerful when working with First Nations and other communities whose identities and belief systems are closely tied to land. From this cultural standpoint, place-based thinking is highly intuitive.

As national and international development agencies and funding bodies become more interested in place-based approaches, we see great potential for improving the alignment of large-scale initiatives with local agendas, value systems and ways of thinking. Investing in a place-based approach means supporting strong relationships between people working together for positive social change. It means strengthening information flows from communities to service providers to governments and back again. It means trusting the people most closely connected to a place to drive local decision-making, because they are the ones best positioned to lead progress toward a shared vision. For national and international agencies, it means playing a supporting role rather than the lead.

For all of these reasons, Community Works sees place-based thinking as both highly compatible with self-determination and highly pragmatic when it comes to achieving better outcomes for disadvantaged populations.  We look forward to contributing to the emerging evidence base on these approaches, and continuing to work with our partners to support best practice.

Click here to read our report ‘Scaling up place-based strategies to strengthen community early childhood systems’

Young Dark Emu: A new resource for conflict transformation in Australia

Young Dark Emu: A new resource for conflict transformation in Australia

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Over the school holidays, I had the pleasure of attending the launch of Bruce Pascoe’s new book, Young Dark Emu, along with my eight-year-old daughter. Young Dark Emu looks at the highly advanced land cultivation methods developed by Aboriginal people in this country through the eyes of early colonial settlers, who often struggled to make sense of what they were seeing. The book is written for children, but it is also very informative for grown-ups reading it with them.

There are three aspects of this book that make it a wonderful resource for transforming the way that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people relate to one another in this county:

  • What it tells us
  • How it tells us
  • How it links to broader conversations about Australia’s future

What Young Dark Emu tells us

Young Dark Emu tells us that Australia was a place of great capacity and innovation long before boats arrived from Europe. It gives us rich details about farming methods, fishing technologies, and the use of fire to manage the land. It teaches us that bread was invented right here in Australia, and points out the importance of this invention to humankind.

At the launch of his book, Bruce Pascoe explained that when he was growing up, he was taught at school that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who roamed the land seeking opportunities to kill animals and pluck berries in order to eke out their subsistence. As he grew older, he began to realise that what he had been taught at school sat very awkwardly with what he learned from his grandparents and other Aboriginal elders, who described long histories of intentional cultivation of the land, and management of steady and reliable food sources. This tension prompted him to research the historical accounts of early colonial settlers to learn more about what they saw when they arrived.

Pascoe’s research sought a truer history of Australia, and Young Dark Emu makes this history accessible to children.  Its focus on land management and cultivation sheds light on a key point that has fuelled conflict in Australia since colonial times:

Before the British claimed Australia as their territory, they declared it terra nullius – which means ‘land belonging to no one’. Although they knew Aboriginal people lived here, the British argued Australia was not settled because there was no evidence of houses, towns, roads or farms. Britain used this reasoning to claim Australia (p. 44).

Young Dark Emu teaches us that houses, towns, roads, and farms did exist, along with a thriving economy and a grain belt that stretched across the entire continent. It also teaches us how the arrival of hooved and hungry animals decimated that grain belt and the economy it supported.

Speaking truth to conflict is well recognised as an important component in peacemaking processes, and has been identified as a crucial factor for reconciliation in Australia. Truth-telling is embedded in the Yolngu concept of Makarrata put forward in the key document produced by the First Nations National Constitutional Convention in 2017, The Uluru Statement from the Heart:

Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children… a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

Young Dark Emu is a powerful tool for Makarrata. Not only does it speak truth to conflict, it does so in a way that peacefully engages people from all walks of life.

How Young Dark Emu talks to readers

Speaking truth to conflict can be a painful process, and one that can either escalate or transform tensions. Research on communication in conflict settings suggests that howwe say things is even more important than whatwe say (Putnam 2006). Strategic communication requires careful attention to the emotions involved, the relationships between different people involved in the conflict, and the intended impact of the communication (Cloke & Goldsmith 2000). When we engage in truth-telling processes with the aim of transforming relationships between people with histories of conflict, it is extremely important to take care in how we express ourselves and, crucially, how our expressions of truth will be heard by people who are emotionally involved in the conflict.

Young Dark Emu expresses the truth about Aboriginal and colonial history in a way that is gentle and engaging. It recounts the stories of early settlers with empathy for their struggle to make sense of the new world they were exploring. For example, Pascoe acknowledges that:

Aboriginal farming would have looked very different to farming in England. Aboriginal people grew crops that were native to Australia and used tools and techniques suited to their environment (p. 33).

He speaks about colonial settlers in a way that refrains from spite, and gives credit where credit is due:

Charles Sturt was a good bushman and a great writer (p. 47).

At the same time, he exposes how entrenched racism limited the ability of many settlers to appreciate the advanced technologies of Aboriginal people. Rather than expressing his own thoughts on this, he offers the words of the settlers for the reader to judge. For example, after a detailed description of a fishing tool that automatically catapulted fish out of the water and onto a riverbank, one settler remarked that:

I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow catch fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true (p. 41).

When my daughter read that passage it stopped her in her tracks. ‘Lazy!?! How could he think that was lazy? That thing he was using to catch fish was genius!’  This opened a door for us to talk about prejudice and stereotypes, and laid groundwork for my daughter to broaden her perspective on race relations.

How Young Dark Emu links to broader conversations

Reading Young Dark Emu clarified, for me, how much all Australians have to gain from learning the true history of our country, and how much we have to lose from teaching Australian history as if it is something that really only began when Captain Cook landed here.

Recognition of Aboriginal history reinforces how important a First Nations Voice is to all Australians. I refer, again, to the Uluru Statement from the Heart:

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

By showing us examples of sustainable land management and food cultivation, Young Dark Emu demonstrates some very important aspects of the gift that a First Nations Voice offers us all.

By gently exposing the opportunities missed by early settlers to learn from agricultural technologies specifically developed for the new land that was confounding them, Pascoe’s work also shows us how racism and fear of ‘the other’ can derail human progress. It prompts us to imagine how life might be different if Australia’s first European settlers had embraced Aboriginal farming methods early on, if they had taken steps to preserve native food supply and carefully constructed aquaculture systems, if they had acknowledged critical fire management techniques.

As our country reckons with the growing challenges of climate change, we can no longer afford to refuse the gift of a First Nations Voice. The concluding page of Young Dark Emu presents our children with an impression of what is at stake:

Baiame, the creator Spirit Emu, left the earth after its creation to reside as a dark shape in the Milky Way. The emu is inextricably linked with the wide grasslands of Australia, the landscape managed by Aboriginal people. The fate of the emu, people, and grain are locked in step because, for Aboriginal people, the economy and the spirit are inseparable. Europeans stare at the stars, but Aboriginal people also see the spaces in between where the Spirit Emu resides (p. 73).

Pascoe shows us throughout this book why listening to the people whose culture evolved in tandem with the land we now share is crucial to building a sustainable economy. More importantly, he gets us to listen by teaching our children to take pride in the rich flora, fauna, and cultural heritage of the land where they live.

Young Dark Emu, along with Pascoe’s more in-depth publication, Dark Emu, are important tools for helping Australians embrace the gift of a First Nations Voice, give thanks, and pay our respects to the people it represents. In my ten years of practice with Community Works, it has been a privilege to witness and learn from the great ingenuity and innovation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We welcome opportunities to support the traditional custodians of the lands that make up Australia, and commit to listening to their voices and following their lead.

Some reflections on mental health for World Refugee Day

Some reflections on mental health for World Refugee Day

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World Refugee Day. My mother was not a refugee, but she wanted to be.

My mother was not a refugee, but she wanted to be. Her family applied for protection visas to escape the war unfolding all around them in Europe, but by the time they gained entry to the United States the bombs had stopped dropping. They fled to Austria from Germany, where my grandfather had been the conductor of the Radio Berlin Orchestra. The year my mother was born, he was dismissed from his position for refusing to fire Jewish musicians. Sensing the growing dangers in Berlin, the family moved to Salzburg, where the Nazis soon expanded their occupation. My mother spent the early years of her life running from air raids, hiding in caves and under bridges, scrounging to get enough food, and fighting to survive serious illnesses that kill many children of war. Today, as she turns 81, she is putting the finishing touches on a novel based on this history, dovetailed with the history of my father, a U.S. soldier who ran through blood-red water at Normandy on D-Day and then survived the Battle of the Bulge.

When I was growing up, both of my parents still struggled with their mental health and wellbeing as a result of their wartime experiences. They were both plagued by terrifying nightmares, episodes of depression, and irrational fears concerning my safety. My father was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when I was a teenager, and the illness made our home life extremely tense and unpredictable. It also had economic impacts as he became progressively incapacitated by the condition, and was no longer able to maintain his small business. My mother was pulled in all directions at once: caring for him, caring for me, and trying to keep a roof over all of our heads. This compounded her own challenges to mental health and wellbeing, and her resilience during the final years of my father’s life – and indeed the years following his death – still astounds me.

As a product of this environment, it is no surprise that I have spent much of my career studying peace, conflict, mental health and wellbeing. This year, the intersection of these elements has featured prominently in our work with the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). Last year, the WPA announced a new direction that prioritises the mental health and wellbeing of people facing conditions of extreme adversity, including the traumas inflicted by war. With most of the world’s 25.4 million refugees living in countries with less than one psychiatrist for every 100,000 inhabitants, community-based initiatives will be vital to this effort. For this reason, the WPA has sought research and advice from Community Works to develop its implementation strategy.

As part of this work, I was pleased to prepare a briefing paper to support a WPA planning workshop held in Madrid earlier this year. Specifically, the paper was created as a resource for the Alliance Project, which is being developed in partnership with the Juan José López-Ibor Foundation to better address the mental health needs of people affected by war, natural disasters, and other emergency situations. The paper reviewed the international evidence surrounding post-emergency mental health and wellbeing, and provided examples of how psychiatrists have supported communities to integrate psychosocial interventions into emergency response systems.

The work of the Alliance Project is important because war and other emergencies interrupt life for the people and communities affected by them on multiple levels:

  • Individuals who survive the initial trauma often face physical and practical challenges such as homelessness, hunger, injury, and disease.
  • At the same time, many also face the emotional distress of losing loved ones, livelihoods, and their sense of safety and stability.
  • Socially, survivors are often left with a narrower and less predictable support network as their family, friends, and community members struggle with similar physical, practical and emotional challenges.
  • Many of the people who engage in the task of supporting survivors are also survivors themselves, adding yet another level of challenge (Cohen 2002).

Left unaddressed, these complex psychological and social challenges can compound to generate further impacts at the community level, including endemic family violence, political and economic instability, and barriers to long-term peace (Whiting 2015).

Young children, in particular, require better psychosocial support following violent conflict, a point that stood out strongly in the literature we reviewed. In places with little mental health infrastructure, interventions designed to fill the gap face great challenges reaching entire populations of children. A systematic review of mental health and psychosocial support interventions for children affected by armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries found that:

Overall, interventions appeared to show promising results… However, these positive intervention benefits are often limited to specific subgroups. There is a need for increased diversification in research focus, with more attention to interventions that focus at strengthening community and family support, and to young children, and improvements in targeting and conceptualizing of interventions (Jordans et al. 2016, p. 8)

As the work of the WPA and the Alliance Project moves forward, it will continue to build from the existing evidence base to develop better support systems for communities affected by war and other widespread emergencies, with special attention to generating better outcomes for children and young people.

My role in this work will be to continue providing research support and evidence-based guidance. This includes coordinating a publication that Community Works will produce in partnership with the WPA and citiesRISE to inform mental health and psychosocial interventions for people facing conditions of persistent, extreme, and complex adversity.

Community Works will share that publication later this year, and I especially look forward to sharing it with my mother, who knows first hand that children who live through war need all the support they can get.

To all the refugees out there, I pay tribute to your strength, resilience, and determination to seek out a more peaceful life. I encourage you to tell your stories, which the world very much needs to hear. And to my mother I send wishes for a very happy birthday.

Community therapy? Parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building

Community therapy? Parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building

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“The parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building have helped me reflect on how to centre capacity-building processes around the strengths, knowledge, and experience possessed by people creating change in their communities” – Maria Rodrigues

Our colleague and Lead Researcher of Community Works, Maria Rodrigues has recently published a peer-reviewed article in the Community Development Journal, in which she discusses a parallel between capacity building in the context of community development and counselling in the context of psychotherapy. Based on this parallel Maria approaches the question: “can capacity building be conceptualized as community therapy?”

In a creative and rigorous way, Maria shares some of her experiences as a facilitator and reflects upon them by recalling elements from her psychology background. This brings to the table a different way of thinking about facilitation by comparing it to the way in which a counsellor might work with her or his clients. Using this analogy, Maria draws a parallel between a therapist, who helps individuals to cope with challenges and function better, and a facilitator, who helps groups to do the same in their communities.

A story… Maria introduces the parallel by describing the first time she facilitated a capacity-building workshop with a group of Indian Government Officials. Knowing little of the challenges and struggles they faced, she was plagued by self-doubt. What could she bring to the table? It turned out that it was her skills as a counsellor that were valued most by the group. This facilitating experience was not about her but it was about them. This gives rise to her reflection on how this analogy can be a useful way of thinking about facilitation and community capacity-building. We highlight the key points of this argument here.

Therapy and ‘Community Therapy’ as a healthy practice

Maria recalls her learning from psychology and how therapy “is not just for the sick” but also for “healthy, well-functioning individuals”. This implies an understanding of therapy as a process of reflection that helps us understand assumptions, identify barriers as well as find new and better ways of moving forward. From this perspective, therapy is beneficial for everyone at certain points of life. It is not about ‘fixing’ someone who is ‘broken’, and many times it is not even about healing the sick. Sometimes therapy is about helping healthy individuals meet extraordinary challenges or life transitions, just like development.

To explain this, Maria refers to the work of Sherry Arnstein (1968) and how this author says therapy and participatory planning might be ‘dishonest and arrogant’ when thinking these processes as ‘the cure’ for powerless and sick groups of individuals. Thus, a possible risk of thinking development processes as ‘therapy’ is to address groups or communities as ‘patients’ to be treated, ignoring the broader and structural development challenges that should be tackled as well. To avoid this pitfall, Maria argues community therapy should be addressed as a reflective process through which groups identify possible causes of their barriers to community development such as racism or discrimination. This allows groups to understand themselves as part of a system, acknowledging how barriers or difficulties might be part of a larger context and not necessarily something that should be fixed within them.

Accordingly, thinking about community therapy as part of development practice presents therapy as a platform for individuals and groups to prepare themselves, build the necessary capacities or practice possible tools to face and negotiate their situations or barriers as a group. Moreover, Maria argues how therapy should be a two-way process in which both counsellor and counselled or facilitator and facilitated are involved as equals- and not about an ‘expert’ imparting a process.

Contientization

Maria deepens her analysis by referring to the work of Paolo Freire and the concept of contientization, or ‘change of consciousness’. This idea suggests how citizens reflect on their realities as the first step towards making ‘their lives better’. Rather than a top-down approach proposed by an expert, these reflections should come from the communities, proposing an understanding of community development as a ‘transformation of mindset’.

Following this idea as well as the Liberation psychology framework influenced by Freire, this transformation implies a process of ‘unpacking’ or deconstructing live experiences as a ‘therapeutic process’. It is through this process of unpacking that a community might begin to liberate itself from oppression and injustice, as well as identify how to avoid further oppression.

Facilitators as community therapists

Maria recalls some of her personal experiences as a facilitator to show the parallel with her role as a counsellor and shares some of the counselling skills that have enriched her facilitation practice:

  • Identifying as an ‘outsider’ – The client, community or group are the experts about their lives and circumstances.
  • Active listening – As therapists do, facilitators are actively engaged and asking the necessary questions.
  • Awareness of multi-directional learning processes – It is not about a therapist healing clients but rather a two-way process of transformation.

Maria mentions how these parallels and distinctions have helped her to reflect on how to address capacity-building processes. Her paper invites our team to continually reflect about our practice as facilitators and ask further questions. How can we both facilitate and experience this process of transformation? How to do this when different cultural logics and mindsets come into play? We hope you enjoy Maria’s paper as we did and we extend this invitation to constantly reflect about how to practice and approach community development.

Reference: Rodrigues, M. (2017) Community therapy? Parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building. Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal Vol 52 No 2. pp. 372-377.

Countering violent extremism through social resilience

Countering violent extremism through social resilience

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It is September 11th, and I am steeped in literature relating to counter-terrorism. Community Works has recently engaged in a new project examining ways of building social resilience to prevent violent extremism, and, importantly, how to approach evaluation and impact assessment in this rapidly emerging area.

War and Peace by Jason Edmiston

A shift to prevention

Governments around the world are struggling to figure out how to prevent the disillusionment of the post-911 landscape from breeding future terrorist activity. The importance of research into countering violent extremism (CVE) has gained traction in recent years as increasing evidence demonstrates that hardline approaches to counter-terrorism can actually exacerbate the threat. At the same time, there is a surge in recognition that preventing new recruits from resorting to violent extremism requires a drastically different skillset from conventional approaches to counter-terrorism that focus on detection and interception of attacks.

Early approaches to CVE focused on broad attempts to ‘counter the narrative’ of radical ideologies, but it is now understood that ideologies are only a small part of the problem. More and more, analysts and policy-makers are recognising the need for social approaches rooted in local contexts. Growing emphasis is being placed on finding ways to build social resilience among individuals and communities to resist the pull of violent extremism.

Context, contact, and complexity

It occurred to me today that, like the broader field itself, my own approach to studying CVE is rooted strongly in the history of what happened on this day fourteen years ago. At that time, I was living abroad in Denmark as a volunteer at a residential school for at-risk youth. One of our students, Habib, had recently arrived from Afghanistan. He was almost fifteen years old, spoke little Danish and even less English. His father had vehemently opposed the Taliban, and their attempts to punish his family had driven them to flee. Soon after I first saw those planes slam into the skyline of a city I love, in the country where I grew up, Habib came to me and apologised with great sincerity. My response was astonishment: ‘No Habib! What happened today has nothing to do with you!’

But of course it did, because my government’s response was to launch an attack on Habib’s country. When he heard the news, he collapsed in tears and repeated adamantly ‘If they stop the Taliban then it will be worth it.’ This was no light statement: aside from his parents and siblings, Habib’s whole family, his entire history was in Kandahar, one of the first cities to be bombed. Whereas I had been able to pick up the phone and hear almost immediately that all my loved ones were safe, it would be months before Habib would learn the fate of his family. Fourteen years later, there are far too many young people facing similar situations.

The nuances that unfolded in this exchange with Habib have made it impossible for me to think of the ongoing wars in the Middle East as a matter of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Although our countries were at war, it was plainly clear that he and I were not enemies and no amount of propaganda could convince me otherwise. The psych-social processes at play here fascinated me, and my research in the years that followed explored how interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds relates to peacebuilding. The social psychology of peacebuilding now plays a central role in my investigation of innovative methods for countering violent extremism.

The demand for research on CVE

Community Works has recently conducted a review of the literature surrounding CVE. A strong theme to emerge from the review is the demand for more rigorous studies, especially to develop effective methodologies for social approaches to countering violent extremism at the local level. Specifically, the literature points to the need for:

  • Collaborative, transdisciplinary approaches – most studies of CVE have arisen from security-focused fields; there is a strong need for input from a range of perspectives including psychology, sociology, education and public health;
  • Focus on stakeholder ownership and empowerment – there is strong theoretical support for the importance of empowering communities through CVE initiatives, but very few programs employ participatory approaches;
  • Studies that focus on women and girls – the vast majority of research on CVE has focused on men and boys, with very little consideration of the strong potential role of women and girls
  • Innovative methods for impact assessment – although governments are increasingly investing in social approaches to CVE, there remains no clear idea of how to gauge which programs are achieving impact;

In partnership with LaTrobe University, Community Works is currently developing a longer-term research project with the intention of filling these crucial gaps. The project will draw heavily from key theoretical frameworks emerging from the social sciences, such as intergroup contact theory, moral inclusion, and social cohesion. The central aim of the project will be to assist a local CVE initiative in developing ethical and effective methods for measuring and leveraging their impact.

Source: Holmer, G (2013), ‘Countering Violent Extremism: A Peacebuilding Perspective’, United States Institute of Peace Special Report.