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’

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.

Community initiatives in suicide prevention

Community initiatives in suicide prevention

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The health and welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

The recent report ‘The health and welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: 2015’ produced by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Through our association with BasicNeeds, Orygen Youth Health, the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre and the Mental Health Association of Central Australia (MHACA), Community Works has been involved in initiatives relating to suicide prevention for some years now. We recently contributed to a series of publications on suicide prevention and social media (see the publications page of the Community Works website).

People often start their own projects to combat the tragedy of suicide in their own communities. Reducing the taboo around the subject is part of the battle. MHACA’s Suicide Story training resources are a good example of the long-term commitment that some community organisations have made to reduce the high incidence of suicides, in this case in Central Australia although the resources have been used for training programs in other places too. The MHACA website is currently under reconstruction but a summary of the resources can be found through HealthInfoNet.

The recent report ‘The health and welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: 2015’ produced by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, noted that during the period 2008–2012 the suicide rate for Indigenous Australians was almost twice the rate for non-Indigenous Australians (based on age-standardised rates). For 15–19 year olds, the rate was 5 times as high as the non-Indigenous rate (34 and 7 per 100,000 population). Suicide is the most common external cause of death of Indigenous people, at 4.8% of all deaths (see http://www.aihw.gov.au/publication-detail/?id=60129550168). According to The Age, if compared with sovereign nations, the suicide rate for Indigenous Australians is now the twelfth highest in the world, with Australia as a whole being 64th.

Yugul Voice

Yugul Voice

I was working recently in Ngukurr, a community of around 1,000 people located in the Top End of the Northern Territory, as part of the Stronger Communities for Children program to which Ninti One is contributing with support from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. While in Ngukurr I met Ambrose of Yugul Voice, a local band, one of around sixteen bands in the community. Yugul Voice has written a song on suicide prevention called Moving On, which can be found here. This is another example of a local effort to break the silence around this subject.

Speaking on the ABC, Professor Pat McGorry of Orygen Youth Health recently described suicides as similar to the road toll in Australia in that both represent preventable deaths. He argued that greater emphasis on community-based interventions and a preventative model will save both money and lives.