The Stronger Communities for Children Program Storybook

Stronger Communities for Children (SCfC) is a community development program in ten participating Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory of Australia. The program supports safe and healthy communities, families and children. It ensures that local people are in control of local decision making.

The program has been operating since 2013, over which time the Local Community Boards in each community have made decisions on investments in a very diverse range of activities, depending on local needs and priorities for families and their children. Examples include education programs for parents, after-school support for children, health promotion and awareness activities, cooking and nutrition programs, support to strengthen the use of local languages in schools and social enterprises in skateboarding and hairdressing, as part of a wide array of initiatives across the ten communities.

A challenge for the program has been to document the impact of such widely differing activities across a vast geographical area and for communities that have distinct priorities. Working with Ninti One, the organisation with responsibility for supporting the program, we developed two strategies for providing a measure of impact across the program.

The second strategy was to collect impact stories for inclusion in a report we called the SCfC Storybook . We worked with each community to generate stories about the difference that their SCfC activities had made. This made the information generated different from information usually presented in reports, which share stories about what happened rather than the difference made or the impact achieved.

The result was the Storybook that we produced with Ninti One as a milestone publication for Stronger Communities for Children. It included the contributions of many people working for the program in each community, especially people delivering the activities and members of the Local Community Boards.

Please see the Community Works blog for reflections on the experience and what we learned for future impact assessment work.