Putting Pen to Paper

The Putting Pen to Paper series was produced by The Department of Internal Affairs in 2007 and other stakeholders to offer guidance on putting partnering principles into practice.

The first report focuses specifically on

• the development of inter-agency partnership agreements
• guidance for those entering into new multi-party agreements
• briefly analysing key opportunities and challenges to date (2007)

Putting Pen to Paper, split into sections, so you can choose the most relevant parts for you.

10 Tips To Build Resilient Communities

Start Local. Let it Happen, Make it work was a very successful one day seminar held in Wellington in June 2016.

In what was an oversubscribed event, 160 people from government, local government, academia, business and communities gathered to increase their understanding and confidence in using a locally-led approach. Presenters from the Community, local and central Government shared their perspectives and explored ways to support locals to drive change in their communities that lead to sustainable, effective outcomes.

We’ve written an extensive, practical report highlighting the very best from the day. We’ve also condensed the discussion and knowledge from the day into some top tips.

Appreciative Inquiry – A Model for Approaching Change

The Appreciative Inquiry model (sourced from here) helps us plan a practical pathway through what is never a totally straightforward process.

In reality we keep looping around these steps (and some side paths too). It’s never as neat and tidy as it looks on the diagram, but each of the appreciative inquiry models are useful aspects of our CLD work.

Here are each of the stages, with links to some helpful tools. 

DEFINITION is about deciding on your focus. What do you need to know or do? Why? Community-led development starts with getting to know our community better, finding community strengths and assets, and weaving these in with particular relationships that support community-led action.

DISCOVERY is about having lots of conversations to tap into community wisdom about past successes and to begin discussions about dreams. 

DREAM is about imagining new possibilities and aspirations for the future. We ask powerful questions and reach out to a diversity of people in fun creative ways to have lots of conversations and listen carefully. 

In the DESIGN and DELIVERY phases we are typically thinking about three things:  

• What have we heard? We identify key themes from community feedback about the community’s past strengths, current energy, challenges and future dreams.  
• So what does this mean for where we are heading?  We build a shared understanding of the overall picture of the different messages and voices we’ve heard. 
• Now what? We might have a community party/hui/gathering to shape a shared vision and agree what actions could happen next. 

At every step we are seeking to work with people to design future pathways and actions together. It’s really important to be clear about who has the decision making power and the ability to take action in each situation. Ideally, power is shared and there is scope for everyone to be a leader. 

Some tools for your kete: 

A Focus on the How not the Who

New Zealand, along with most modern democracies, has a system of multi-level government, with central government having responsibility for matters of national significance and local government matters of local or regional significance. And, like similar democracies, the allocation question – that is, how responsibilities are distributed across orders of government – is a constant matter of debate.

The latest Policy Quarterly, published by Victoria University’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies examines the case for Decentralisation.

Inspiring Communities’ Megan Courtney contributed to this journal article – here’s is her contribution.

You can read the full journal here https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/pq

Working with complexity

It’s inevitable that you’re going to encounter some complex situations on your CLD journey and the best thing to do is to be prepared. On this video with Inspiring Communities’ David Hanna he explains Mark Cabaj’s Certainty-Agreement Matrix, which helps us understand the different ways we need to approach different situations. Some are simple, and a recipe book approach will work. Complex situations require much more experimenting because there are no simple answers. Check out these resources to find out more about the different styles of leadership needed for different situations we find ourselves in.

The certainty-agreement matrix provides leaders and managers with a lens for viewing the underlying cause-and-effect relationships and stakeholder positions of a situation and to adopt an appropriate orientation addressing it. It’s a detailed document which gives clear instructions about how to assess situations, and recommended courses of actions depending on the variables.

At the Heart Resource, Part Three – this video discusses working with complexity and Action Reflection

Neighbourhood Strengthening Ideas

In 2016, Jim Diers visited Aotearoa and toured with the Inspiring Communities team nationwide to share his own thought leadership and learnings amongst our own communities.

Inspiring Communities’ Practice Lead Megan Courtney captured these ideas around strengthening neighbourhoods and distilled these into a one-page summary and resource.

Click here for more information about Jim and his work.

Looking back to move forward

Tangible CLD Learnings & Insight Report

These pages harvest the learnings from the four communities who worked with the Department of Internal Affairs as part of the Community-led development Pilot projects between 2011 and 2016. Over the course of the project, teams learnt what works, what doesn’t and how outcomes can vary. In this spirit of this, they offer reflections, stories and tools to support and help other community-led initiatives to thrive.

The following pages have been broken into digestible sections so you can download those pages of interest and relevance to you. If you would like to receive a full copy of this report, please contact us directly at exchange@inspiringcommunities.org.nz

Making the most of community conversation feedback

Learn how to make the most of your community feedback. Even though your community conversations might be informal, people want to know something is going to happen as a result.

How to measure and monitor CLD

To be effective in locally-led change, what you do and how you do it are equally important. So we need to keep noticing what is emerging, and what lies behind the results and changes observed.

We need to pay attention to who is involved and in what roles, what is going on and how well we are living the CLD principles, not just our results.

We need to keep noticing what’s emerging, and what lies behind the results and changes observed.  We need to intentionally notice and assess the broader factors that impact on and are impacted by locally-led action processes.

Learning by Doing – a handbook

In 2013, Inspiring Communities published a comprehensive examination of community-led development. Appropriately named Learning by Doing, it includes both theory and practice, and is essential to anyone working in CLD in New Zealand. 

Learning by Doing (LBD) includes comprehensive thinking, learning, examples and results from community-led activity right across Aotearoa.  It’s become a ‘must have’ handbook for people and organisations wanting to empower and support locally-led change. Noticing change is at the foundation of effective change. CLD is a long term game, and one where rules, models and evidence only take us so far. We are constantly reminded that not everything that counts can be easily measured. So it’s important that we embrace a ‘learning by doing’ approach in order to better understand what works, what doesn’t and why.  Sharing diverse examples, stories, ideas and results from community-led activity around Aotearoa serves to strengthen a community’s ability to succeed. These examples are intended to support and inspire you to use community-led development to make positive change in your place. 

A number of the book’s chapters are also available to download and share: 

See highlights from the launch of Learning by Doing at Te Papa here.

What others have said about Learning by Doing…. 

“This book is a fantastic resource for practitioners and policy makers. It both provides a collection of really useful tools and resources, and it shares “real life” stories of how people have made use of these in practice in New Zealand. I highly recommend it.” Liz Weaver, Head Coach Tamarack Institute of Community Engagement – Canada 

“Learning by Doing is a gift to the nation and also to the international community-led development movement. Just when we need it most, here is a book guiding people back to the power of community.” Jim Diers, Neighbourhoods Expert- Seattle USA.

Deepen your knowledge by purchasing a copy of Learning by Doing

 To purchase a copy please email exchange@inspiringcommunities.org.nz