What I do…
Tackle complex problems.
What I do?
I help you and your community with big community and social change.
I love working together to build capacity as we go, so that you have the opportunity to strengthen your own skills and the skills of others in your community to navigate these problems head on.
I help you as a project leader or assisting in the design and conduct of qualitative research, or to write public health grants, submissions or course content.
I help you facilitate and build your own capacity in using some new systems thinking methods in your community, like community-based system dynamics (CBSD). This includes understanding what’s happening with the problem over time, as well as developing causal loop diagrams to help your community uncover underlying issues and identifying new areas for action.
I help you with strategic planning & project planning, community change management, measuring social impact, evaluation planning, improving collaboration techniques and collective learning, amongst other things.
How it helps you?
Complex problems are hard to tackle for good reason - they are often stuck in place for a very long time, influenced by many other ever-changing problems, and have causes and effects that are so far apart in time that sometimes we can’t even make the connections between them.
For example, mental wellbeing of a community (a group of individuals that have a connection with each other as a result of geography, age, cultural background, or another aspect of their lives) might be affected by many things that also have their own underlying influences - stigma, discrimination, access to opportunities, previous experiences of trauma, community acceptance, inclusion or isolation, amongst many, many others. While each of these sub-problems, or sub-systems, influence the mental wellbeing of a community, they also influence each other, and in turn, feedback and influence themselves.
These ever-changing influences keep the problem moving and changing, which makes it very difficult to address. No single project or program will work. It’ll take a suite of ongoing, collaborative actions, led by the community it’s affecting, to really change things.
Other examples of complex problems may be disaster recovery, drug and alcohol use, housing, climate adaptation, healthy eating, active living or violence against women. I am sure you can think of others too.
Confusing? Hard? As if we can change something like that?!? I hear you!
Every community is unique.
Find your voice.
What I do?
I help you and your community strengthen local relationships.
I help you and the leaders in your community to design consultation and engagement processes that give everyone the opportunity to contribute (like workshop design & facilitation, community survey methods, using pictures, audio or other methods that meet the needs of people in your community).
I help you shift from community consultation and engagement, to community mobilisation and leadership by identifying and helping you implement specific strategies that you can lead.
How it helps you?
Every community is unique. Communities come with their own values, passions, opportunities, leadership and complexity. Each community responds differently to problems and challenges in front of them.
Communities are built on relationships. Those relationships exist between individuals and community groups, and stretch into relationships with other communities.
The way we work alongside and within communities affects leadership, decision making and ultimately, long term outcomes on social and community problems that some people often find too hard to address.
Ultimately, every community is different and when it comes to hard problems, the community needs the opportunity to be at the forefront of leading their own change.
No one person has the answers, and certainly not those ‘outside’ the community. The answers are within, and my role is to help you with the process to uncover them.
A strong understanding of social impact and public health landscape.
Connect aligning organisations.
What I do?
I help you and your staff with tailor made professional development and support.
I help you one on one or in a team to improve skills and knowledge in prevention and/or community led change so that your organisation is in the best place to have your community leading the change they want.
How it helps you?
Working alongside communities in respectful and empowering ways is critical to placed-based work, community led change and working to prevent some of our greatest public health and social challenges.
Being successful in this work relies on specific skills sets. It includes things like the ability to:
Advocate
Communicate with care
Mediate
Lead under pressure
Alongside:
A genuine willingness to understand community before diving in
An acute awareness of power dynamics and how they influence decisions being made
An understanding of how all causes, and actions, weave together in complex ways and keep feeding back on each other
A strong understanding of social impact and the greater prevention, health promotion and public health landscape.