Together with other members of the Strengthening Communities Alliance, United Way Australia and Mission Australia have launched a Strengthening Communities Position Paper to call on Federal Government to lead responses that will scale up place-based, along with community-led initiatives across Australia. The goal is to improve well-being and equity in local communities.
Place-based, community-led initiatives are cooperative, long-term strategies for creating successful communities in which several individuals and organizations cooperate to realize a common goal. Eight organizations presently make up the newly established Strengthening Communities Alliance, a growing network of groups devoted to promoting this strategy for bringing about constructive social change.
The Alliance claims that despite significant financial investment in support services totalling over $64 billion annually across the nation, these initiatives produce beneficial results in regions where traditional service delivery models have failed.1
It highlights the growing collaboration between community members, organizations, agencies, and governments to identify the causes of disadvantage and enact lasting change. However, without the chance to perform this kind of service, many underprivileged communities lose out.
The Alliance’s paper outlines the obstacles that prevent place-based, community-led initiatives from spreading to more Australian communities, including the ways that competitive funding processes discourage collaboration and limitations on access to and sharing of data that would aid communities in setting priorities and finding solutions.
According to the Alliance, there are six important opportunities that, with national leadership and support, can help construct the necessary infrastructure and ensure that more people can collaborate to better their local communities across a wider range of places.
The Federal Government should implement the following essential recommendations from the Alliance:
a centre of excellence for the country
a framework for place-based investing
a national initiative to enhance methods for outcomes assessment and evaluation
federal clearinghouse
A review, audit, and realignment of current place-based initiatives
ideas for incorporating location and community attention into all programs
The groups see chances in the 2019 federal budget for the government to put more effort into expanding place-based, community-led activities.
With its Stronger Places, Stronger People initiatives as well as investment in the National Centre for Place-Based Collaboration (Nexus Centre), the Federal Government has recently acknowledged the benefits of this kind of work.
“At Mission Australia, we witness what so many communities, governments, along with service providers, Trusts and Foundations know and witness immense value of place-based work for the communities we serve,” says Marion Bennett, Executive of Practice, Evidence, and Impact. However, Australia is still not where it needs to be for location-based work.
“We’re urging a systemic response to scale place-based, community-led work across Australia in order to overcome the entrenched disadvantage that exists in some areas. Local communities can seize opportunities to strive toward positive transformation and construct a new vision for their community with coordinated national leadership in the development of supporting infrastructure.
“At Mission Australia, we strongly believe in working together to build stronger communities. We make use of and concentrate our resources to support place-based projects. Communities have accomplished remarkable results, as we have witnessed.
