Facilitating Community Change

ASSESSING READINESS: Identifying choice
Learn before you leap! It is essential to size up a community's readiness and capacity to act before committing valuable energies and resources.

ENERGISING OURSELVES: Building and equiping a leadership team
A diverse core group of people with talent, relationships, resources and credibility is needed to facilitate and lead the charge. A leader's role is not to have magic answers, but to elicit creative responses from his or her community in a manner that builds shared action. This requires new skills, such as facilitation and process design, to help the leadership team work effectively on issues outside their area of expertise.

EARLY WINS: Getting to work
A community leadership team becomes the catalyst for the successful launch of a community-wide change effort. They need to develop a clear mission, create an effective community process design, generate a powerful set of activities to engage and communicate with the diversity of the community, and establish a resource base commensurate with the task.

ENERGISING THE COMMUNITY: Building knowledge for action
Lasting positive change happens when people have the passion to take action and are committed enough to persevere. A thoughtful and comprehensive process is needed to build the type of understanding that inspires action. It also helps the leadership team hone its skills in building teams, creating working agreements, using facilitation and listening skills; and practicing collaborative problem solving.

SETTING DIRECTION FOR CHANGE: Fine-tuning our aim
Translating a shared vision into a comprehensive action plan requires changing individual and organisational behaviors, impacting old systems and structures that may have outlived their purpose, and getting beyond quick-fix solutions. Community priorities need to be established for more than the most conspicuous issues emerging out of an assessment process.

IMPLEMENTING CHANGE: Making it last
Community initiatives that measurably improve health and quality of life inevitably touch the core of what it means to be in community. They build relationships of trust and commitment across lines of sector, race and class. They develop the skills of collaboration and the muscle of civic capacity that allows a community to do what it must. They engage in a continuous process of learning. They evolve ways to make community improvement a way of life.