Victory Village Forum and Community-led Development featured in Future Times magazine
September 2011
The huge and widespread interest in and family centred community-led development following Victory Village Forum has led to many new connections. Among these was an invitation for the Forum organising team to contribute to the latest volume of Future Times, the magazine of NZ Futures Trust, for a volume dedicated to the idea of communities leading. Yvonne Curtis is Executive Director of the Futures Trust and editor of Future Times. In introducing the latest edition she writes…
“Recent media and local, national and international events have contributed to a perception that the ‘answers’ to major problems are the domain of central government, with any ‘community contribution’ seen as largely irrelevant. But my recent experiences over the last few months leads me to challenge this perception. I have attended a number of AGMs, forums and workshops that have showcased the strengths, often hidden, that New Zealand communities have to respond to their local needs to give hope for the future. On each occasion I came away with a sense of being energised, motivated and more informed of different ways that communities can dream together and then work together to create more positive futures for themselves...”
Read the rest of Yvonne’s article and the full edition at the Futures Trust website or download it here.
|
|
|
Philanthropy Through the Looking Glass Conference |
|
April 2011
In 2009 when the newly formed Inspiring Communities ran a workshop at the Philanthropy NZ Conference the key questions people asked were why take a community-led development approach? what does community-led development mean? and why does it matter to focus on ‘place’ or local neighbourhoods and communities?
Fast forward to the April 2011 PNZ Conference and the discussion was different. It had moved from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’ How can we do community-led development effectively, what does it mean in terms of local leadership approaches, how can we work together better and what does it mean for funders’?
Inspiring Communities presented findings from What We Are Learning about Community-Led development in Aotearoa NZ. These were wrapped around two powerful presentations from Opotiki and Taita about their local community-led developments and the changes coming about.
|
|
Read more...
|
Placing communities at the forefront of change
October 2010
From Philanthropy New Zealand News Spring 2010: Download the article
Community-led development continues to grow across Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has many faces: it may be iwi creating economic development and jobs in Opotiki; it may be neighbours being better connected in Taita; or the community coming together to solve the disease of debt in Porirua. It has huge potential to transform communities, street by street.
Mary-Jane Rivers, from Inspiring Communities, says some of these things would not have been heard of three years ago. “What has changed is there is an intentional focus on communities of ‘place’: streets, neighbourhoods and local communities, rather than issues. It means rather than being clients or recipients of services, local residents are authors of their own and their community’s development.”
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Framework in Practice