"What we are talking about is unleashing community ingenuity"
Mark Cabaj, Tamarack Institute, Canada
The Exchange

At the heart of Inspiring Communities Networks is a small Exchange team

The Exchange exists to build and spread the "know-how" of place-based, collaborative community-led development, and to provide more leverage than is possible from disparate and unconnected local initiatives, through:

  • Learning from experience
  • Advising
  • Community leadership development
  • Promoting and advocacy
  • Bringing unlikely people together and developing the 'strength of loose ties'

For more about us and what we do, you can:

The Exchange is the engine room that:

  • Supports a national network of people and places actively involved in practising and learning about community-led development - the Core Learning Cluster
  • Supports the development of regional learning networks of people, initiatives, organisations and places wanting to share experiences, strengthen community-led development ways of working and enhance community resilience
  • Inspires and supports development of local leaders and leadership styles that foster community-led development
  • Develops tools, processes, case studies and identifies lessons learned
  • Communicates about community-led development through the newsletter, website and advisory services
  • Provides focused community-led development expertise in selected communities for specific purposes
  • Builds cross sector understanding and connections over practical community-led development initiatives
  • Connects and learns from developments in New Zealand and internationally, distils and shares information

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Inspiring Communities kaupapa:

  • Acknowledges with pride the unique role and status of Tangata Whenua, our Treaty and our Partnership
  • Believes leadership comes from every corner of the community
  • Demonstrates that inventive alliances, collective thought and working past boundaries and difference creates solutions
  • Supports the release of local resources, energy and ideas to address local challenges
  • Recognises the impact of people being actively involved and having strong pride in their place
  • Advocates for communities being participants rather than clients
  • Is constantly learning
  • Has developed a framework for community-led development as a basis for constantly learning, adapting and supporting emergent development
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Haere Mai and Welcome to the website of Inspiring Communities

Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou ka ora ai te iwi
With your basket and my basket we will sustain the people

Inspiring Communities

JULY News out now

Click to read

Our places, Our people, Our future - Better together

Inspiring Communities is about unleashing the ingenuity and creative solutions within communities. It is about people working together from all corners and sectors - residents, business, Iwi, councils and government, community organisations and funders - to build neighbourhoods, foster community connections, grow local economies, solve problems and achieve community goals together.

We think it is vital to learn from experience and share what is learned in order to accelerate development and reduce 'reinventing the wheel'.

Download our two-page Inspiring Communities pamphlet PDF for an overview of what we do.

Inspiring Communities started operating in June 2008 with people from several place-based initiatives deciding to learn together. Key to this was developing an Exchange to swap learning, develop knowledge and contribute to a national community-led development movement.

Inspiring Communities supports communities of place to achieve their vision and goals by:

  • Promoting the power of working together across sectorsalt
  • Supporting leadership and learning for community-led development
  • Linking people, projects and places
  • Developing and sharing resources, tools and new knowledge
  • Being a catalyst for change in communities of place

We publicly share the vision, learning and practice of place-based, community-led development. See our "Share and Share Alike" copyright protocol. We invite you to participate. We look forward to exchanging ideas with you and hearing your suggestions, examples, stories and case studies. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Community-led development offers a great opportunity for business, philanthropy and government agencies to support
local residents in making their own communities even better places to live."
Stephen Tindall, The Tindall Foundation

Inspiring Communities appreciates the funding support it receives from The Tindall Foundation and The Todd Foundation and our ongoing relationships with the Foundations.

Copyright
This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand Licence.