Paul Born, President of Tamarack (http://tamarackcommunity.ca),  recently spent a day in Auckland as part of a six city stop in Australasia presenting workshops on his book “Community Conversations, Community Engagement and Change”.

Paul is a great story teller and has many fabulous stories to tell. 120 people attended the workshop from right throughout Aotearoa.   Paul started the  workshop  by providing a useful reminder about the strategic context for conversations– solving complex problems . The reality is that many of the problems we seek to solve in communities cannot be solved by one agency working alone. The answers instead lie with multiple agencies talking and working together. The most effective strategies usually involve implementing multiple courses of action, seeing what works and doesn’t, and continually working within a framework of plan-act-review, plan-act-review.

“Conversation is not just about what is said; it is also what happens between people…it is part of a much larger process of change”

Paul reinforced the importance of “suspending judgement” on what others are saying so we can really hear and understand what is being said. He saw this as key to community conversations. With “dialogue” coming from the Greek (“dia=through and logos=word or meaning”) conversations then become the basis of building ‘understanding through information flow’ between people. This is the first step in engagement and collaboration.

Through the workshop (and his book) Paul encourages us to “understand what conversation is and learn the techniques for better conversations so we’re better able to build trust, find new opportunities, and explore possibilities for our communities together.”

Conversation Catalysing Community Change

Regarding the use of conversations as a catalyst for community change, Born looks to the work of developmental evaluator Michael Quinn Patton who asks two key questions:

• Who will use this information?
• Who else could use this information?

….. and then brings them together to find out what would be helpful to know,  and why and how the information could best be gathered as part of conversations and evaluation processes.

Paul reminded us about the importance of creating welcoming spaces for conversations, and conversations that involve everyone. He reinforced the need to take time to get close to people and build empathy and trust, “welcoming all that arrives through dialogue” and to let what needs to be done as a result of conversation “emerge.”

Paul took the group through several key techniques for information gathering, dialogue, and mobilising an effective multi sector team to support community action and change.  Here are three that struck a chord with us:

1. Encouraging Multi-sector tables

– Paul Born is a huge advocate of bringing diverse groups of people together to enrich conversations, build powerful new alliances and expand the possibility for what could come next. In comparing the two types of conversations he makes the following comparisons:

Adapted from Paul Born Community Conversations page 39-40

2.Appreciative Inquiry

– an approach which involves “searching for the best in people and organisations and seeking possibilities in problem solving.” It’s also about really listening to people and letting them tell their story without interruptions. As part of the workshop we practised an exercise in pairs of ‘listening’ to our partners tell a story about a successful collaboration and practicing the discipline of confining ourselves to five probing questions:

• Tell me more about that…
• Why do you feel that way?
• Why was that important to you?
• How did that affect you?
• What was your contribution?

3. Top 100 Partners Group

– in thinking about community change, Paul posed the following questions:

• What is it we want to talk about?
• Who else cares?
• Who could make a difference?
• Who are the 100 people who could help realise the change we want to see?

Rather than leaving who comes to the collaboration table up to chance, Paul encouraged us to critically think about the top 100 people and organisations in our communities that could really help effect change and how they could be brought together. He advocated for intentionally designing a conversation process that brings the ‘right people’ into the room.  He commented on the importance of ‘creating the right conditions’ for both the conversation and equal participation from 4 key stakeholder groups - business, community sector, local and central government and people with the ‘lived experience’ of the issue being addressed.

He also reflected that getting the combination of the right people may take some time, reminding us to consciously reflect once conversation processes have started on:

• Who’s not involved?
• Why not?
• And what would it take to get them on board?

At the end of the workshop, Paul also shared some practical examples of how conversations in Canada early in 2000 had resulted in the development of one of Canada’s most effective initiatives in reducing poverty.

After nine years, the Vibrant Communities programme, which comprises strategic place based poverty reduction initiatives in fifteen Canadian cities, now boasts some stunning achievements – taking approximately 170,000 people out of poverty over the last nine years. Vibrant Communities, which in itself has been an ‘action learning project,’ was built from Opportunities 2000, a millennium poverty campaign project which Paul Born himself led in the city of Waterloo, Ontario. With the backing of the McConnell, Maytree and Trillium Foundations, Vibrant Communities began as a series of conversations with economically prosperous cities to see whether they were prepared to address the urban poverty which was also inherent within their communities.

Over these last nine years, much has been achieved by Vibrant Communities, with 164 local social innovations having contributed to successfully reducing urban poverty – from living wage campaigns, to free public transport for beneficiaries and 37 public policy changes.

For more on the Vibrant Communities story see: http://tamarackcommunity.ca/downloads/vc/VC_Evaluation.pdf

Here in New Zealand, we have much to learn from the Canadian experience of collaboration and social innovation. We also have much to share with them. It was a pleasure to be part of Paul Born’s workshop and to listen and learn from many other progressive and passionate New Zealanders who are also seeking not just new conversations but new approaches to conversations – all with the view making Kiwi communities stronger, more connected and able to lead in the future ahead.

Mary-Jane Rivers, Barbara MacLennan and Megan Courtney
from the Inspiring Communities Team