July 2009

International Association of Community Development and Community Development Queensland Conference, Brisbane Australia, June 2009

Mary-Jane Rivers and I (Jenny Blagdon) attended this conference on behalf of Inspiring Communities. We both really valued the chance to learn from and share with community development practitioners from around the globe and felt that Inspiring Communities has a natural home in this forum.

We were fortunate to be offered a chance to present in a session attended by about 50 people. We provided a potted history and overview of Inspiring Communities and the Exchange and used aspects of the Great Start, Taita story to bring this alive. There was a lot of interest in our work and people were heard to quote us on and off over the next few days.

During the breaks we had the opportunity to develop links with the International Community Development Association through its executive members who were present at the conference. At their request we are continuing to explore with them about how we might forge stronger connections with NZ and particularly with Inspiring Communities.

Mary-Jane and I are summarising the plenary sessions and some of the workshops we attended. These notes will be available in the learning section of the website. They include ideas on: social enterprise; community leadership; asset building in community; local living economies; community cooperatives; using technology and particularly group sourcing to support social innovation; and how the current situation may provide an opportunity for building sustainable livelihoods.

The conference was framed as being about Courageous Dialogue, about really listening to different perspectives. Fundamentalism was defined as thinking that says my truth is the whole truth, while genuine truth, it was suggested, grows and develops through questions and dialogue. This of course, mirrors much of our thinking in Inspiring Communities, about there being a grain of truth in every perspective and about developing the key skills of being aware of your own perspective, truly listening to another's, and being able to translate across perspectives.

Two of the stand outs at the conference were the plenary sessions.
Ela Bhatt, Founder of SEWA (Self Employed Women's Association: www.sewa.org) in India, spoke with enormous humility and passion about her lifetime's work supporting self reliance amongst the poor, self employed women workers in her country. She also offered up an alternative way of thinking about the economy, the Gentle Economy as she called it, which requires us to consider how we embed capital into community to ensure both survival and self sufficiency. She stressed the importance of opening spaces in order that the poor can find solutions that they own and are meaningful for them, and that they are given the time to do this. There was significant synergy between her work in India and ours in Aotearoa NZ and the notes from her speech are well worth a read. See www.theelders.org/elders/ and www.sewa.org/

Michael Shuman, Research Director for the US Based Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and both an economist and lawyer, entitled his key note address "BALLE-nomics: The Local Living Economy Solution to Poverty". He drew on recent worldwide research to make the case for networks of locally owned businesses selling primarily to local markets being the key to a prosperous community. He presented compelling evidence that showed local businesses to be more reliable generators of income, wealth, jobs, taxes, charitable contributions, social equity and political participation.

As someone who struggled with Economics 101 at university and admit to having never really got my head around it I found his presentation riveting. He acknowledged the four crises we currently face: the oil crisis, the climate crisis, the financial crisis and the poverty crisis and outlined how the obvious solution to each of these is localisation. He also noted trends in the global economy, such as towards purchasing services rather than goods, and how such trends are favouring local owned, self reliant and socially responsible businesses.

One of his key points was about understanding how much leakage there is currently from most local economies (how little of the money spent actually goes back into the local community, often as little as 10%) and the importance of plugging these leaks. He also stressed that most communities are too dependent on philanthropic support and government grants and there is a real need to become more entrepreneurial. Some of his ideas around this included: local debit cards, meta businesses, local gift cards, local stock exchanges and local investment. For more information about each of these visit www.smallmart.org or www.livingeconomies.org. 

Jenny Blagdon

July 2009