How to start Place-based change initiatives

What if something small today became the turning point for your whole community….

In change initiatives, the small intentional seeds planted today become the promising shoots of tomorrow and the trees for future generations. The burning question is, what seed needs planting and watering today so that tomorrow change is emerging?

Across the breadth of my work with place-based initiatives, some of my favourite are when working with communities and change initiatives early on — in those early formation phases before the initiative has a name, a governance structure, or momentum. When it is still finding itself, working from foundations already embedded in community but finding and forming new ways of thinking and approaching things. When the question of what this could become is still genuinely open.

Sadly, this is the phase that gets the least attention in the literature, the least resource from funders, and the least recognition from the sector. Its yet to be glamourous, its yet to have ready to publish outcomes or even outputs, and it is still very much emergent. It is also, in my experience, the phase that matters most. Every change initiative you can name, started as a seed. What happens at the start sets the tone for the journey.

Why the early phase is so underinvested

The collective impact framework — which remains the dominant model for place-based and cross-sector collaboration in Australia — describes three preconditions that need to be in place before formal collective impact work begins: influential champions, a sense of urgency around an issue, and adequate resources. What it doesn’t dwell on is the work required to create those preconditions — the slow work over months, the ‘who else should we chat to’, the number of coffees and conversations, the painstacking building of evidence, and the microtesting of things done within reach. This stage is fragile, it sits with person risk, and is often off the side of peoples desks and personal calendars. Its growing in deep care for what comes next and a recognition that if someone doesn’t start who will.

ARACY’s 2023 overview of place-based initiatives in Australia is careful to note that early-phase work is “largely focused on building readiness and creating the conditions and safety to allow collaborators to work” together — and that this phase is both essential and chronically underestimated. Collaboration for Impact similarly identifies readiness as a distinct and substantive phase of the Collaborative Change Cycle, requiring specific skills and approaches that differ significantly from what’s needed once an initiative is up and running.

In my experience, where intention and time in readiness isn’t fostered, once more concrete resourced work commences often by way of a funded program, it experiences the same gradual readiness building, except with the addition of pressure and mounting expectation to demonstrate outcomes and momentum. In all cases the seed needs to be planted.

The reason this phase is underinvested is partly structural. Funders find it difficult to fund something that doesn’t yet have a clear scope, a governance structure, or a theory of change. Organisations find it difficult to commit time and resource to something that may not become anything. And practitioners find it difficult to demonstrate their contribution when their work is relational and preparatory rather than programmatic and measurable.

What is the starting seed?

Understanding what actually starts a place-based initiative requires separating two things that are easy to conflate: the conditions that make collective action possible, and the people who turn those conditions into movements.

Lets start with the conditions… Hanleybrown, Kania and Kramer in 2012 set out three early conditions that need to exist before a collective impact initiative can launch — an influential champion, adequate financial resources, and a sense of urgency for change. Together, these preconditions create the opportunity and the motivation necessary to bring people who have never before worked together into a collective impact initiative and hold them in place until the initiative's own momentum takes over.

What this looks like in a real world context is in truth uncomfortable at best; people who are agitating and being lone voices for change, they can foresee whats ahead, smell smoke before seeing the bushfire, and may have lived and local experience of issues that are yet to mainstread on agendas. In almost all communities I have worked with, these people don’t lead with positional power but rather lived and local experience as a local community member bold enough to expect a different future for their community. Where you see such champions, bringing coaching and support alongside them is critical to sustain and grow their early leadership so that it doesn’t burn out prematurily.

Conditions alone don't ignite change. That's where the second piece of the puzzle comes in. Cheuy (2023) describes a specific type of actor — the Field Catalyst Intermediary — whose role is to play a high-impact but often invisible part in enhancing the success and impact of promising community innovations, strengthening, linking and amplifying local efforts to achieve lasting and transforming change.

What this looks like is a real world context is someone with a uniquely combined set of skills, consciousness of the many elements coming together and an ability to grasp hold and bring together the data, people, experiences, perspectives, energy, and complimentary assets and resources within reach towards an only just emerging agenda. The weaving many early threads together to hold the spark long enough for others to gather around it.

This is the phase I find most alive with possibility. It is also the phase that requires the most skill to navigate well.

Local residents collaborating during a neighborhood meeting in a park

Five things to do — and do well — in the earliest phases

Drawing on my experience working with communities and initiatives at this formative stage, here are five practices I return to consistently in early-phase work.

1. Listen before you gather

The instinct in early-phase work is to bring people you know of together and launch a new thing. The trust is, this work has already been happening quietly before anyone knew, respecting the history, the relationships, the attempts that came before that we can learn from and build upon, and the informal conversations already happening is critical — to overlook it and rush in is one of the most common and costly early mistakes.

Before any formal gathering, invest time in coffee. Listen, learn, be curious and ask ‘who else should I be chatting to?’ and ‘what is felt knowledge about this?’ The gathering often comes naturally and intuitively.

2. Hear the history before you build the future

Every place has a history of collaboration — and usually a history of collaboration that didn’t go the way people hoped… or maybe it did and thats why that particular crisis is no longer a driver. Communities have long memories, memories of forgotten promises, relationships that did or didn’t outlive partnership, ripples of impact that lived beyond programs, of what it has felt when community is strong and resilient and what how it feels when its struggling.

Acknowledging what came before, even if it means sitting with the disappointment or cynicism it may have left, and being honest about how this effort intends to be different — is not optional. It is foundational. Build on what has been, it also often means being able to build momentum faster by building on the muscle of collaboration that already exists, albeit latent. Initiatives or programs that skip past this step in the assumption they are the first and this is the start, miss the beauty of before.

3. Build the social and relational infrastructure alongside the formal infrastructure

The formal infrastructure of a place-based initiative — the governance structure, the terms of reference, the shared agenda — is important. But it is the relational infrastructure that determines whether it functions. The trust between backbone staff and community leaders. The willingness of partner organisations to be honest about what they can and can’t contribute. The capacity of the initiative to hold difficult conversations, hold space with one another as they go upstream into the uncomfortable drivers of challenge, and hold together in the often slow momentum of change.

Focus intention in time together, be it how meetings begin, time spent getting to know people not just programs, and activities however small that foster collaboration and the muscle of trusting and change together in low risk or quick to mobilise activities. The BBQ run together is far more than just a BBQ.

I’ve sat in the room when relational infrastructure clicks into gear, its invisible but vital. It shows up in the tone of responses to complex or uncomfortable truths, it shows up in the conversation in the carpark after the meeting, or whether people involved in place-based initiatives describe enjoying the journey not just the destination. Its hard to KPI, but that KPI is 100% dependent on the relational and social infrastructure foundations.

4. Clarify the question before you design the answer

One of the most important contributions a skilled facilitator can make in early-phase work is to help a group stay with the question longer than feels comfortable. The reality is that a majority of people come to the table with a pre-determined (and passionately held) answer, early days can quickly become a battle of the best idea. We dive straight towards a program, strategy, and theories of change, and only in time realise we were off course by a critical 5 degrees.

In complexity, the quality of the answer depends entirely on the quality of the question(s). Stay curious to the why is that, whats the about, and tell me more about that space. Build deep understanding by cross matching data with lived experience, past learnings with emerging policy agendas, with the views of our youngest locals and the wisdom of our oldest.

I use the test that if, when asking many in many ways, we are hearing the same thing again and again, we are on the right track. Stay in the curiousity until you have confidence that from every angle, the story is the same, in all its complexity.

5. Protect the pace of the community

This is by far the most challenge, we quote ‘work at the pace of community’, but can we hold to that.

Its a pace that may be gradual, waiting for those lingering behind or yet to trust enough to come to the table. It is also sometimes a pace that is rapid, energised and not keen on waiting for approval processes and mamoath reports to be written, reviewed and approved for the sake of paper. Sensing the pace of community is the skill, an intuition that understands the ever changing signals of pace and is confident enough to maintain an agile pace aligned to community, speeding up when needed and calling out the slow down. Pace may stop too, understanding that things rarely stall for forever it possibly the grit of this work.

If you are in this phase right now — wondering whether there’s enough momentum to proceed, holding together a fragile coalition of interested partners, trying to figure out what this could become — I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Reach out today at crystal@goodimpactau.com to explore how I could help your local initiative grow.