Diana Harris, 5 March 2024

ARACY were chuffed to get a namecheck from Glyn Davis AC last week when he delivered the Kenneth Myer Lecture. Mr Davis drew from our 2023 paper Place-based Initiatives in Australia: An Overview in the section of his lecture focusing on place- and community-based work.

As we argue in that paper, and as Mr Davis observed, place matters. Community matters. And the way government and philanthropy choose to work with communities makes or breaks the success of their work.

Together, government and philanthropy can both turbocharge their individual contributions. Philanthropy has the freedom, within their charters and the will of their Boards, to be bold, to innovate and iterate. Philanthropic funded work can be a pathfinder and proof of concept; it can build an evidence base that gives comfort to other funders that a particular program or intervention is a good buy. Government, while holding the responsibility of stewarding public monies and the higher burden of proof this tends to carry, has the weight and deep pockets to back in and scale what philanthropy has shown to work. It’s this partnership of complementary strengths that ARACY-powered collaborations like the Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership and the Investment Dialogue for Australia’s Children are seeking to leverage.

Yet the third partner in achieving meaningful social change, the community itself, often does not enjoy the same seat at the table or power in the relationship. While a community’s knowledge of its own people, problems, strengths and assets is recognised as an essential part of what is needed to create change, the structures that shape how both government and philanthropy work with communities rarely allow for these community inputs to be afforded the same value and importance as the money of a funder or the knowledge of an ‘expert”.

While both those things are necessary, neither are sufficient without deep community involvement and participation. That’s why the Thriving Queensland Kid Partnership’s Management Board is backed up by a Leadership Table that can bring our work closer to the ground and, as required, help recruit more and deeper community input. Similarly, The Investment Dialogue for Australia’s Children is now recruiting for both a Community Leadership Council and a First Nations Leadership Council.

This work of understanding and dismantling the unhelpful structures and replacing them with new ways to understand and share responsibility, risk, accountability, and power is slow and frequently painful. It requires those of us who benefit from these structures to recognise the ways in which we benefit and be prepared to give some of those benefits up. It requires time, lots of time, to build relationships and move at the pace of trust. It requires a generosity of spirit, to share the knowledge we each bring to the table even though that means losing our “expert” status. It requires investment in building capability on all sides to deeply, meaningfully understand each other’s knowledges. It requires the right kind of data, which we then require to access and interpret together.

In short, this kind of change requires unlearning our own ways and learning a new way together. Is it hard? Yes. But it’s the only way forward.

Diane Harris - ARACY Lead, Operations
Diane Harris – ARACY Lead, Operations