CLIP Consulting can help your community, region or neighbourhood recover from disasters like flood, fire or drought or from economic downturns caused by the closure of a major employer or a shift in demand for what the region offers.
A CLIP process in your community could, like the Walk Tall program in Ravenswood, help build/rebuild infrastructure, engagement and pride.
Getting Ready
- After a disaster has happened – or a major community challenge has arisen – one or more people in the community need to rally broad support for the community having a voice, a say in the recovery and a partnership with government agencies
- Create an action team – and think about a governing structure or corporate entity that can act as a partner with government and other agencies and also be the safe, legal body to whom funds can be given
- Identify if there is potential to get access to funding from government agencies AND from the community, especially those people who weren’t so badly impacted or larger businesses who have the resources to help a community-led recovery
- Consider getting charity status and/or Deductible Gift Recipient status to make donations easy and tax deductible
Getting Started
- A powerful process for community wide visioning is called Future Search. “A future search,” write Marvin Weisbord and future search co-developer Sandra Janoff, “is a large group planning meeting that brings the ‘whole system’ into the room to take ownership of their past, present, and future, confirm their mutual values, and commit to action plans grounded in reality.”
- Gather up to 30-80 diverse stakeholders, a cross-section of people concerned with the activities of the organization or community undertaking the search.
- Use the shared wisdom and experience of the participants to explore the trends — including global forces — at work in their lives. Together they create a detailed “mind map” of these trends on a giant sheet of paper.
- Discuss concerns, prioritize the trends they’ve identified and explore common ways of viewing the “mess” they’ve charted together. Tell each other what you’re proud of and what you’re sorry about.
- Gather in subgroups to imagine themselves 5, 10 and 20 years in the future. Generate concrete images and examples of what’s going on in your chosen future, and the barriers you imagine you’ve had to overcome to get there. Role play your presentation to enhance the creativity in this way of visioning.
Getting Results
- Participants develop lists of common futures (what they agree they want), potential projects (how to get there) and unresolved differences.
- Agree on the commonly acceptable actions and projects
- Each participant figures out what they personally want to work on.
- Get together with others of similar passion to plan action.
- Complete a One Page Plan
- Offer the team mentor support
- Follow the One Page Plan to make the projects happen over 12 months
- Measure the tangible and anecdotal results of the project
- Publicise the results and get more funding support
- Celebrate!
The CLIP Consulting team can help you to fast track this process. If your community needs partners to help make things happen then contact us at partner@clipguide.net.
An example of CLIP in Action is shown below.
CLIP in Action: The Walk Tall project
Ravenswood is a suburb considered to have socio-economic disadvantage in education, health, employment and crime. Traditional top-down, service-based approaches didn’t appear to be making improvements and the principal of the Ravenswood high school was sick of the graduates of the school being looked down on as employment prospects by those outside the suburb simply because of its reputation.
With consulting help, he rallied an action team of the local municipal council, the local newspaper and local residents. The team won federal government funds to mount The Walk Tall project to show the wider community the positive face of Ravenswood.
A Future Search conference was held with a cross section of the community invited over 1 ½ day to discuss what could be learned from the past, identify Prouds and Sorries and to creatively present what Ravenswood could be 10 years on.
Action plans started immediately with results including: better walkways and transport to connect to CBD Launceston, better policing, development of the heart of Ravenswood, a community garden and projects to build pride and engagement. Over a million dollars was committed to these development projects. The Royal Australian Planning Institute gave Walk Tall their Merit Award for Community Planning as that year’s best community-led project nationally.