What a day and a morning! I went to the #ShiftThePower Summit yesterday, which finished up this morning. I really didn’t know what to expect. What I found was 50+ people from all over Australia and beyond, from community foundations to partners, from very impressive young people to deeply experienced older people. I found friendly, passionate, open, diverse people focused on making our world a better place to live. In a community hall. All preceded with coffee. That is important.
We were guided through the day by Jenny Hodgson, GFCF Executive Director, who outlined the background to the #ShiftThePower movement and its underlying and driving question of:
What will it take to build a global civil society and funding system that is based on new ways of deciding and doing, that harnesses and mobilizes solidarity, money and other resources in ways that centre equity, justice and flourishing lives for all?
The power imbalance between the “givers” and the “receivers” was discussed. The challenge for community foundations is to empower and #ShiftThePower to our community and community partners (and not become just like big-end philanthropy and development).
Together, we developed our own sub-questions and agenda based on that guiding question, and we got into it. My own compelling question combined with another person’s:
How to ensure the community foundation will not grow to become (like) the dominant model but become an agent of change! To #ShiftThePower i.e. not become a fractal of the very thing(s) that don’t work.
Why was this question important for me?
The Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation is very young. We were founded very quickly – because we wanted to provide a pathway for community members to contribute to securing and maintaining the presence of a local community newspaper. I’ll discuss the newspaper and our origin story in another post but, in short, we turned around the establishment of a board, the foundation (with all its legal and regulatory approvals), and provided a pathway for tax-deductible in a few short months in time for an end-of-financial year fundraising push, last year in July. Lean start-up! We have and are going hard. Our narrow newspaper project to help build a stronger community and shared future has grown to be so much wider, deeper and encompassing, but has the same compelling WHY.
The decisions and culture we establish now will flow through for years to come: how we start is how we’ll continue. What I particularly got out of our discussion is that we need to stop, slow down, and spend time to engage even more deeply with our community. We’ve done that reasonably well – for example, we developed our Prospectus (check it out ;-)) with some very significant community engagement…but we have a long way to go to become as deeply embedded and as truly community-led as we need to be. If we are to avoid becoming top-down, out-of-touch, elitist.
We had already identified that we needed to find investments to support the deep, slow work of community engagement with the Aboriginal members of our community. That is if we want to be truly intercultural (which we do!). Again, a good beginning, but so much more to do.
Our “so what” session this morning highlighted that deep community engagement takes time and money and prioritization. It highlighted that “what is measured is what drives action”, and it’s easy to measure tangibles, like how much money is raised and distributed, but not so easy to measure the depth and quality of community engagements and empowerment.
Of course, there was so much more (check out the photo at the top of the page), but this is supposed to be a quick blog, not an essay!
John Huigen is the Executive Director at Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation, and a version of this blog was first published by Alliance Magazine.
Check out more coverage from Community Foundations Australia Forum Week – including the #ShiftThePower Summit – here:
- Communities have enormous power when they are connected and inclusive – Harriet McCallum, Executive Officer, Mannifera
- Language matters when you want to be heard – Stacey Thomas, Board Member, Community Foundations Australia