In November this year Family Life welcomed internationally renowned Tamarack Institute Co-CEO, Liz Weaver, for a presentation to colleagues, partners and senior staff.
Liz led the highly successful place-based Collective Impact project, Vibrant Communities, in Canada driving what began as an experiment within 13 communities, to an initiative that expanded to 176 cities across the country. In its first 10 years, the initiative delivered 440,000 poverty reducing benefits and impacted more than 200,000 households. It is still achieving amazing outcomes today.
In Liz’s presentation to Family Life, and guests, she provided an in-depth explanation of this work, which is underpinned by a core philosophy that is consistent with Family Life beliefs and practices – nothing for community without community.
Over the past five years Family Life has developed a close relationship with Liz, who has been essential to growing Family Life’s expertise for enabling collaborative community change.
Liz was Family Life’s international coach for providing the backbone role for the award winning Together We Can (TWC), a Collective Impact family violence prevention innovation in Cardinia Shire from 2015 to 2018. The project was extremely successful, seeing the rate of reported incidents of family violence reduce throughout the life of the project, peaking at a reduction of 23.7 percent between April 2017 and March 2018.
Deputy CEO, Allison Wainwright, who hosted and attended the event said, “There are many synergies between Family Life’s existing Creating Capable Communities (CCC) program and the Collective Impact philosophy of practice.
“Collective Impact brings a disciplined approach to CCC – a framework for community change so it was wonderful to have Liz here to explore that further.
“We feel so fortunate to have had an opportunity to spend time with Liz and further build our ability to enable the collaborations we need to create capable communities.”
The guests and staff who attended the event were able to have an intimate discussion with Liz and draw on her extensive experience and better understand how her experience relates to the Australian context.
Ms Weaver said, “Family Life Australia and Together We Can are leading examples of how Collective Impact efforts can move the needle on some of the most challenging issues facing communities.
“I look forward to continuing to spend time with colleagues at Family Life to further build this practice. “
Family Life offer customised training, mentoring and support packages for enabling community change. For more information about these programs contact Family Life on 8599 5433 or visit this page.
Comments for this post are closed.