From CoBu to Beyond: Naming What We’d Already Become
Some names change because something is different.
This one changed because something had become more honest.
Why the name changed
For a while now, the team inside Jeder known as CoBu has been doing work that the name couldn’t quite hold.
Community building, yes – but also leadership, facilitation, measurement, harvesting, systems change, governance, organisational development, and more. Often several of those things woven together in the same piece of work, with the same people, in the same room.
CoBu made sense when the team was primarily Jeder’s Community Building arm. But the work kept growing. The name didn’t.
So we stopped trying to make it fit.
Beyond is not a new direction. It’s an honest description of where we already are.
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The team didn’t sit down one day and decide to become something different. They looked up from the work and realised the name had been trailing behind them for a while. Beyond is what catches up.
And it does something CoBu couldn’t – it stays open.
Beyond Community Building. Beyond Measurement. Beyond Harvesting. Beyond Leadership. Beyond whatever the work asks of us next. The name moves with the practice rather than defining its edges. That matters, because the most interesting work – the team will tell you this themselves – tends to happen just past the point where the methodology runs out.
This is already reflected in ABCD & Beyond, the book the Beyond Team launched internationally at the World Community Development Conference in Glasgow just last month. The team loves ABCD. It’s deeply embedded in how they work. But they’ve never been interested in treating any single methodology as the answer to everything. They draw from different practices, different people, different ways of knowing – depending on what’s needed.
Beyond gives the name permission to do the same.
As the team put it best: “CoBu told people what team we were. Beyond tells people how we think.”
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What stays the same
Everything that matters.
The people. Dee Brooks, Fiona Miller, Lee Griffiths – the same team, the same relationships, the same slightly unconventional way of going about things.
The generosity. The practice. The deep roots in ABCD and community development that have always underpinned the work.
This new name isn’t about leaving something behind. It’s about taking what the team knows, values and loves – and seeing where else it can take them. The foundations aren’t going anywhere. The name is just making more room around them.
The logo
The Beyond mark started with something that already existed: one of several alternate Jeder logos created during our last rebrand, variations that have quietly lived in the background ever since.
The team looked at them with fresh eyes and chose the version that felt most like them: a form that reaches outward, that stretches beyond its original shape.
Fiona Miller brought it to life as the Beyond identity – adding the Beyond wordmark and the Jeder Institute name to complete the mark.
It didn’t need to be built from scratch. It just needed the right eyes to see what it could become.
Which is, quietly, a perfect metaphor for everything this new name is trying to say. We haven’t thrown away where we’ve come from. We’re reaching out from it.
What’s next
The team isn’t rushing to define exactly what Beyond is allowed to become, and that’s almost the point.
Beyond shouldn’t become another box. The whole idea is that in two years someone can wander in with a completely unexpected idea and the answer can be: yes, that’s Beyond.
Some of what’s coming already has a name. Some of it probably doesn’t exist yet.
Website and socials updates are on the way. In the meantime, if you’re curious about what working with the Beyond Team could look like, reach out at info@jeder.com.au ; we’d love to have a conversation
