1. Blog masonry – classic

Written by Michelle Dunscombe Whilst agencies and governments are keen to connect with the community post a disaster for a variety of reasons, much of the engagement is top down and paternal in nature. From my experience the best way to connect and engage with the community is to utilise the many dynamic community networks…

Healthy Relationships A Jeder Institute Project Author: Aleks Jovanovic – Behaviour Support Practitioner Due Date: February 2020 Publish Date: February 2020 Buyer Persona: [Anyone] “A healthy relationship is when two people can communicate openly and successfully dissolve any misunderstanding.” – Malanda   It was about 15 years ago that I learned one of the most…

The paradox of bottom up community development and top down consultancy Written by Dee Brooks The Jeder Institute is a strengths-focused, not-for-profit, messy, imperfect, next-stage organisation, based on decades of asset-based community development and person-centred practices, blended participatory leadership approaches and is uniquely based on our own member-led horizontal governance platform. Power and Participation As…

Dee Brooks, Agitator, Blender and Chief Hugger of the Jeder Institute, provides a brief overview of Asset Mapping to truly mobilize communities. Please join the conversation around community development and the asset-based approach to community development, leave a comment and let us know your thoughts. And hit the subscribe button to follow us. About Communities@Work…

Written by Fiona Miller   Placemaking is a multi-layered approach to the planning, design and organisation of public spaces. Placemaking focusses on the broad spectrum of all local community assets. It creates places and spaces that promote connection, good health and wellbeing and can bring happiness. Good Placemaking is: Community driven and collaborative Relevant to…

Written by Michelle Dunscombe The last few months have been challenging for me as the current disastrous bushfires burn across my beautiful Australian landscape from bush to beach. At times I have been catapulted back to February 2009, when my own community faced the full ferocity of Black Saturday. An event that changed me, my…

Based on reflections of the concept of The Natural and the Open from The Apparatus, by Giorgio Agamben Written by: Dee Brooks The overview of Conscious Co-Design (CCD) offers a space for inquiry and conscious decision making when practically applying a number of community engagement and development frameworks, including their practices, processes, patterns and guiding…

Written by Charlotte Saunders, Behaviour Support Practitioner Due Date: December 2019 Publish Date: December 2019 According to the Human Rights Commission, international law, and national law, we all have the right to make choices for ourselves and have control over our own lives. This includes (but is not limited to) making decisions we feel are…

Ethan grew up in Sydney’s inner west where he also went to school. He is a young man living with Autism and a moderate intellectual disability, but that doesn’t stop his from living his best life. A few years ago, Ethan and his Mother Claudia made a sea change and moved to the Illawarra region.…

A Jeder Institute Project Written by Aleks Jovanovic Due Date: December 2019 Publish Date: December 2019 The music in you   “There’s a musician and an artist in all of us.” – AJ   Jeder Institute members Aleks Jovanovic and Mark have set out to explore the power of music by looking for people who…

“A comparison study was undertaken between the asset-based community-led development (ABCD) approaches versus the traditional needs-based approach to community development relating to community leadership

how Asset-based Community-led Development (ABCD) supports & strengthens Art of Hosting (AoH) practices in community engagement & development work.

By Dee Brooks

Conscious Co-Design: creating safe spaces to explore vulnerability in complexity Written by Fiona Miller Locating yourself within a number of given community engagement and development frameworks can be exciting, stress relieving and can open up new possibilities. Patterns in frameworks are as natural, and needed, as breathing; you just don’t know what you don’t know!…

Over the years, we have adapted (from others) and developed (our own) practical and emergent ways of discovering assets, both active and latent, in community to support community-led mobilisation for change.

“Imagine a meeting of 60 people, where in an hour you would have heard everyone and at the end you would have precisely identified the 5 most important points that people are willing to act on together

By Kerry Hartigan

I know that not all participants end up being practitioners. I know that not all stewards have been apprentices.  I believe that there are natural AoH practitioners who come with innate wisdom and experience, without ever joining an AoH gathering. I began to wonder what it would look like if people were asked: ‘Tell me about your AoH journey?”

By Dee Brooks and Kerry Hartigan
Art of Hosting, Ballina, NSW, Australia

The Art of Coasting provided a place to “hold space” for ourselves and each other for gentle healing and catharsis and also for genuine learning and growth. As a Core Team, we all left this training feeling like we had equally contributed, we had experienced a deep learning together and we were equally valued.

I’ve been an Intentional Nomad for over 3 years now and to date, participatory co-designing of meetings, forums, conferences and events is the work that stretches me! Due to not having a physical address or community who I live amongst, I have discovered a few ways to strengthen my own global community while supporting others.

It started with a lone voice in Goa, India.

In January 2017, Bernie Dolley from Ikhala Trust, stood up, in front of everyone, at the end of the ABCD Festival in Goa and announced her intention to host the next ABCD global gathering in South Africa.

….about Hosting Community Written by Dee Brooks Mike Green and Henry Moore of the ABCD Institute were onto something, years ago, when they coined the phrase “leading by stepping back” as a successful way to work within a community. Many years ago, when I was frustrated with how ABCD could be applied in transient communities,…

Download Written by Dee Brooks Date: 07th Sep 2017 For many years, IAP2’s Public Participation Spectrum, which explores different levels of community engagement, has been a part of what I teach in blended workshops where I combine Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) and the Art of Hosting or Participatory Leadership, amongst other frameworks. Since first delivering…

Download Richard Holmes talks to Dee Brooks from the Jeder Institute about her journey into asset based community development. She shares how she created ABCD Co-Labs, and stories from how they have been used. Dee offers her advice to young people – gather your tribe!  

Written by Michelle Dunscombe and Dee Brooks   June 2015 saw us pack our bags and head for the UK, well specifically Ribby Hall, Wrea Green Lancashire in England’s North West for the 2015 ABCD Festival. We had read the program, in fact assisted with writing the program with the ABCD team. We were looking…

Local football clubs are great proponents of ABCD and they don’t know it. Ever been a part of a footy club? You soon get to know who is the plumber, the accountant, the builder, the student etc. Clubs are adept at learning what skills and abilities players and members have to share. In Asset Based…

When you walk into your local Op Shop what do you see? Probably just a range of second hand goods at a bargain price. You may be aware that you are supporting a charity or a local community organisation but what you don’t see or consider is the great social impact and community building roles…

Written by Facinta Cubis with Max Hard Date: Feb 2017     Carol* weighed up the pros and cons carefully before signing up for the citizens’ jury in her regional town. The appeal was dubious. Five Saturdays with 30 people she didn’t know. Giving up her gardening to learn about, discuss and debate unfamiliar issues.…

— the internal mechanics of effective collective impact Written by Dee Brooks   I wrote a blog some months ago titled “Through the Looking Glass; a Blended Herstory” which was an attempt to synthesise almost 2 decades of work. This cathartic experience compelled me to create something flexible and adaptable to support community members in…

It is your choice. If you don’t like the LAC or NDIS planner you have been allocated you may request someone else. You are in Control.

For those who don’t know the movie “Jerry Maguire”, Jerry is a sports agent who has a client who is considering jumping ship and who has coerced him to participate in a business conversation about pay rates by shouting, “show me the money” to prove his loyalty & as Jerry gets more excited, he is swept along with the wave of enthusiasm and excitement and rightly so, he scores a coup; he makes history, retains his client and boosts his business!

ABCD & Art of Hosting: productive and powerful together! Written by Dee Brooks   There’s a key area of ABCD community building and/or asset mapping which I emphasise strongly in workshops and it’s one of the powerful, blended areas between ABCD and Art of Hosting work which helps with turning ideas into actions! In Connect! Don’t Collect:…

It’s easy to say we collaborate but what does effective collaboration look like?

As community facilitators, we are embarking on a journey of multiple ideas, opinions and attitudes that can potentially swing from interactive, participant-led beauty to frustrated, daunting chaos!

Dee Brooks shares her insights in how ABCD supports community-driven initiatives.

Above all else, when mapping the strengths and assets of a community, make sure you connect, don’t just collect!

My job now, is not as a consultant; it is to enter a community with open heart, open mind and open will and to continue to offer these blended gifts to communities who are in crisis

Participant-driven gatherings, authentic discussions and real actions! This is what happened during November when a team of Aussies from the Jeder Institute and Future by Design embarked on a whirlwind tour of New Zealand with the staff of ImagineBetter, headlined by Margaret Wheatley

This is the story that involves many people, over many years, and it tells us of their work and the emergence of the language and the principles of Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) in Australia and some of its’ Asian neighbours

Blending Person Centred Thinking and Asset-based Community Development has been both a natural progression of two powerful strengths focused approaches yet, has also been a challenge in discovering where the intersections and borders are within the stand-alone frameworks and philosophies. Person Centred Community Driven practice delivers an experience for people that shifts mindsets towards a…

Who cares? A few months ago, I started some conversations (which some people might call ‘work’) with 14 multi-cultural community leaders in Sydney who are seeking ways to collaborate and learn from each other plus, share their strengths with the broader community. For example, one of the Afghan leaders told one of the African leaders…

One Tree at a Time Late one Friday afternoon, I was talking on the phone with the Regional Coordinatorofa Government Department about the upcoming talk and workshop I would be delivering at their Annual Forum. Being very passionate community workers, we very quickly moved onto talking about the importance of listening, the potential dilemmas caused…

Between Chaos and Control “Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish in the crowd.” ~ From the I Ching Over the years of working with people; community members, teams, friends, my family, I have observed and reflected on the path between…

Why are the ‘Values of Inclusion’ (developed by Marsha Forest, Jack Pearpoint, John O’Brien and the Scottish Human Services) so important? Start Fragment Everyone is born ‘in’ All means All Everyone needs to be ‘in’ Everyone needs to be ‘with’ Everyone is ready Everyone needs support Everyone can communicate Everyone can learn Everyone can contribute…

I recently attended a one day workshop on Collective Impact in Sydney, facilitated by Paul Born of the Tamarack Institute where he talked about the concept of Third Spaces. The term is not new to me and is what one of my ABCD colleagues, Jim Diers, calls Bumping Places but, it got me thinking about…

  When traveling around the country, delivering ABCD workshops, I often hear people say, “I’ve heard great ABCD stories but it all seems too big for my little community” or, “People aren’t interested, where do I start?” I was reminded of this yesterday when wrapping up a 3 day Person-Centred, Community-Driven training for Early Linkers,…