Stronger Things Start When We Stop Doing Things to Communities
What we heard in London about assets, relationships, ownership, power and measuring what really matters
Stronger Things is New Local’s annual festival of community power, bringing together people from local government, public services, the community and voluntary sector and beyond to explore how power can shift closer to communities. Held at London’s Guildhall, the 2026 gathering brought around 750 people together in person, with hundreds more joining online, for a day of ideas, conversations and practical approaches to building more community-powered places.
In June, three of us from the Jeder Institute, Dee Brooks, Lee Griffiths and Fiona Miller, joined Rich from Go Together at Stronger Things to open up a conversation around the ideas at the heart of our ABCD & Beyond: A Practical Guide for Local Government book. If you’d like to explore the book alongside these reflections, copies are available in Australia and internationally.
Rather than present the book or walk people through its frameworks, we wanted to put the thinking into the hands of people in the room and see what happened when the ideas met their experience. The six chapters of ABCD & Beyondbecame six spaces for inquiry: Time for Change: Rebels with a Cause; Asset Mapping: Connect, Don’t Collect; Built to Last: Relational, Not Transactional; Co-Everything: Doing With, Not To; Shifting the Power: Genuine Community Engagement; and Measuring What Matters: Data With Soul.
Each chapter was paired with a question. What challenges can’t be solved by services alone? What gifts, skills and assets are being overlooked? How do we move from projects to community ownership? Where are people being consulted rather than genuinely involved? What decisions could communities make that organisations currently make? And how do we know whether community is actually becoming stronger?
People gathered around the questions and brought their own experiences, frustrations, challenges and possibilities. The walls gradually filled with sticky notes, but the real harvest was in the patterns between them. What appeared to be six separate conversations began revealing a larger story about the relationship between communities and the institutions and systems that work alongside them.
Some things cannot be delivered
Time for Change: Rebels with a Cause
When we asked people to consider a challenge in their community that couldn’t be solved by services alone, they didn’t simply identify gaps in service provision. They named trust, hope, identity, connection, isolation, poverty, equity, accountability, bureaucracy and community democracy. They talked about organisations working in silos and systems focusing on institutional responses when community solutions may already exist.
Saying that services cannot solve everything is not an argument for institutions withdrawing from their responsibilities. Strong communities need good public institutions and accessible, properly resourced services. But services and communities do different things. A service can respond to isolation, but it cannot simply deliver belonging. An organisation can create opportunities for connection, but it cannot manufacture the relationships that make people feel they matter to one another. Trust, identity, hope and reciprocity emerge through lived relationships over time.
That changes the starting question. Instead of seeing a community challenge and immediately asking What service do we need to create?, we might also ask: What can only this community do? What capacities already exist here? What relationships could be strengthened? The role of organisations then becomes not only delivering interventions, but helping create the conditions in which community capacity can flourish.
From finding assets to connecting them
Asset Mapping: Connect, Don’t Collect
When people were asked what gifts, skills, passions and local assets were being overlooked, the answers ranged far beyond traditional asset registers. People named young people’s voices and skills, informal networks, intergenerational experience, libraries, universities, green and blue spaces, community gardens, unused land, empty shops and offices, community organisations and hyper-local communication networks. Libraries were seen not merely as buildings where “stuff” lives, but as trusted community spaces.
There was also an important challenge to asset mapping itself. One contribution reminded us not to look only at a person, but at the skills they hold. Another cautioned: don’t decide what the assets are, listen to what people want.
An asset map can easily become another extractive institutional exercise. We identify people’s skills, spaces, organisations and knowledge, put them into a database and technically declare the community “mapped”. But the deeper purpose of asset mapping isn’t the map. It is what happens between the assets.
A young person’s passion might connect with an older person’s experience. A community group might discover an underused space. A university might connect research capability with knowledge already held locally. The real question isn’t simply What assets exist here? It is what becomes possible when people discover, value and connect them themselves?
Communities are not projects
Built to Last: Relational, Not Transactional
The conversation about building things to last moved quickly into funding, ownership and time. Participants talked about long-term and flexible funding, seed funding, stewardship, community leadership and sharing resources in ways that enable genuine ownership. They warned against dependence on a single community leader and automatically bringing in external consultants when local organisations already hold relationships, knowledge and capability.
One contribution cut straight through: funding should not be the trigger.
Too often, a funding opportunity appears, an organisation develops a project, outcomes and timelines are established and then somebody goes looking for a community to engage. Even when the engagement is thoughtful, the sequence itself has already determined where much of the power sits.
The harvest suggested another sequence: begin with people and relationships. Understand what matters to them and what they care enough about to act upon. Discover what is already happening. Connect existing assets and allow ideas to emerge. Participants described this beautifully as co-thinking before co-design. Then ask what additional resources might help.
Communities don’t live in funding cycles. Relationships don’t become irrelevant when an acquittal is submitted, and community ownership cannot simply be added as an output near the end of a project. Sometimes the most valuable investment we can make is enough time, flexibility and trust for people to build something that belongs to them.
Co-design isn’t enough if ownership doesn’t move
Co-Everything: Doing With, Not To
When we asked where people were being consulted rather than genuinely involved, the responses were painfully familiar: tick boxes, red tape, silos and consultation fatigue. Participants described residents being invited into processes after important parameters had already been established, organisations seeking feedback about things people couldn’t meaningfully influence and engagement processes where the feedback loop was never closed. They noted that services may be called co-designed while implementation and evaluation remain institutionally controlled.
There was also a challenge to sequencing. Sometimes institutions begin with data, determine what they believe the problem is and only later ask people what actually matters. Sometimes people aren’t involved early enough because time or budgets don’t allow it. And sometimes, as one contribution acknowledged, we are afraid about what they’ll tell us.
That discomfort is part of genuine participation. People might disagree with our framing of the problem, reject something we have developed or identify priorities outside our organisational boundaries. If none of those possibilities exist, we probably haven’t shared very much power.
One of the strongest ideas in the harvest was therefore starting with residents, not bringing them in later. Instead of asking where we can add co-design to an existing process, perhaps we should ask who should have been involved before the process was designed. From there, co-design starts to become co-everything: co-thinking, co-designing, co-implementing, co-evaluating, co-learning and, eventually, sharing ownership.
Power becomes visible when we talk about decisions
Shifting the Power: Genuine Community Engagement
Our next question made power practical: What decision could your community make that your organisation currently makes?
People talked about communities deciding where funding goes, participating in grant decisions, allocating resources and setting agendas for local meetings. They talked about accessible information, working from the bottom up and changing where organisations meet people. Among the harvest was a wonderfully simple phrase: the decision that means something.
That gets to the difference between participation and power. We can invite people into surveys, meetings and beautifully facilitated workshops while retaining control over the agenda, resources and final decisions. Those activities may still be valuable, but participation shouldn’t be mistaken for power simply because people were present.
At the same time, shifting power isn’t as simple as handing over a decision and walking away. Participants recognised that organisations and their people need to become comfortable working with community before the making of decisions. Accessible information, relationships, transparency and trust matter. Shifting power is not a single act of delegation. It is a relational practice, and institutions need to learn different behaviours too.
What if our data had a soul?
Measuring What Matters: Data With Soul
When we asked How do you know community is becoming stronger?, people talked about belonging, pride, ownership, connection, confidence, capability and sense of control. They wanted to know whether people felt seen, heard and valued; whether new voices were being heard and acted upon; whether local people were increasingly involved in design; whether projects became sustained or volunteer-led; and whether people could move on from services. Importantly, they suggested that community should inform what “stronger” actually means.
One contribution described qualitative data as the place “where the soul lies”. Another argued that quantitative data should be anchored by people’s voices so the resulting narrative reflects the nuances of community. Another simply offered “voices and opinions as data.”
This isn’t an argument against numbers. It is an argument for evidence that helps us understand what is actually changing. Attendance tells us somebody came, but not whether they belonged. Activity numbers tell us an organisation was busy, but not whether community capacity increased. An output tells us something happened, but rarely tells us what rippled outward afterwards because people met, built trust and started doing something nobody had predicted.
Perhaps measuring stronger communities requires us to become interested not only in what is easy to count, but in what is important to notice. Who knows whom now who didn’t before? Who has started contributing? What has continued without us? What new leadership has emerged? Where has ownership shifted? These aren’t soft alternatives to evidence. If stronger community is what we claim to be working towards, they are evidence.
When six chapters become one conversation
ABCD & Beyond separates these ideas into chapters because books require some kind of order. Communities, inconveniently and wonderfully, do not.
At Stronger Things, the boundaries quickly blurred. Asset mapping became a conversation about power. Power became a conversation about funding. Funding became a conversation about relationships. Relationships became a conversation about ownership. Ownership changed what we needed to measure. Measurement brought us straight back to the question of who gets to define what matters.
This connects strongly with the ABCD & Beyond Practitioner Wheel and Systems Wheel we had in the room, which explore movement from TO → FOR → WITH → BY → AS: from transactional practice, through programmatic and collaborative approaches, towards community-led practice and relational governance.
The Practitioner Wheel asks us to examine how we show up in that movement. The Systems Wheel asks the harder companion question: what needs to change around practitioners if institutions genuinely want them to work differently?
We cannot continually ask practitioners to work relationally while surrounding them with transactional systems. We cannot ask them to build trust while funding structures reward short-term outputs. We cannot promote co-design while organisations retain control over implementation, resources and decisions. And we cannot claim community ownership while institutions still own the agenda and define success.
Perhaps that was the strongest message hidden among all those sticky notes: the shift towards stronger communities isn’t only a change in community practice. It requires a change in institutional practice too.
Taking the chapters back off the page
ABCD & Beyond grew from years of learning alongside communities, practitioners and systems, but a book should never be the end of a conversation. If it is useful, it becomes an invitation into another one.
At Stronger Things, six chapters left the page and became questions. People brought their own places, frustrations, possibilities and wisdom to them. What came back wasn’t a tidy endorsement of a framework. It was much more useful. It complicated the ideas, grounded them and reminded us that they only matter when they meet practice.
Across the conversations, one challenge kept appearing in different forms: if we want communities to have greater ownership, our organisations have to become willing to own less.
Less ownership of the answer and the agenda. Less certainty about what the assets are before we have listened. Less control over how every resource is used. Less assumption that professional knowledge should automatically outweigh lived and local knowledge.
That doesn’t make organisations irrelevant. It asks something harder and more interesting of us. It asks us to become partners, connectors, convenors, listeners, resource-sharers and sometimes followers. It asks us to move from doing TO, through FOR and WITH, towards what can be led BY community and what becomes possible when we learn to work ASpart of community.
Maybe that is what the “Beyond” in ABCD & Beyond really asks of us. Not to abandon what we know, but to stop assuming we are the only ones who know. Not to stop measuring, but to notice what communities tell us matters. Not to stop bringing resources, but to think carefully about who controls them. Not to stop acting, but to recognise when our most useful contribution is to connect, support, make space or get out of the way.
Because stronger communities aren’t the outcome of better things being done to them. They emerge when people have the relationships, resources, agency and power to do stronger things together.
Community isn’t the recipient of the work. Community is where the work begins.
Explore ABCD & Beyond
ABCD & Beyond: A Practical Guide for Local Government is written by Dee Brooks, Lee Griffiths and Fiona Miller, with contributions from Michelle Dunscombe. It brings together practical tools, stories, provocations and frameworks for people interested in moving from service-led approaches towards stronger, more community-led practice. If these conversations have sparked something for you, the book takes the thinking further and offers practical ways to explore what this shift can look like in your own practice, organisation and community.
Buy in Australia: Books Online Australia
Buy internationally: Amazon, paperback and Kindle
Find out more about the book: ABCD & Beyond at the Jeder Institute
