Thank you to all who joined us today on our monthly IACD Zoom catch-up!
These informal monthly sessions are hosted by IACD’s Director for Oceania, Dee Brooks; IACD Country Correspondent for Australia, Michelle Dunscombe, and IACD Member Fiona Miller. All IACD members are welcome to join these sessions, and we are planning on holding monthly catch-ups in more time zones.
Today’s call had fifteen attendees from five different countries, and the ideas brought up during the conversation were translated by the attendees into a “harvest” of notes. In addition, Fiona captured the conversation in an artistic response shown below.
To begin the meeting, all members checked in by sharing their name, where they are from, and what brought them here today. To the last question, answers ranged from being with like-minded people and learning to meeting other IACD members, to promoting the new IACD Instagram page.
The Discussion’s Harvest
The group was then invited to respond both verbally and on a Google Doc to three questions before having a further discussion. The questions and short responses were:
1. How has your role shifted?
– Need to figure out ways and means of rethinking and reworking
– How do we provide leadership by stepping back
– Difficulties bringing others into leadership in Aboriginal communities.
– Implications for service delivery
– Much more online communication, to reach people due to covid19 restrictions
– Rural communities are doing their things whilst more urbanised communities are expecting council or NGO support
– Changing the way we connect
2. What does this mean for community development practice?
– Zero sales for our women’s collective
– Changing practice to streamline
– I recently heard a phrase we are all in the same rough stormy sea right now but different boats, so being aware of how to support people, given the different circumstances..
– Need to look at reaching out to people who are doing innovative stuff. Broadening our networks.Not the usual suspects.
– Structures and ways to keep leadership development remotely.
– Impact of fires, floods and now COVID and the impact on the economy and funding has the potential to fragment community recovery
– In bushfire recovery, communities usually come together to connect and in COVID, there’s fear from practitioners that it will become a top-down model; money is the root of evil in disaster recovery
– It creates competition and top-down approach – it gets into people’s psyche long after; creates a welfare mindset
NGO’s want to be seen as doing something but often they are doing to communities instead of with communities
– Communities need to be at the centre
– What does recession mean for our work and communities?
– How we access services in the coming years? Who we connect with?
– One positive thing that has come out of this COVID situation for us is that it has forced us to ‘hand the baton’ over to our local team members in Myanmar (where we have an ABCD project). We have been working with them since 2011, and building their capacity. But the NGO in Australia we work through has been consistently resistant to allowing them more autonomy in running the program. With us suddenly not able to travel to Myanmar, we’ve had to find ways to hand work over, and mentor at a distance. So that almost ‘forced’ localisation been a real positive outcome of what is otherwise a terrible situation.
– Have to pass the baton on but there will always be a role for Community Development
3. How are the international standards informing your work?
– Puts a framework around new CD workers roles and what to expect; very beneficial from that perspective
– Not sure if there is much linkage to standards in a New Zealand context
– Do the Standards inform our work, or does our work inform the Standards?
– Used in education — but how often do we use them to inform our practice?
– How do we give life to the standards and understand what they mean in practice?
– I go back to the standards every now and then, to see if what we do fits in the standards.
– The standards are really high level and look really good. But I’m wondering how we could encourage buy-in to actually implementing them – particularly in funded services.
In Closing
There was a lot of reflective and inspirational talk in one hour, and we truly appreciate the members who joined us from around the world — at 4am in some cases!
A huge thanks to Director and host Dee Brooks, and for the Harvest by Country Correspondent, Michelle Dunscombe and IACD Member Fiona Miller
What’s Next?
Missed out this time? No worries, IACD will host a catch-up at this time (13:00 AEST) on the first Wednesday of every month. Email membership@iacdglobal.org for the Zoom link to our 3rd June meeting. See you there!
