Tools & Resources

This resource describes successful community leadership development programs through which governments, social purpose organisations and communities can help build leadership capacity.

This resource is a video of Rich Harwood describing the Harwood Institute’s concept of Turning Outward, or making the community the reference point for everything you do.

This resource includes an overview of what a common agenda is, and a five-step guide for developing a common agenda with others.

This tool will help you to identify how ready your system (group, community or organisation) is for collaboration and adaptation. It can also be modified to help you assess readiness for tackling complex challenges.

This resource provides a comprehensive ‘how to’ guide for forming, running, and harnessing the benefits of working groups.

This tool will help you to map and interpret stakeholder dynamics in your initiative. This tool can be useful at the start of an initiative when you are working out the ‘lay of the land’, if things go wrong, if there is conflict, or if you are not making progress.

This resource from Australians Together outlines clearly why and how Intergenerational Trauma needs to be understood in the context of working with First Nations Australians.

John Kania shares insights into why Collective Impact and Systems Change efforts are most powerful when they are conducted at a place-based level. This is an excerpt of a video interview in 2020 with John Kania by CFI Director, Kerry Graham.

John Kania introduces the six conditions of systems change framework. An excerpt of a video interview in 2020 with John Kania by CFI Director, Kerry Graham.

This resource will help you gain peer input into responding to a current challenge, surfacing assumptions, identify new opportunities, and identify common patterns and themes in the work of community change.

This resource will help you clearly articulate your ideas, identify key benefits for specific stakeholders, and reflect on what is required to go from idea to impact.

This resource will help you gather feedback that does not focus only on either criticism or praise, make it easy and more comfortable for others to provide input, and visually identify similarities or differences in feedback.

This resource situates collective impact in relation to similar approaches, notes similarities and differences, and makes recommendations for enhancing collaborative community practice.

This resource uses a basic matrix to distinguish between simple, complicated, political, complex, and chaotic issues and challenges, and the types of intervention most appropriate to each.