Tools & Resources

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 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 tool will help you to identify: • Factors that have contributed to the change you seek. • Evidence demonstrating the contribution. • The strength of the contribution. • Identify new means of and opportunities to exercise leadership.

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.

This resource provides a guide to using the Most Significant Change (MSC) method, together with an MSC story collection guide.

This resource provides a guide to the Most Significant Learning Technique, which is an adaption of the Most Significant Change Technique, and helps to surface assumptions and workshop key lessons. 

This resource provides a framework, together with more than 80 methods and tools, for evaluating place-based work in the Australian context.

Logan Together’s 2018 Progress report is an example of the type of reporting that can be achieved through the measurement and learning effort.

Rubrics are a useful tool for assessing performance, these can be co-designed with the community.

This resource is a compilation of tools and techniques for working in groups and facilitating meetings and workshops.

This resource describes the theory and objectives of reflection workshops, and provides a step-by-step guide to conducting them, based on three stages of evaluative thinking: What happened? So what? Now what?

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

This resource describes the ABLe Change Framework for systems change, and provides a package of simple rules, processed and tools for applying the approach. 

There are many more tools and approaches that can be used to engage with and learn about your community, have a look through the following websites for inspiration: 100 Conversations, appreciative inquiry, there are also a number of arts-based methods that can be useful…

More tools for evaluating complexity can be found here. 

This resource includes a six-step process for practitioners to understand and gather evidence of the contribution their work made to achieving observed outcomes.