Tools & Resources

This video explores how conflict – often seen as the enemy – can be an asset to partnerships when understood and harnessed. Deep Collaboration is a way of working that was created by First Nations and other Multicultural Australians to find new ways to work and lead together.

This resource is a field guide to the use of participatory and other research tools by Aboriginal research practitioners in Australia.

This resource provides detailed instructions for practitioners to create an actor map, which is a visual depiction of the key organizations and individuals that influence a topic or system.

This resource will walk you through the philosophy of an Appreciative Inquiry, and how to facilitate one or more phases of the exercise.

This resource is a comprehensive toolkit for planning, delivering and analysing Harwood Community Conversations.

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 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 supports practitioners to think through key moments for community members as they participate in the initiative being developed (e.g. from first contact, to participation, to leadership).

This resource is a framework for focused conversations with groups in order to reach agreement and/or clarify differences.

M.Q. Patton, an American evaluator whose approaches and tools are recognised and used to evaluate place-based initiatives, has identified a useful set of principles for evaluation, which are Effectiveness Principles. More resources including a webinar  on the…

This resource explores different ways of assessing a community’s readiness for collaborative work and includes links to tools and resources for assessing and building community readiness.

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

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

This resource identifies different levels of thinking and intervention regarding systems, emphasising that most of what occurs, particularly root causes, sit below the surface.

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…