Community stories: 20 June 2024
Recently our IRCF Program Manager, Nancy Sposato, along with representatives from Junee Community Centre, Junee Community Power and Junee Shire Council spent three joyful days learning about The Art of Hosting at a workshop led by Percolab (formerly Campfire Coop) in Bright, VIC.
They came together with 40 community leaders from across the country. Each leader brought a passion for nurturing community conversations and a desire to do it better.
For Junee members, this participation was supported by an IRCF Toolbox grant with local leaders intending to apply skills gained towards developing effective and meaningful ways to foster inclusive community engagement and to have a shared language to be able to support each other in their efforts well into the future. The Junee initiatives that will directly benefit from this investment in people include a project that engages young people in the NFP sector, the development of culturally safe services and uptake in the renewable energy transition.
Nancy reflected, “A question that comes up time and time again is how to manage conflict and differing perspectives in a community. This is a very natural question when people are working on projects that they care strongly about and when people have invested a lot of time and energy.”
The skills gained over the three days offered efficient methods and insights into the awareness we need to have as individuals and the ways people can work together to foster positive cultures where everyone participating feels supported and included. Participants of the workshop spoke about using some of the tools they had learned immediately in work and during meetings.
Nancy and the rest of the community leaders, left with multiple techniques for having important conversations that can be applied to multiple contexts, frameworks to use for collaborative project design and creative ways to collate and share information gathered from community conversations to support greater impact and momentum.
You can check out a foundational Art of Hosting technique, the Four-Fold practice, at the link below.
