Progress report from Down-Under

[Stephen Duns]

I thought you might be interested in some progress being made in just one part of the "down-under" AoH community.

A group of organisations have entered into AoH prtactice in a deep and meaningful way, and are exploring ways to collaborate. The organisations are:

• annecto, aged and disability support orgainisation,
  
• Melbourne Citymission, a large NGO supporting homeless, people in or leaving prison, people with intellectual disabilities and unemployed people
  
• Merri Community Heatlh Service, offering community health as well as aged, disability, carer support
  
• Deakin Univserity, a major teaching and research university
• Success Works, a consulting company specialising in social policy, evaluation and innovation.
  

Last Monday we all met to have a conversation about how to establish a research centre in social innovation, with a focus on participatory leadership/AoH. Also involved is the emerging Hub here in Melbourne. We see this as a way to make a contribution to the broader AoH community, as well as deepening the practice of the organisations involved.

At the meeting it was decided to focus on Art of Hosting/Participatory Leadership and it's impact on social innovation. A very exciting nexus of energy for stewardship and development of AoH.

This collabroation has only been made possible by the power and integrity of the practices of this community. Thank you for your contributions.

[Bob Stilger]

Yes, Stephen, this is really exciting. It seems like this is the evolution/next stage of this work in many places.

Sometimes at Berkana we talk about the progression from networks to communities of practice to systems of influence. Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze did some great writing about this a couple of years ago in an article called Emergence which you can download from the Resources page of my www.resilientcommunities.org website.

One of the things we've been looking at in several systems I'm involved in in the US, Southern Africa and Japan is that there are some core capacities used in this work at different levels of system -- in other words, they are used both at the broad community/networking level as well as used in service of more focused action. One way we've been naming these core capacities is as:

1) connect and convene
2) support peer learning
3) provide reference and resource from outside the system
4) use a strength's based approach


Great to hear of this work in Melbourne!

Cheers,