What lies beyond community consultation? Beyond co-design?

This course explains how professionals working in governments, agencies, charities, non-profits, consultancies, developers and businesses can go well beyond standard community consultation processes to better work with and enable action by local communities.

The curator of this course, Dean Cracknell, co-founder of social enterprise Town Team Movement and creator of the Placemaking.Education platform, introduces the course in the video below.

Community consultation and community engagement are different

Community consultation and engagement are often talked about as though they are the same thing. They are actually very different, as this graphic below summarises.

What this course is about

The course:

1. Builds on the work of:
   1. Cormac Russell and the Asset-Based Community Development approach;
   2. Jon Alexander's work on citizenship;
   3. Seth Kaplan's work on fragile and flourishing communities; and
   4. The placemaking mindset and process, as 'road-tested' through Town Team Movement's work on the ground in dozens of communities in Australia and New Zealand.
2. Explains what community consultation is and how it differs from community engagement.
3. Explains the four modes of change and the Doing To / For / With / By framework.
4. Introduces the 'Ladder of Doing'.
5. Contrasts the consumer mindset with the citizen mindset.
6. Provides tips and examples from working with and enabling action by local communities.

Lesson 3 of the course explains how governments, institutions, agencies, charities and businesses can shift from Doing To and For to Doing With and By more often. It includes:

It includes advice on:

Connecting with people

• Tips for finding people to work with, including from the field of community organising
• 4 simple, but powerful, conversation starters

Clearing barriers to action

• Shifting from "No ... because" to "Yes, if ..."
• Professionals playing 'gapfiller' roles
• Understanding and using 'risk' to support doing with and by
• Addressing stakeholder or community opposition

Unlocking and encouraging 'discretional effort' in the community

• Helping people to think and behave as citizens, rather than customers, more often
• 11 tactics that you could use or suggest to help local people and informal or formal groups to create their own actions

We've also provided a Community Engagement and Communications Plan template to help you to plan your approach.

As a bonus, we also introduce the Placemaking Participation Spectrum.

The Four Modes of Change

Prior knowledge

The course does not require any particular knowledge to begin, but you may better understand the context and related ideas and approaches if you have done one of our other courses first.

Some of our other courses go into more detail on why working with local people and communities is important and how communities and cities are living systems, rather than complicated machines to be managed.

The two we would suggest are:

1. Creating Great Places in 12 Minutes (FREE) or
2. Creating Great Places: essentials for professionals (AUD $220).

Get your personal Certificate of Completion

People who complete this course will receive a personalised Certificate of Completion, endorsed by Town Team Movement and PlacemakingX, to recognise your knowledge.

Remember to press the “Complete and Continue” button in the top right-hand corner after you have finished each lesson.

Once you press the “Complete and Continue” button in the Download your Certificate of Completion section, you will be issued with your own personalised Certificate of Completion.

You have 5 months to complete the course, but extensions can be granted. You will have access to the course materials even after you have received your Certificate of Completion.

Let's get started!

Click 'Complete and Continue' to move to Lesson 1.