We have been undertaking a Progress Mapping review of the Burnie Works initiative.

Over 50 local and external partners participated in workshops to look at how we work together to create positive community change. The outcomes of the Progress Mapping process can be found here.

A group of local partners and stakeholders took what we heard through Progress Mapping to work through a number of key questions. How do we work together to:

• Balance foundational local work with ‘growing the field’?
• Engage wider and deeper, using a variety of processes and storytelling to inspire participation?
• Build a deeper understanding of the systems and their impact on us to design equally impactful responses?
• Orientate efforts and test shifts in policy and investment to align with local strengths, needs, efforts and shared agenda?

The group considered what support Burnie Works requires from our external partners, including Federal and State Governments, the University of Tasmania, support organisations and peak bodies, so our work can continue to grow and have the impact we desire. From those discussions the following six requests were presented to a meeting of these partners at a Support Planning Workshop in Hobart.

We seek to deepen our productive partnerships through:

• Long-term bipartisan funding certainty based on performance against agreed goals and actions. System change needs time to understand needs, build trust, confidence, and capabilities. Short term funding and political uncertainty inhibits this work.
• Commitment and collaboration. Be a real committed partner, show genuine interest and be collaborative. Work with us, align our strategies, bring others into the collaboration, share data and information, participate, and promote the work and outcomes.
• Participatory assessment and accountability. Participatory assessment should be a two-way street: government to community and community to government. This gives both parties agency, makes accountability a participatory experience, building trust.
• Elevating and embedding place-based approaches. It is fundamental to accept that place-based facilitation and coordination is as essential as any other social infrastructure necessary for communities to flourish.
• Community led measurement of outcomes. Trust communities to lead this work and set meaningful KPI’s because they know what outcomes they need. Measurement of outcomes linked to placed-based needs will help progress issues that matter to communities.
• A risk framework that allows innovation and “failure” through a Continuous Improvement lens. System change is an adaptive challenge that requires new ways of working and the ability to take a risk and try something different. Permission to fail and learn from it is needed. Risk management should not stifle initiative or innovation.

Partners are now considering how they can respond and what actions they can commit to. These will come together with agreed actions with local stakeholders that will guide work until the end of June 2024