Sincere apologies! We’re back online…

What's on top?

Let me open with an apology. We’ve had serious problems with the Change Agency’s website. We couldn’t send our free monthly enews and folks have been unable to download files from the website. Sorry! To cut a long story short, we’re back online now. Please keep your helpful feedback coming if any of these problems persist. Thanks for your patience!

Our team are catching our breath following the fourth and final workshop in this year’s Community Organising Fellowship. The cohort gathered at CommonGround, an hour from Melbourne, for a four-day exploration of movement building, sustainable activism and building people power to influence decision makers. Annie Kia joined us to share lessons from Lock the Gate’s powerful work to support the movement resisting coal and gasfields . Mark Wakeham and Linda Parlaine reflected on twenty years of organising in the Australian environment movement. We end the 22-day training program with strong relationships, deep understandings and organiser toolkits ready for action.

Applications for the 2017 Fellowship closed last week. We’ve received strong interest from campaigners in most Australian states – folks representing large and small NGOs, grassroots groups, Aboriginal and Torres Strait groups, rural and urban campaigns. Please drop us a line if you need an extra week or two to submit your application.

Community Organising Guide set to launch this November

Our other (big!) news is that the second guide in our People Power Manual is almost ready to send to the printers. It’s a year since we launched the Campaign Strategy Guide – our collection of training resources for activist educators and campaigners to take the mystery out of campaign strategy. Since then, James and Jason have been creating the Community Organising Guide: 300 pages of workshop processes, resources and plans. The guide will be launched at this year’s Organise conference in Sydney 24-25 November, and available in electronic format and hard copy from our website. You’ll be first to hear when it’s launched.

Thanks to friends for sharing the links and resources in this month’s enews. Enjoy!

Comm Org fellow profile: Adele Neale

Here by the beach in south-east Melbourne, we’ve just come out of a whirlwind 4-month election campaign in the electorate of Dunkley (as well as Deakin electorate in the east, where we worked with ACF). We are building community power through deep and ongoing organising in this area, where the vote is close in state and federal elections, to make …

Great online resources

Enews subscribers regularly share with us the websites and online resources they’re developing, discovering and learning from in their community organising. Enjoy this month’s batch and be sure to drop us a line to suggest links for the next enews.

10 LESSONS FROM BRITAIN'S CAMPAIGN GURUS

Earlier this year, Sam McLean (former CEO of GetUp Australia) spent two weeks working with British campaigning wizards, 38Degrees — the British sister organisation of GetUp. Here are his top 10 lessons for campaigners from our British mates: "It was just a striking realisation when I looked back on 8 years of GetUp campaigns and realised that 95% of the impact …

Oh for the love of sticky notes: The Changing Role of Evaluators Who Work with Foundations

Julia Coffman (Director and founder of the Center for Evaluation Innovation) writes: "I’ve been an evaluator for 25 years now, and I love it. I love the opportunity to apply research skills to important questions. I love helping people to think about their hypotheses and assumptions and then testing them. I love informing strategic decisions at critical times..."

evaluation capacity building: Funder Initiatives to Strengthen Grantee Evaluation Capacity and Practice (report)

Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB) is the process of improving an organization’s ability to use evaluation to learn from its work and improve results. Organizational learning is incredibly important. Organizations that are adept at learning from mistakes and adapting to new challenges are more likely to be successful, and in the nonprofit sector, more likely to make significant progress toward mission-related …

Guide to system mapping

A system map is a visual depiction of the relationships between actors within a system. Often, system maps depict flows of information and/or resources. In this four-part blog series, Emily Gate, Srik Gopal, Lauren M. Smith, and Joelle Cook of FSG give guidance, share examples, and and might even get you to pick up a marker and draw a rich picture!

Rallying for a cause: 7 experts on how to raise awareness

What makes you tear up at a commercial? What is it about a post on social media that can make you decide to stand up and take action? Is there a cause that hits so close to home that you can’t help but support the organizations that champion it?

New style lobbying: How GetUp! channels Australians' voices into politics

We see their spokespeople quoted in the papers and their ads on TV, but beyond that we know very little about how Australia’s lobby groups get what they want. This series shines a light on the strategies, political alignment and policy platforms of ten lobby groups this election campaign.

Upcoming learning opportunities and events

For details of other workshops and learning opportunities, visit our calendar.

Not-for-Profit People Conference | 21-22 November, Melbourne

The Not-For-Profit People Conference is Australia’s biggest event focused on how to attract, train and retain the best people for the NFP sector. Over two days and twenty-nine inspiring sessions, join five hundred senior leaders and team leaders, HR professionals and board members, volunteer managers and CEOs to explore the NFP sector’s most pressing people issues. Full details and registration …

FWD + Organise | 24-25 November, Sydney

Australia's top digital and organising talent converge for two days in Sydney, November 24-25. Some of us mostly work behind a keyboard, others spend our time talking with communities in the field. Some of us obsess over circles of commitment, recruitment events and building relationships. Others focus on innovative email tactics or new tools for online customisation and targeting. The …

Common Cause: values and frames that motivate change (various dates and locations)

Introductory half-day workshop for those new to values and frames-based community engagement. We explore how values and frames work, why they matter, and what a values-based approach to community engagement means for individuals, organisations and movements seeking to create a more just, sustainable and democratic world. Masterclass for those who already have a grasp of the Common Cause fundamentals, but …

Groupwork Institute of Australia 2016 training calendar

The Groupwork Institute of Australia are the collaborative education and training arm of Commonground Training Resources Inc. We have been leaders in facilitation and collaborative management for more than 30 years. Our approach has two levels: Practical skills and processes that are easy to understand and simple to use Building emotional intelligence so these tools can be applied to a …

OrganiseUs (digital campaigning) 2016 training calendar

Workshops on social media srategy, digital organising and train the trainer. Full details and registration here >

VCOSS training calendar: Our Community

Upcoming training opportunities on grant writing, successful boards, effective meetings, governance, media, online essentials, campaigns that sizzle, and being an effective spokesperson. Our Community has developed a suite of affordable, practical training to help community sector staff, volunteers and supporters keep abreast of their responsibilities and learn how to lift their organisation from ordinary to extraordinary All training is delivered by …

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