| This
is issue number 6 of the e-newsletter produced by the Cooperative Venture
for Capacity Building in Rural Australia (CVCB). In this edition:
Keeping groups fit and healthy. A guide to the key principles that contribute to keeping participative groups fit and healthy, based on some of the things learnt in one of the CVCB’s key projects reviewing extension and education across Australia. Knowing when and what to evaluate. At what phases during a project should you evaluate and what should you be evaluating? This article shows what and where and gives a useful reference for designing, evaluating and implementing projects. What’s new. Calls for preliminary research proposals from SRDC and RIRDC. Newsletter survey. What you think of the newsletter. Research out there. A research project in the sugar industry is using a story approach to understand local communities and design strategies for a sustainable region. And the University of Melbourne’s Institute for Land and Food Resources Social Research Program showcases useful capacity building resources. In print. Murray-Darling Basin Community Advisory Committee publishes a comprehensive toolkit for resolving conflict, making good long-term decisions and developing processes to solve problems in natural resource management Handy links. Links to websites with useful tips for capacity building and working with groups. Steering Committee. Who’s on the CVCB steering committee. Contacts. Who to go to for more information about the CVCB. WHAT’S NEW
Rural Industries Research & Development Corporation is looking for preliminary (2-page) proposals for research projects. Closing date is 17 September 2004. For more information go to RIRDC’s website, www.rirdc.gov.au. NEWSLETTER SURVEY
If you haven’t had your say about the newsletter yet there is still time to do so. A copy of the survey is at website www.rirdc.gov.au/capacitybuilding/newsletter5.html It only takes a minute to complete and the information is very useful for us. STEERING COMMITTEE
Simon Hearn, Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (Chairman) Caroline Lemerle, Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation Steve Coats, Dairy Australia Paul Comyn, Australian Wool Innovation Victor Dobos, Grains Research and Development Corporation Tony Clancy, Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation Neale Price, Meat & Livestock Australia Craig Bradley, Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Australia Alice Roughley, Land & Water Australia Alison Reid, Murray-Darling Basin Commission Tracy Henderson, Sugar Research and Development Corporation John McKenzie, John McKenzie and Associates (Program Manager and Executive Officer) Contacts
Caroline Lemerle, RIRDC, phone 02 6271 4033, email caroline.lemerle@rirdc.gov.au John McKenzie, John McKenzie and Associates, phone 0402 018 318, email mckenzj@ix.net.au Website
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KEEPING
GROUPS FIT AND HEALTHY
One of the CVCB’s major projects is a national review of extension and education across Australia. The project research team of Jeff Coutts, Kate Roberts, and Fionnuala Frost has identified characteristics of five different extension models and used these, along with a lot of other information, to develop indicators for success. This article looks at one of those models, Group Facilitation/ Empowerment, and summarises key elements for keeping groups fit and healthy. The research team characterises groups working in the Group Empowerment model as having participants that look to increase their own capacity in planning and decision-making and seek their own education/training needs based on their situation. These groups will do their own research, and they will often employ a facilitator. They work best when they are provided with a facilitative framework where they can define their own problems and opportunities and seek their own avenues to address them. Making successful groups
Self formed groups are best. Any facilitator or member of a group knows that if the group isn’t really interested in a particular issue or achieving a particular goal or being involved in a particular project, then you have an uphill battle to make progress. Related to this point is the fact that the group needs to be clear about the requirements for ongoing funding (assuming it is funded) and whether it is prepared to live within these requirements. Allow groups to find/select their own facilitators – with guidelines/ boundaries. If a group is going to have a facilitator working with them the first thing is for members to agree on the facilitator’s role. This means being clear about goals and elements such as reporting and responsibilities. Facilitators need to be selected (preferably by the group) based largely on their facilitation strengths. They require strong support, both in terms of training in industry issues and in methods of supporting the empowerment process. Provide support and training for facilitators. A big trap after a group has employed a facilitator is to assume that they can be left to operate without support from group members. Interaction and communication are crucial. After all, the role of the facilitator is help the group achieve its goals, not to achieve those goals by themselves. Another element is to ensure that facilitators are allowed to take up any training that has the potential to help the group. Follow an annual planning cycle. It’s important for any group to develop a plan of action and identified outcomes. This way you can check progress and demonstrate that you are actually achieving what you set out to achieve. Use benchmarks. This point is linked to the previous one. Benchmarking is a concrete way of showing that you are making progress. It is essential that as a group you set benchmarks against which achievement can be measured. You also need to make sure that the ways that you evaluate your group’s progress are meaningful and related to the self-empowerment philosophy that the group is based on, e.g. the process used for making decisions, what decisions are made and reasons for them, changes against group developed benchmarks, extent of networking, and confidence and enthusiasm. Provide opportunities for groups/representatives to meet/interact with other groups. Looking at what other people are doing and how they are running their activities is a great way to learn and gather new ideas to apply to your own situation. Take all the opportunities you can to interact with other groups and other group members, e.g. develop partnerships and relationships with government, industry, community and other groups to maximise the benefits to group members. Provide exposure to the wider picture (scanning) to help broaden options. This point is related to the previous one. All the good ideas don’t reside within the group. Take advantage of experience and ideas beyond the group to improve what you are doing. Encourage groups to become self-funding after an interval. This is a difficult issue but it must be considered, preferably when the group is being set up. The way most government funding works now is that it is available for a specific time period, after which it reduces or disappears. If you incorporate strategies and options for self funding when the group is being established, your group will be much better prepared and more likely to be able to continue on after government funding finishes. Work at keeping fit
KNOWING WHEN AND WHAT
TO EVALUATE
From the workshop it would seem that we aren’t doing a bad job but there is much more we can do. An important point made by Jeff Coutts was that different sorts of evaluation can occur at different stages of a project and it’s useful to know what to do when. Jeff kindly supplied this graphic, based on Owen’s forms and approaches of program evaluation, as a way of illustrating this fact. When and what to evaluate
Want to know more?
The guidelines include instruction on planning, implementing and evaluating continuous improvement projects, with discussion on the objectives, processes, principles and ethics needed to evaluate the implementation of a continuous business improvement program. The guidelines emphasise an action research approach, but also discuss the balanced scorecard method and environmental management and audit systems. To download the publication go to their website www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/research/social/public.html RESEARCH OUT THERE
University of Melbourne gets
into nitty gritty of capacity building
The institute’s research in this area focuses on understanding people-to-people relationships to achieve sustainability as well as understanding the processes of change and the sorts of changes people make. For more information go to their website www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/research/social/index.html For a full list of titles produced by the social research team go to website www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/research/social/public.html IN PRINT
Towards Whole of Community Engagement – a Practical Toolkit focuses on involving people for engagement so that robust long-term decisions can be made about a community’s natural resources. It offers community, government and industry ways to foster good practice engagement in the increasingly sensitive area of managing natural resources. Written by Bureau of Rural Sciences senior scientist Dr Heather Aslin and Australian National University’s School of Resources, Environment and Society visiting fellow Professor Val Brown, the toolkit recognises that agreement between parties is not always possible. The toolkit, which was funded by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, was developed from reviews of previous work, interviews with Basin stakeholders and from observing events. For a copy: Phone MDBC on
02 6279 0141 or go to publications website: http://publications.mdbc.gov.au/
HANDY LINKS
Website http://www.chrysalisinternational.com/Remoteorvirtual.pdf is a worksheet to help assess whether a group should to meet face-to-face or online (PDF). It’s a handy way of looking at the costs and conflicts of the new options for collaborative work. Another handy website is
one looking at the benefits of dialogue and how can it be used to achieve
understanding in groups. Check it out at website
You might have suspected it already but a demographic study just released by the ABS and written by Neil Barr, confirms that Australia’s farmers are getting older. The report looks at patterns of entry to and exit from agriculture and, from this information, builds a model of the farm sector that can be used to do projections of future farming population structures. You can download the report, called The Microdynamics of Change in Australian Agriculture, 1976 – 2001. http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/free.nsf/Lookup/F1E8D5C8F82A9E5ECA256E37000429FA/$File/2055_2001.pdf |
