The Hon. Kate Washington Minister for Families and Communities with students from St Brigid’s Primary School.
Spend an hour in a community sector meeting and you’ll hear about agency, lived experience, co-design, holding space and building capacity. Everyone around the table nods. I’ve nodded along too. Many of the people the sector works for would reach for a dictionary.
The sector’s promise is nothing about us without us. Yet we often talk about people in words they wouldn’t use themselves.
What even is agency?
Agency means having a say in what happens to you, and being able to do something about it.
Some other words we use, in everyday language.
- Lived experience: knowing it first-hand
- Co-design: designing it with the people who’ll use it
- Holding space: giving people room to speak safely
- Building capacity: helping people do more themselves
- Place-based: suited to this town
- Theory of change: our plan for making a difference
- Systems change: fixing the rules
- Mutual aid: neighbours helping neighbours
What words would you add?
The skills behind the words
Leading a community organisation comes down to four skills: curiosity, creative thinking, collaboration and communication. In my eight decades I’ve met only a few people who have all four. I believe they can be taught.
Where could we start?
School seems the obvious place. Children are curious, and what they learn in the classroom grows the adults they become
Teachers would do the teaching, so training them comes first.
The resources and the training are already here. Action4Agriculture has resources that teach curiosity, creative thinking, collaboration and communication, the same skills I teach the kids I work with. They’re available on request. Josh Farr runs the training. Through Campus Consultancy he has delivered more than 1,600 leadership programs with over 40 universities, reaching more than 100,000 students and staff. He trains teachers too.
I’ve seen Josh in action. In 2023 he led the student workshops for Action4Agriculture’s Young Environmental Champions program, working with students from ten schools across the Hunter and Hawkesbury. The share of students confident they could do something to improve their community rose from 57% to 80%.
And the kids delivered. St Brigid’s Primary School cut its landfill by three quarters.
You can read the full report here and the case study here
Our case study calls it an “Ecosystem of Expertise”. We wrote it for government in the langage government use. In everyday language, a lot of good people helped some kids do something great. Both versions are true. The skill is knowing your audience and speaking their language.
So when we’re talking with our communities, why aren’t we using language everyone understands
What do you think?
What would change if the people we work with chose the words we use?
A ten-year-old with these four skills could explain agency better than any strategy document.