DAY ONE Thursday 5 August

Thursday 1.30pm Woolshed Room

Music for Social & Cultural Development
presented by Multicultural Communities’ Council of SA & Multicultural Youth SA

Music is the universal language and a powerful medium for driving social change. This workshop will reflect on how music-based projects enable people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to overcome social, cultural and economic barriers, so that they can fully participate in Australian society.

Thursday 1.30pm The Shores Room

What Money Can Buy
presented by the Julia Farr Association

Money can’t necessarily buy you love, but can it buy innovation?  In this session, Robbi Williams talks about the work of a local grant-making trust, and how buying innovation isn’t as easy as you might think.  Robbi discusses how the trust’s work has been shaped to provide a bias for innovation, and identifies the critical factors that can help innovative ideas to emerge

Thursday 2pm Woolshed Room

Ladder St Vincent: Is working together really working better?
presented by Department for Families & Communities and the Ladder Program

Everybody likes the idea of working together and across jurisdictions to build bridges that encourage the notion of smooth transition and continuity of care for clients. The reality of how these partnerships work however can be very different, or very reliant on that single person who works from dusk till dawn making it happen.

DFC and the AFL’s Ladder program have embarked on a partnership approach that brings existing and new players into the realm of homelessness and disadvantage in a unique, meaningful and sustainable way. Further to this, the project, a homelessness housing service in Port Adelaide is actually intended to add value to the community, not just by bringing outcomes for homeless youth, but by bringing the corporate sponsorship, local government and the service sector together on a local community, business management and broader governance level. The opportunity for change is not just offered to each individual young person, but everyone involved and entire communities.

Thursday 2pm The Shores Room

C Pix
presented by the Hepatitis C Council of SA

C Pix was a title given to this project about hepatitis C and digital photograph. The letter C referring to the hepatitis virus and ‘Pix’ being both a pun suggesting pixel and a common term for needles amongst people who inject drugs. Single letters and sharp, fragmented images derived from digital snapshots have been collaged, stained, torn, cut and painted to create a corollary of memory and event. This photo essay is works of art that form a cultural interpretation of a serious health issues that is seldom talked about in the school curriculum or at the dinner table, yet has it place of prominence within human activity as far back as ancient Egypt. Mahdi and Maggie will discuss of how this project has enable the youth who are from the high risk population communicating their ideas about risk and hepatitis C through art, text and photography.

Thursday 2.30pm Woolshed Room

The Paper Tracker
presented by UnitingCare Wesley

The Paper Tracker combines old-fashioned investigative research with modern communication tools to expose the credibility gap in Aboriginal Affairs and change the way governments are held accountable. Jonathan Nicholls explains how this innovative project (and some serious networking) is making it harder for governments to rely on the tried and untrue. Jonathan will also discuss how this style of online accountability is being adapted for other campaigns and contexts.

Thursday 2.30pm The Shores Room

The Family Project
presented by The Australian Centre for Social Innovation

How can we enable more families to thrive? That is the question we are answering in our nine-month 'radical redesign' project with the city of Marion and the Department for Families and Communities. We're using a ground-up innovation process, blending service design with social science and business, to co-create new kinds of in-community networks and supports to strengthen all families over time--preventing their interface with the child protection system. That means partnering with families of all shapes and sizes to reset outcomes from their perspective, visualize what could be different, try out new experiences, interactions, practice and policy, and develop vehicles for scale. In this session, we'll share our innovation process and what we're learning by doing, as well as challenge assumptions about where & how change happens. 

DAY TWO Friday 6 August

1.30pm Friday Woolshed Room

Indigenous Youth Leadership Program
presented by The Smith Family

How do Aboriginal kids benefit from being taken away from their home communities and placed in the very demanding and often very foreign environment of a high performing private school?  Does this really “work”? Do kids really benefit? Are parents really supportive of this?

The Smith Family is the largest partnership broker for the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program which is an initiative of the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The Smith Family currently works in partnership with ten independent schools in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Sydney. Together with our partners we place Indigenous students in high performing schools and support them to fulfil their potential by finishing Year 12 and through education, develop as leaders for their community.Our students come from rural, remote and isolated areas. We are currently supporting 80 students on the program and in 2011 will expand to 122 participants.

At this workshop you will find out about the IYLP, the views of parents and students and the outcomes that the program is achieving. Then you can judge for yourself whether this “works” or not!

1.30pm Friday The Shores Room

Keeping the Energy Where it Should Be
presented by Community & Neighbourhood Houses' Association of SA

Working at the grassroots, community and neighbourhood houses and centres develop innovative strategies to raise awareness of poverty in local communities.  For the past 4 years SA Health, Health Promotion Branch has provided the peak body, Community and Neighbourhood Houses and Centres Association Inc. (CANH) with funding to disseminate as small grants to 30 community centres across the State to run Anti-Poverty Week activities.  CANH has developed a model of delivery that enables centres to focus on the important issues in a local context, ensuring broad community and local media involvement, development of partnerships and a link in with the CANH workforce development strategy.  This session will focus on the project methodology and local outcomes.

2pm Friday Woolshed Room

Standing Our Ground
presented by the Milang Old School House Community Centre

Rapid, negative environmental change can destroy a community, shattering individual well being, community spirit and the local economy.  This could have been the outcome for the communities around Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert at the end of the River Murray.  The Milang Progress Association Inc through the Milang Old School House Community Centre utilised it's close connection with the community to ask the hard question "If our future is one with a lot less water what can we do to sustain ourselves, our communities and our environment". The answers and subsequent actions empowered, creating opportunities for training, reskilling, work and micro enterprise.  A key factor to success has been the acknowledgement that local people know what's best for them. Innovation and advocating for the way the community wants to move forward has encouraged government to shift its perspectives about the way to do business with community.

2pm Friday The Shores Room

We'll Hold You To That: how community campaigning closed the Magill Youth Training Centre
presented by the Youth Affairs Council of SA

In the 2009/10 State Budget, the Government committed to closing the ageing and inhumane Magill Youth Training Centre. Months later, they went back on their word. In response, YACSA and hundreds of other individuals and organisations across South Australia took part in a successful campaign to hold the Government accountable for their promise.

This session will demonstrate the strength of the community sector using the “Close Magill” campaign as a case study, highlighting its collaborative approach, adaptability, and the innovative ways technology was used to support the campaign’s goals.

2.30pm Friday Woolshed Room

Keeping it Real & Keeping us Strong: the Women's Services Network
presented by the Working Women's Centre

Working as the only management representative in a small community organisation can be lonely work.  Add to this the constant requests to justify a 'women's only service', ever strengthening threats to defund, the imposition of even more hoops (reviews, tendering for funds, more reporting) to jump through, attacks from Men's rights groups, the perception by some that gender is no longer relevant and one might begin to wonder 'why bother?'

Why do women leaders of service organisations continue to 'bother' about women?  Why is it important to retain women specific services?  How do we support each other when our strength, simply because we are women or care about women, is challenged?

2.30pm Friday The Shores Room

The Listening Project
presented by Connecting Up Australia

What are our challenges? What are our strengths? Are we preparing now, for our future positioning? The Listening Project is a national research project to explore the Australian nonprofit sector’s current and emerging priorities, just completed by local South Australian organisation Connecting Up Australia who provide national services to the sector. The researcher Karen Gryst (nee May)  will present on findings as identified by organisations from a broad cross section of organisations all over Australia and some of the innovations developing as well. The study reveals many inspiring organisations with terrific ideas and achievements and also discusses some of the future challenges which will require the sector to strengthen further by investing in capacity development but also through greater collaboration and sharing with each other. Karen will discuss how this can happen and some emerging best practice ideas from the international nonprofit community.