Understanding community-wealth building programs and community readiness to adopt change

As water threats increase in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), rural areas within the basin are becoming less desirable to live in, with many of these losing communities due to declining agricultural productivity. Water threats are adversely impacting the social and economic wellbeing of these communities, calling for alternative economic development models as pathways towards transformative change. To build their resilience, these communities need to be engaged in transformative thinking. This project, therefore, aims to understand Community Wealth-Building Programs (CWBPs) in the Australian context, and the associated social marketing, communication and change processes that promote these programs. The goal is to generate fit-for-purpose combinations of the CWBPs and change processes that organisations can use to engage rural MDB communities in transformative thinking.    

About this project

Community wealth-building programs aim to create a support mechanism to enhance local economic activity through re-investment, empowering people, reducing economic inequality, and promoting local ownership and resource control. Given the pressing challenge of increasing water scarcity, identifying gaps in communities’ economic and social capacity to support their future needs is crucial. While a diverse range of CWBPs exist, it remains uncertain which type best enhances capacity and innovative practices for socially orientated not-for-profit organisations supporting communities within the Murray-Darling Basin. 

Literature indicates that CWBPs lacking end-user inputs often prove unfit for their purpose. In addition, CWBPs have been hindered because of poorly developed and executed social marketing and change strategies. Thus, this project dives deeper into the multi-faceted issues in this area to develop a concurrent understanding of both the nature of available CWBPs and the supporting communication and change processes.  

Through collaborative, participatory engagement with key not-for-profit community groups and other stakeholders, coupled with qualitative data techniques such as observations and user-design workshops, this project aims to explore communities’ knowledge, attitudes, experiences as well as value for a range of scenarios featuring CWBPs and social marketing change practices. This will help participants identify a fit-for purpose approach for their community that will support change while catering to the current and future needs of businesses and communities within the Murray-Darling Basin, in the face of water scarcity.

Outcomes

The primary benefit of this project is risk mitigation, especially for organisations supporting the Murray-Darling Basin rural communities, through an evidence-based, proactive process that aids decision-makers and can be replicated, with appropriate adaptations, in different regions. This process assists businesses and communities in selecting and communicating the value proposition of the self-sustaining initiatives inherent in CWBPs and alternative development pathways that consider economic, social, and environmental equilibrium, enabling transformative change.