Governance

Because every child deserves every chance to reach their full potential

OUR GOVERNANCE APPROACH

The Management Group is responsible for providing organisational governance, financial accountability, strategic guidance, leading broader engagement and sourcing opportunities for improved partnering, investment and influence.

Every Child CQ is committed to sound governance, including transparency, adaptive leadership, engagement and innovation. Our strategic direction recognises that creating the conditions necessary to change complex, complicated and entrenched social systems requires considerable innovation and changing people’s minds, assumptions and habits.

To achieve this Every Child CQ’s governance arrangements are based on a leadership approach that embraces the community, truly walks among and alongside community and constantly works on strengthening collaboration and coordination with and between existing service delivery organisations. This prioritises the building an engaged and responsive community that is supported by a trans-disciplinary approach to service delivery.

COMMUNITY

The community encircle every aspect of our work, their capacity to inform and drive change is crucial to our success as a backbone and for our communities across CQ to thrive.

CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

Children and families are at the centre of all that we do, every aspect of our work in partnership with our community and all the services that support community is focussed on creating an environment where every child has every chance to reach their full potential. Our children are the parents of our future and with our community we can make Central Queensland a great place to live, work and play.

OUR MANAGEMENT GROUP

The Management Group live, work and volunteer in CQ. Every member is passionate about this region and wants to watch their children, their grandchildren, their families, their friends and their community thrive both now and for many generations to come.

All members of the management group have a thorough understanding of the importance of ‘place-based’ work and the use of a ‘collective impact approach’. This allows the decisions to be informed by the community and focused on helping to shape existing service provision within this construct.

TEAM

Backbone organisational teams, as lead facilitators, are typically relatively small but well connected and inclusive in their approach. This underpins the ‘collective’ approach where the use of existing resources is a priority.

Our team works with and is supported by several organisations that are considered experts in ‘place-based’ and ‘collective impact’ work at both national and international levels. This supports our professional development; increasing skills and knowledge. We undertake the day to day connection to community, the networking, the administrative responsibilities and communication across the community and its service delivery functions in ways that promote a different way of working.

Our team is responsible for ensuring the community is well informed about Backbone activity, aspirations and processes. This is in line with the collective impact philosophy of collective impact. The primary role of our team is to ensure that it listens, interprets and amplifies a broadly-based community voice

COMMUNITY TABLES

Community tables are a vital part of all that we do as a backbone. They are responsible for amplifying what the community has to say, ensuring that we hear and listen to the community’s voice in all our planning, implementation and most importantly, evaluation of our work. They are the key and a constant link/barometer into the community. They will work with us to establish a common agenda and design a community owned roadmap that will lead to every child in CQ having every chance to reach their full potential.

COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER COLLECTIVE

Most regions have an abundance of unused capacity available and ready to be harnessed in order to develop more resilient communities. Successful communities have structures in place to allow community members in the workforce, in community bodies, and in retirement, to contribute their skills and time in proactive and flexible ways. Building such an architecture is a very exciting part of our role as a backbone and it is a significant part of developing collective impact.

We understand that this will take time because it will take time for us to build the necessary trust within community. To develop a shared understanding and recognition of the value of time given, and skills shared. That the architecture underpinning the community volunteer collective is professional, well considered and has adaptability and flexibility.

We are about doing things differently; we are about developing places where people are more than their ‘job titles’; where people can find the opportunity to contribute to developing their community without membership requirements, knowing that their skills and knowledge will be valued.

Our Volunteer Coordinator will be working in partnership with community, with organisations that already utilise volunteers and/or anyone that sees the true value volunteers bring to our community.

KEY PARTNERS

As a backbone ogranisation our partners are our strength. We simply do not function without them. Beginning with our First Nations People, the community as a whole, community groups, community based organisations, large government and non-government organisations, and learning institutions

right through to experts in the children and family sector at a state, national and international level, we are the backbone that works at bringing it all together.

By providing the independent, local, community-based architecture to open doors, to learn from one another, strengthen connections, support communication, facilitate coordination, identify and reduce duplication, we “connect the dots”. International and national experience shows that ‘community ownership’ is the driver of sustainable and impact driven change.

PROJECT WORK GROUPS

When the key issues have been distilled from our Community Tables process, we will facilitate the establishment of Project Work Groups which will have community and service provider representation. These groups will have a primary objective of working across existing service delivery boundaries. They will use a transdisciplinary methodology to develop the recipes to unblock barriers to delivering impact on the collective goals of the community, government, business and civil society in child development.

Every Child CQ’s backbone role will be to coordinate and facilitate the process, support the necessary communication with and between existing service delivery agencies, evaluation and resource processes and assist advocacy in determining policy implications and development.