Welcome to Michelle Baldwin as she begins our inaugural Community Collaboration Fellowship
CFAus is delighted to work with Michelle Baldwin, who describes herself as a ‘collaborator with purpose’ and is set to soon land in Australia from Canada to take up our Community Collaboration Fellowship. She is hosting a co-design journey with the network to map a community foundations lifecycle framework.
The work will lead to the creation of a community-led, adaptive learning model that truly reflects the developmental trajectory of Australian community foundations – in all their robust, responsive, non-linear and sometimes messy essence.
Australia’s community philanthropy sector is at a pivotal moment of growth following the historic DGR tax reform and community foundations are forming at a rate of knots. Community Foundations Australia (CFAus) recognises we are now at an inflection point where a suite of developmental supports would be valuable to the network.
“The Community Collaboration Fellowship is about strengthening the future of community philanthropy in Australia. The goal is to build practical, shared infrastructure for a field that is evolving rapidly, while keeping the process unequivocally community-led,” said Michelle, speaking from Canada before she arrives in Australia in mid-March.
We want to be intentional about how the growth happens
Michelle brings an extraordinary range of experience as a former Senior Advisor of Transformation at Community Foundations of Canada and is a faculty member in the governance, leadership, ethics (GLE) program at Huron University College. Huron is a fellowship partner, with fourth-year students completing a capstone project analysing adaptive lifecycle frameworks for Australian community foundations.
Michelle’s work bridges GLE research themes including community philanthropy, systems transformation, digital technologies, and place-based practice and policy. Michelle is deeply engaged in networks, learning and communities, focused on collaborative governance and more equitable ways to mobilise and distribute capital and decision-making.
“We want to be intentional about how the growth happens. So, while borrowing models from the global perspective, we are also recognising the unique development that’s happening in the Australian context. We’re thinking about how to incorporate First Nations knowledge and include communities that have traditionally been excluded.”
The intention is to reflect the diverse and heterogeneous nature of community foundations here, while co-creating an adaptive model that accurately maps the many different journeys a foundation can take. The experiences of more Indigenous-led funds and non-placed based foundations, such LGBTQI+ led groups, will be crucial to building out the framework.
The outcome is hoped to be a diagnostic and wayfinder tool for community foundations to identify their position in the lifecycle and what they might need next in their evolution.
At the heart of the work is a nature-inspired map or adaptive model that embraces complexity rather than imposing linear stages. “Foundations can be in lots of different parts of the cycle at different points,” said Michelle.
The framework will continue to evolve
The framework surfaces signals, stuck points and guiding questions across four fluid stages: an emergence/birth phase (“what if we could?”); growth (“building something together”); durable (a more usable take on “maturity” or “how do we sustain and deepen impact?”), and renewal (“what might we release or let go of before moving on?”).
“Those stages provide an opportunity for everyone to see themselves at different points and it will continue to evolve as we learn more from within the network during our co-design journey.
The co-design is being done through three sessions with a broad group of participants from community foundations across Australia, ahead of a workshop at CFAus’ National Community Foundations Forum in Melbourne in May. The practical tools that have emerged during the process will be tested at this workshop, then refined with feedback, and iterated again.
“We’ll need to approach the work with humility, and open minds and hearts. I see myself more as a guide and host of the process,” Michelle said, “and the insights and experience are surfacing from the community.”
Two sessions have already taken place online. The first invited participants to map themselves to the cycle and name concrete signals and challenges. “The second was a deeper dive into building out the framework together – what do organisations need at each of the stages.” The third shifts to prototyping: “What tools can we create that will be useful to people? Is it a playbook? Is it a card game? Or something we have not imagined?”
“It’s been wonderful hearing from the communities in Australia so far, and there’s a real openness to meeting this moment with intention, with care, with trust and with relational approaches,” said Michelle.
She said that case studies and stories will also help people place themselves in the framework and provide practical examples for others to learn from. “If we can build in curiosity, imagination and play into the model, as opposed to seeing it as a structured, stagnant framework, that will keep it fresh and relatable.”
The role of technology and AI will also be explored during Michelle’s Fellowship. Going beyond looking at how technology can help efficiency, and ask “is there a possibility community philanthropy can play a role in how we shape this?”
Michelle expects to be in the Melbourne office from 15 March and will be with us for three months in person. “I’m excited to start meeting people face-to-face and continue the work we’ve started. I also welcome one-on-one conversations with anyone who wants to contribute.”
The lifecycle work acknowledges points of disruption and renewal as normal, along with the emotions that might arise, such as uncertainty or vulnerability, said Michelle. All this becomes priceless connective tissue for the network’s relational infrastructure.
“Having a common understanding that was created with one another will spark our imaginations of what is possible – as well as exponentially strengthen the network in this unique moment of growth.”