Capacity Development for Mission-Led Change
Help us to develop community capacities for pursuing mission-led change in south-east Europe
Thriving Communities is a collective initiative with a mission to help communities to create radical enough change to thrive in the 21st century.
Our approach is designed to tackle the core problem of how communities can organise, resource, plan and manage radical enough change so that they can genuinely come to live and thrive within planetary boundaries.
A key element in how we approach this problem is using a mission-led approach as an important tool to help make the cultural shift from incremental, insufficient change to radical and holistic enough change.
Radical community development missions push communities to focus on ‘what must we do’ rather than the status quo approach of ‘what can we do next’. This is important if communities are to properly address the enormous challenges we are facing. But mission-led change is a big mindset shift for most people, organisations, businesses, governments and municipalities. It means working very differently to how most of us have been trained and rewarded to operate so far.
So, significant and sustained support is needed to help build capacities across communities for taking a mission-led approach to change.
Thriving Communities brings together experience from across our collective to provide communities with this support, which fills an important gap in the types of support that is currently on offer to communities in SE Europe (where our work is focussed).
We deliver capacity development for mission-led change through online materials, trainings, workshops, shared learning, co-creation sessions, learning-by-doing and bespoke coaching – covering these areas:
- The case for radical community change & examples of good practices
- Nurturing community imagination, co-creation and deliberation processes
- Social innovation and entrepreneurship
- Local mission development
- Mission branding, communication and storytelling
- Enablers of mission-led change
- Mission incubators and governance models
- Partnership agreements, including City Climate Contracts and Local Green Deals
- Mission portfolio development
- Transformative investment, business & economic models
- Government policy innovation to support community missions
- Aligning local missions with EU priorities
- Mission monitoring, evaluation and collective learning
The primary outcome of this work is significantly boosted capacities of citizens, organisations, businesses, governments and municipalities to lead and manage mission-led change processes.
This means more communities in SE Europe will be getting on track with the radical, mission-led change processes that are desperately needed everywhere to tackle the challenges of our time.
Getting on track with the radical, mission-led change will ultimately result in much greater social and economic benefits for communities – where most citizens are currently missing out due to insufficient action and positive change being achieved in their community (for example, see our work on the economic case for more radical decarbonisation in SE Europe).