Session links are posted here.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hmtu1YeVgus7IagiSoNV5GkvEL7UO0A7jt60OJK6XEg/edit?usp=sharing

Below is a list of descriptions for sessions and is also available here to download. You can view a timetable in multiple time zones here. We would suggest saving a copy of the timetable and deleting the columns that are not your time zone. Here are PDFs of the program with the timetable

Last Updated 10/3/2022:

You do not need to attend all 48 hours of the conference. Sessions will primarily take place over Zoom. If you are registered, you will receive information before the conference that contains a link to enter the conference. If you are in need of disability supports to attend the conference and have accessibility questions, contact Allison at alourash@gmail.com. Most sessions will be recorded and materials available shortly after the conference with captioning to assist with language translation.

Opening Plenary

Howard Rosing, USA and Heather Keam, Canada are excited to officially welcome you the 3rd annual Unconference. We have a packed plenary session, starting with a video chat with ABCD legend John McKnight talking about ABCD innovations, our planning team will run through everything you need to know for a successful Unconference experience from finding your sessions to how to log in and how to navigate the website. We will be wrapping up the plenary with a global Indigenous round table with our very own Michelle Dunscombe, Australia and Karri-Lynn Paul, Canada.

Exploring Rural Communities, through an ABCD Lens
ABCD Rural Communities Workgroup Members
What comes to mind when you think about “rural communities”? How might we build stronger rural communities by using ABCD principles and practices? This session will explore the rural topics and questions YOU are interested in from an ABCD perspective. We will open with a discussion about the meaning of “Rural Communities.” Participants will have the opportunity to suggest and choose topics and questions as they relate to rural communities through an ABCD lens. Small breakout groups will then dive into the topics. Come with questions you would like to explore and tap into the group’s wisdom and experience.

Playing Together, Build Community!
Tyson Bankert
Over the past 4 years of developing the program I’ve learned the value of play to create connection. Specifically, how play and just being together, being silly, imaginative and taking a break can foster ways to connect deeper. I want to talk about how play allows for vulnerability, humour, silliness and trust to build community. Talk about my experience and demonstrate though a storytelling game that I played with participants though the pandemic to connect.

Giving the Community a fish, a fishing lesson or a fishing rod
Marilyn Kelly, New Zealand; Fiona Miller, Australia
They say “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime” but ABCD gives us the opportunity to discover if the community needs a fishing rod, a fish recipe or a fishing lesson. Looking at ABCD from within a local government organisation and how as a practitioner you can lead by stepping back and learning to be in a community without doing all the doing and working in the invisible spaces. It is also an opportunity to share ah-ha moments from our work.

Power of lived experience stories in understanding the harms of gambling
Judy Avisar, Melbourne, Australia
Gambling harm in Australia – lived experience theatre for social change Three Sides of the Coin project places people with lived experience of gambling harm as advocates for social change. We will screen two 6min lived experience video stories about recovery from gambling harm (crafted artfully with animation and music). These will be followed by live Q&A and discussion with the storytellers. Performance cuts through to the heart of the matter and thus sparks conversations for professionals and communities to understand how gambling harms us all. Our work highlights the links between gambling, mental health, alcohol, drugs, family violence and crime, de-stigmatizing gambling addiction, and re-framing it as a public health issue.

ABCD within the hearing impaired community
Vinh Nguyen, Vietnam
A sharing session from the journey of an ABCD learner, from her introduction to ABCD, how she has applied it, and what her experience with ABCD has made an impact to her community. Afterward would be a small Q&A session between the host and guests.

Communities, youth and children lead change for gender equality
Vikrant Jadhav, Shahrukh Atpade, Jayshree Kamble, Kaushalya Aagre, Imran Shaikh, Rituu B Nanda, India
Gender norms and patriarchal social structures intersect across all stages of girls’ restricting their access to rights and undermine their agency and decision-making authority over life choices. At Avani organisation, we believe that change societal change cannot occur without challenging and addressing the gender inequities in the community. This has inspired our working on gender equality programme. We started with gender equality modules in schools for boys and girls. After examining and reflecting the changes we were observing in the adolescents as a result of our work we realised that for transformative change we needed to expand the scope of our work. We will share our changed approach. We shifted from orienting the adolescents to working with community based approach so that adolescents, youth and adults in the villages can take ownership and responsibility of gender equality in their communities. We will share our experience and seek inputs from the audience.

Crash Course in Inclusive Traditional Storytelling
Nicola-Jane le Breton, Australia
Join Nicola-Jane le Breton, Community Story Weaver with Befriend Inc and Co-Founder of The Possibility Fellowship in Perth, Western Australia, for a crash course in traditional oral storytelling. Down through the ages, our ancestors have sat around campfires, communing and learning together through traditional folk tales, wonder tales and myths. Through a mythic lens, we reframe challenges as opportunities to grow, connect and contribute. This 2-hour session includes a traditional tale, tips and practice retelling stories in your own words and style, and a chance to reflect on how the story speaks to you and your calling to make a difference.

Siya Sonke: The ABCD Family and Lessons Learned about the Unlearnig for Moving Forward
Anne Loffler, Bernie Dolley, & Nomaxabiso Precious Fani
Germany, South Africa
Siya Sonke was started as a project by Raphael Centre (Makhanda/ South Africa) and supported by the Ikhala Trust since 2017. In the course of the last few years, it has emerged as a community driven partnership and the project grew organically in its activities. The way it seeks to engage with the local community is based on the philopsophy and ideas of Asset-Based Citizen-driven Development. It puts the strengths of individuals and communities into the center of intentions and builds processes of change from here. Under Siya Sonke umbrella there were facilitated ABCD capacity building workshops, organisational and entrepreneurial development mentoring, regular family engagements and Child and Youth Development (CYD). Siya Sonke has engaged 35 families and their social networks of over 1,150 people to date. The session will introduce its narrative as well as lessons learned about applying strength-based work with the smalles socia unit – the family. The intention is to open the floor for critical reflection on its findings.

Community-centred and asset-based approach: key principles for CSO support to communities engaged in the ABCD approach (Session is in French)
Marcienne Emougou, Audrey Ibin,& Guillaume sota Kampala
Cameroon, Uganda
Nous avons élaboré et mis en œuvre un programme d’appui aux organisations de la société civile du Bassin du Congo, inspiré notamment de l’approche ABCD, pour leur permettre de tracer le cours de leur destinée et de leurs actions. Dans leur vocation à soutenir les communautés locales et autochtones, l’initiative ACCA donnerait aux OSC la capacité d’aider les communautés à déterminer elles-mêmes les choix de leurs aspirations et les actions de changement nécessaires pour les réaliser. Quels sont les principes fondamentaux basés sur les principes ABCD et la pratique du développement organisationnel qui créent un environnement propice au changement à travers trois trajectoires marquées par la collaboration horizontale et la coresponsabilité dans les engagements ?

The Role of a Caregiver; Learning to build positive relationships with a child through Movement, Touch and Play.
Monja Boonzaier, Janine Ward, South Africa
A 2 min video of the work: https://youtu.be/cAjSbfyS9UU

Equipping youth to address teenage pregnancy
Wiwin Winarni, Indonesia
Adolescent pregnancy remains a difficult and complex problem in Indonesia due to several factors like low uptake of reproductive health services, low educational attainment, and social and cultural norms. Under Constellation’s multi-country ‘Go Girls’ project, Indocompetence team is working with the local family planning officials in facilitating community response through SALT in the villages of Bandung and Indramayu districts. The presenters will share the challenges as well as actions the mothers and youth have taken to address teenage pregnancy. The presenters will seek insights of the audience on ways to sustain community and youth-based response.

ABCD and Khula stockfellas
Bongekile Ngcobo, South Africa
The power of saving and doing things collectively. In the session, we will be describing the power of a stockfel and openness to networking with other stakeholders. The session will be about the small group of people who chose to save together and achieved being pork sellers through networking and sharing their story.

Collecting, analyzing and giving back community data in an ABCD way
Lisa Fuchs, Kenyal Levi Orero, Nairobi
In a world where institutions take away data from communities, how can ABCD help? How can ABCD principles not only rise above the noise, but truly connect with community members? The challenge, of course, is while scientists collect data and publish reports, many communities never see the enumerators again. They do not get to hear and discuss the data analyses and hence narratives about their lives before they find them ‘out there’. In this session, the ABCD team from World Agroforestry (ICRAF) will share how they approach collecting, analyzing and giving back farmers’ data in their work in Kenya.

Communities, youth and children respond to child labour and trafficking
Dhiraj Lepcha, India
We at Rural Aid, we work with children and adolescents to address the issues of child labour and trafficking in Tea gardens of West Bengal, India. We have realised that apart from working with different stakeholders like the government and other stakeholders, we need to facilitate those affected by the issue. The Tea gardens are inhabited by people from different ethnicities like indigenous communities, Nepalese origin etc. Through the SALT approach we are working with these diverse communities, children and youth to realise their own strengths and work towards their dream. Through this panel discussion, we will present our experience of facilitating a strength-based action learning cycle – community life competence process (CLCP), the skills required for facilitating the process and the changes we have observed in ourselves and in the communities we work with. We will share our experience and seek inputs from the audience.

Addressing Mindsets and Enabling Change
Terry Bergdall, United States
Charles Esibikhwa, Kenya
Community-driven development involves different practices from the dominate “top-down” approaches of most conventional development work. Central to this is enabling the emergence of a “mindset” that is consistent with “bottom-up” approaches where local residents are the primary actors. Experiences where mindsets have successfully changed will be shared along with best practices for enabling community members to become leaders in the development process rather than passive responders to priorities set by outsiders. The session will include interactive discussions among those who attend about the challenges associated with mindset change along with supporting theory and techniques.

How do ACCA Online Well Grounded practitioners engage communities in ABCD? (in French)
Danny Mungamini, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
The covid 19 pandemic, while restricting our field activities, made us creative to offer around twenty participants from three Central African countries Cameroon, Congo and the DRC to follow a learning path on the approaches centered on communities and their assets. The first edition that we had from January to September 2021 is already in operation and some wanted to share with the ABCD audience, how they manage to interest the communities supported in this approach, the successes achieved, the challenges and learnings. projects are either at start-up, in the implementation phase, or in the evaluation phase.

Community of Practice and Beyond
Joel Murphy, Jennelle Duguay, Maggie Morden, Templeton Sawyer, Canada
In this session, we hope to articulate the ingredients and activities which helped support the meaningful collaboration of three organizations which started in a provincial community of practice. This collaboration has really been amazing is a great example of how to put into action the relationships developed within a community of practice.

Reclaiming the Assets of People and Land coming out of Occupation
Inge Lempp & Constantino Pinto, Timor Leste
450 years of colonial rule and 25 years of military occupation squashed the strengths and assets of the people of Timor Leste, but these were very the cultural and spiritual underpinnings that helped the people win the long struggle for independence. The workshop will share examples of assets from the culture and land (such as the Uma lulik, GGG, weavers, Moringa tree) that continue to strengthen the journey of healing and building a nation.

Disability is an Asset
Monic Rwaheeru, Uganda
Allison Lourash, United States
Sarah Nathaniel Yanayork, Nigeria
When we talk about what is strong in a community, we often do not think about disability as a positive asset. But many disabled community workers utilize gifts and assets that come from their disability experience. Additionally, centering the experiences of people with disabilities brings different perspectives to community development. Come hear stories and strategies around including everyone in community-led development.

Antigonight: Facilitating Community Connectedness Through Arts Engagement
Addy Strickland & Becca Semple, Canada
For twelve years, the Antigonight ‘Art After Dark’ Festival has relied on community strengths and talents to keep the magic alive. In this session, Becca and Addy will discuss the nature of ‘art after dark’ festivals and their value to creating expectation-free community spaces; share stories from the Antigonight festival over the years; dive into the role of community strengths and talents in making the festival possible; speak to the challenges that come with this form of community organizing; and discuss how the art, stories, and opportunities to gather that festivals like this one provide are assets themselves.

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Evaluating Social Impact
Daniella Fast, Serge David Musubao, Khotso Mokitimi, Jamie Munday, Kendra Dimicco-Lovins
Why do we evaluate our work and who are we evaluating it for? What is the value of effective evaluation? How do you evaluate transformation within a community and communicate the value with quantitative data? Sometimes monitoring and evaluation can be the most challenging part of our community development work, especially when what we are seeking to evaluate can feel intangible or seemingly unquantifiable. In this interactive workshop, the Five & Two Network will discuss these challenges and equip participants with tools for effective evaluation of social impact in community development work. We have invited “on-the-ground,” local practitioners as panelists and would like to share a sliding scale evaluation tool that is adaptable to many contexts and helps to quantify social transformation.

Key Ingredients of Neighboring
Adam Barlow-Thompson, United States
The Neighboring Movement is a US organization that has been developing the Key Ingredients of Neighboring (KIN) for several years. The KIN are Joy, Relationship, and Abundance. Joy is about knowing who you are and your authentic role in the community. Relationship is about giving care and receiving care with neighbors. Abundance is about discovering and activating individual gifts. The presentation will share practical tools to live out the KIN wherever you live.

Soul-full Stories: Using Stories to Bridge Divides
Wendy McCaig, USA
At the 2021 Unconference, fate brought together a small band of creative soul-full storytellers from across the globe around this question, “How might we cultivate spaces where soul-full stories are shared, develop processes for gathering and weaving them together, and platforms for sharing them in a way that shifts harmful narratives toward more hope-filled ones?” In this session, we will share what we have learned over the past year and will invite participants to share how they are using hyper local stories to shift harmful cultural narratives. We will also explore together how we might weave our individual threads together into a hope-filled global tapestry.

Creative Conversations Part 1: The Power of Small Group Dialogue
Tim Vogt, United States
Starfire adopted the small group dialogue structure after learning the process from Peter Block & John McKnight. In this session, we will explore some of the history and values of small group structure & how we implemented it for our internal team & external stakeholders. We will explore the purpose and intentionality we discovered, and how we blend it with wisdom from other leading facilitation thinkers (Meg Wheatley, Priya Parker, etc.) in supporting conversations that “walk the talk” of inclusive community building. This session will be highly interactive. Attendees will reflect on and practice the steps of small group dialogue together.

Creative Conversations Part 2: The Power of Community Project Design Sessions
Tim Vogt, Bridget Vogt, Danyetta Najoli, Carol Combs- United States
For the past 10 years, Starfire has been activating inclusive community projects all over Cincinnati, and increasingly, the United States. One supporting structure we use is a regular “Community Project Design Session” where people gather to share ideas, support, networks, and strategies for their local efforts. In this session, we will show the origins and values behind the process, the ways we’ve used it as an organization and as neighbors, and practice it together with attendees.

The Building on Abundance in Indigenous Communities
Karri-Lynn Paul & Krista Hanscomb, Canada
Approaching Indigenous communities with a lens of abundance supports us to remember, re-value, and revitalize Indigenous strengths, knowledge, and wisdom. Which in turn helps us decolonize our way of thinking and acting. This approach is not new to Indigenous people; it aligns with foundational Indigenous principles and practices that teach that everyone has gifts, talents, and skills to contribute to healthy and thriving communities. Come and add perspectives and approaches to your leadership bundles/practices.

Faith as an Asset: Practicing Faith-Full ABCD Beyond Faith-Based Contexts
Facilitated by the ABCDI Faith-Full ABCD Workgroup
This past year, Wendy McCaig and Mary Nelson formed the Faith-Full ABCD Workgroup and together this team went on an exciting journey to discover how faith, very broadly defined, is seen as an asset in ABCD efforts. In this session, we will share what we learned and will invite participants to share their own Faith-Full ABCD stories. How is faith an asset in your work? What are the benefits and challenges you have faced in practicing Faith-Full ABCD? Those who want to help grow the Faith-Full ABCD tribe will be invited to join our new community of practice launching this fall.

Open Space: Exploring our burning questions relating to ABCD practice
Amanda Palmer, Ottawa, Canada
A virtual open space technology session to allow participants to put forward their burning questions relating to ABCD practice and explore them in conversations with others. We will seek questions or topics from participants to start the conversation, then give people the choice as to which conversations they would like to participate in through breakout rooms. Open space let’s us set our own agendas, tailored to the questions we have and the conversations we need!

IamRemarkable: A Discussion on Self Promotion

Amanda Onochie

This session #IamRemarkable not only serves the burned out community worker in need of a reminder of their strengths but those new to ABCD work who may feel that they are not qualified enough to start something in their community. Ultimately, we as ABCD stewards need to embody ABCD and that begins with discovering the gifts of the Hands, Head and Heart that we possess. Exercises will have participants writing and at times speaking of their assets/ contributions out loud becoming more comfortable with the act of self promotion. We’ll discuss how to humbly but honestly speak on the impact of our work and the taboo associated with doing so. When teaching communities about self advocacy we as practitioners must also acknowledge that there first needs to be the ability of self promotion within the community member.

Kinglake Ranges Flowerdale Talks: Conversation for Change

Michelle Dunscombe, Vicky Mann, Australia
The Kinglake Ranges Flowerdale Talks : Conversation for Change project is community led and co-designed by community members. Community members decided to host a process to invite community members to share what they loved about their community, what they thought would make their community even better and inquiring if people had ideas for community projects they’d like to make happen. The project included a series of community conversations including larger community conversations, smaller facilitated kitchen table conversations, online conversations, in-school art activities, Idea’s Cafes and Sense Making sessions. The projects aim was to build a sense of community by bringing diverse people together to identify community priorities, opportunities, passions and potential projects for 3 townships. The output of the project was 3 community designed plans for each township to enable community to focus on realising their priorities.

ABCDE: Centering Equity in Asset-Based Community Development Efforts
Ksenia Stepkina, Canada
The session will challenge participants to consider the question: “Who else should be a part of the ABCD conversations?”. While ABCD is a powerful tool of unleashing community’s potential to make a difference, it has been criticized for ignoring structural barriers that do not allow certain groups to participate equally – as a result, not everyone’s gifts are realized and not all voices are heard. We will discuss how can we overcome structural barriers and support equitable participation of all members of the community in the ABCD efforts towards meaningful change.

The Intersectionality of ABCD and Trauma-Informed Practices
Dee Brooks, Michelle Dunscombe, Fiona Miller, Steph Bitter, Kate Johnstone, Vic Tyler, Australia
Come and join a coffee shop discussion about the intersectionality of ABCD and Trauma Informed Community Building (TICB) practice! We will discuss and explore how trauma is common within society and is particularly prevalent amongst vulnerable populations, First Nations peoples and people with Lived Experience of disability and/or mental health challenges. As community development practitioners, we need to become more aware of trauma informed practice so that we can help and not harm the communities we work with. Let’s come together to reflect on trauma informed principles and what they mean for our work as ABCD practitioners and community builders.

People Need People—Mutual learning and deeper connections through transcontextual conversations exploring the mess we’re in
Nicola-Jane le Breton, Australia
It’s been said that a text without a context is a con. This is incorrect. A text without a context is meaningless. Context is necessary for meaning, just as ground is necessary to figure in perception. In living systems, nothing exists in a single context. Homelessness, for example, has many contexts—housing, the economy, politics, health, etc. To reduce homelessness—or any complex issue—to a housing crisis is a mistake, for it blinds us to the interdependence of multiple contexts. We are within a meta-crisis (class of crises), which must be seen and addressed if housing, employment, mental health, education, climate, and other crises, are to be mitigated or eliminated. Explore ‘wicked problems’ from a transcontextual perspective in People Need People (an online Warm Data Lab) hosted by Peter le Breton, PhD, with Nicola-Jane le Breton, both certified by the International Bateson Institute, Thinking Partners at Befriend Inc., & co-founders of The Possibility Fellowship.

Co-creating the Future – Learning from the Pandemic, Together for Tomorrow
Tathra Street, Australia
Who decides what the future holds? What if we decided together what kind of future we want? We have just experienced a global collective trauma and have an opportunity to decide what direction humanity takes. Join us to explore how we want tomorrow to look by coming together today to learn from yesterday. A brighter future is possible, and it’s up to us.

Six elements of a Village In The City
Mark McKergow, Edinburgh, Scotland
You want to start, grow or enhance your local neighbourhood community… but where to start on what to focus on next? Mark McKergow will share and discuss Village In The City’s six elements (http://villageinthecity.net) – six building blocks which, while separate, are all interlinked. They provide a practical focus for helping you to look around, see what’s already there in your community, think about how to build on it, find the next areas to focus and create a balanced and functioning micro-local neighbourhood community. Mark will describe using this framework in Edinburgh’s West End neighbourhood.

 

Simulation Games for Community Participation

Mohammad Issa, Palestine

Simulation games transform participants into stakeholders and let them experience the roots and dynamics of a given community challenge. The method is a great tool to improve social skills in general. Further, simulation games foster a deeper understanding of the given topic. They improve empathy and help to stimulate self-reflection processes. By that, they also promote critical thinking and collective decision making process.

ABCD and agroecology: Can conceptual reframing help ABCD to gain more prominence?
Lisa Fuchs, Kenya, Levi Orero, Nairobi
Langat Kipkorir, Victoria Apondi, Cannell van Dien
This session will look into the congruence between ABCD and agroecology, and will explore in which ways a reframing of ABCD in agroecological terms might help to both increase the remit and prominence of ABCD, and to deepen the social dimensions of agroecology in theory and practice. The session will draw on work and practical experiences of the ABCD team from World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Kenya.

ABCD – The catalyst to pioneering Enterprise Development
Amelia Visagie, South Africa
One of the Mining companies in South Africa was the main sponsor of an Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) project implemented by leading consulting engineering and infrastructure advisory firm Zutari. This was highlighted by a successful Enterprise Exhibition hosted on behalf of Olifantshoek communities in the Northern Cape on 27 January. The Enterprise Exhibition was the culmination of over two years’ fruitful collaboration between the Mine, Zutari, the Olifantshoek Community and key stakeholders, including the Local Municipality. The process commenced in early 2020 amidst the initial outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Local volunteers were recruited after being nominated through ABCD and an asset mapping process and then trained through a mixture of on-site and digital processes. The project required dynamic and innovative strategies to navigate the Covid-19 climate. The volunteers came to be known as the “Olifantshoek Iron Champions”, spreading messages of hope and positivity, as well as disseminating vital Covid-19 related messaging on a variety of social media platforms. “Development must start from the community, with knowledge and assets which are already present. Assets are everywhere and in every form. South Africa has long suffered from so-called experts and outside entities dictating what they think communities need. This has regularly hampered development, especially in rural communities,” Associate and Programme Manager Amelia Visagie explains about Zutari’s ABCD programme.

Nurturing the soil: creating conditions for community-led change
Jaime Smith, Nova Scotia Canada
Between 2014 and 2020, six women in northern Nova Scotia led a series of community conversations, action planning, and reflection to shift the dialogue and discussion in Pictou County from deficits to assets, inspiring the conditions for social and economic change. This presentation will share some of the things we think we learned along the way, borrowing from ABCD, collective impact, adult education, and systems change models and frameworks.

How a folkschool changed my community: a practical guide for setting up a skills sharing platform from the grassroots
Jennifer DeCoste, Nova Scotia Canada
The LifeSchoolHouse is a community-led network of barter-based folkschools with a simple idea: connecting a community of folks keen to share or learn new skills greatly reduces social isolation and loneliness. Having recently completed a four year innovation cycle, this community project has written a “story bundle” that is being offered into the commons as a gift to those who would like to learn from this project and build folkschools in their own neighbourhood. Join in to hear the stories of these folkschool hosts and to learn practical tips for launching programming of your own!

Community Music as a tool in Community Building

Rory Wells, United Kingdom
Marc Mcaleavey, United States
This session will explore music as a tool in community building. Drawing on Community Music practices this 30 minute session will provide a chance for participants to come together and explore relationship building through music. There will be opportunities to learn practical tools of how to use music in community building, learn about the connections between community music and ABCD and have fun making music together online! Open to all abilities and musical experiences, this session will connect to the core musicality that’s innate to us as human beings.

Share your Skill
Lee Chase & Sean Moore, United States
Share Your Skill is an initiative to eradicate the stigma surrounding low literacy for adults by celebrating the skills that make up Memphis. There are two stations that move to a different library each month and one to take to community events. Participants will fill out a bookmark by writing or drawing their skill. If they do not wish to do so, there’s a QR code they can scan or a phone number they can call or text to share their skill. The purpose of the project is to highlight that regardless of reading level, every person has at least one skill or talent they are proud of. At the end of the year, an art project will be created to highlight all of the different skills that are shared.

The Sweet Art of Neighboring (Borrowing Sugar Optional)
Joel Zaslofsky, United States
As Bob Moorehead once said, “We’ve been to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor.” Are we doomed to disconnection from the people literally closest to us? ABCD laughs at such a silly question! Let’s look around the global landscape of neighbor-based ABCD initiatives and discuss questions like: * What if the next job you wanted, family support you needed, or personal health ally is just a neighbor away? * What becomes possible when a short walk down the block unlocks fulfillment, safety, or impact the Internet can never provide?

The Well Grounded programme on the Community Centred and Asset Based Approach: the harvest of our experimental journey (in French)
Audrey Ibin, Cameroon
Danny Mungamuni Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
Guillaume sota Kampala, Uganda
Well Grounded’s (WG) ACCA programme has been built around three trajectories with co-constructed accompaniment approaches: within the Well Grounded facilitator team, between Well Grounded facilitators and the CSO team, and between the CSO team and communities. We have learned some lessons about using ABCD tools that we would like to share with the rest of the community of practitioners to inform how the Congo Basin context has influenced the trajectories of the ACCA Well Grounded programme.

The Story of Belonging Brant- So far
Tara Buchanan, Rishia Burke, Ontario Canada
Join us as we weave together our stories of belonging through story telling and small group sharing. Belonging Brant is a Citizen lead ABCD initiative that started in October of 2020 in Brantford Ontario. We have been finding creative ways to connect and learn with community for the last 2 years, aiming to elevate the voices of champions and focusing on all the gifts that surround us. We want to share our victories and challenges for trying something new in our community. We will then invite you to experience the “Triad” in small group sharing. In the end we will have a patchwork of global stories and ideas that will inspire us to grow together to build stronger communities.

Shifting from within – Using governance to facilitate systemic change
Jess Wyatt, Ray Soellner, Baltimore United States
The definition of “Governance” is the “overseeing the control and direction of something”. How can we use ABCD to shift the definition from “control” to “co-creation”? To move away from the models of control, we believe weaving ABCD principles and practices into established governance structures can be used to dismantle harmful systems and build new futures within institutional structures. Governance structures, in particular shared governance models, can be fertile ground for systemic change Diverse participation Opportunities for collaboration Established structures to allow for generational consistency Participants will leave with ideas, tools, and strategies on how to better weave ABCD practices and principles into their already existing structures.

Closing Plenary: a participatory reflection and action session

Dee Brooks, Australia

Mary Nelson, United States

Where are we now? What have we learned? Where do we go from here? Join us in closing this year’s unconference by participating in a collective harvest that takes us on a journey of reflection, curiosity, and hope. Together, we’ll imagine the future of ABCD in our communities, and leave ready for another year of putting it all into action!