Our Approach

We Help You Make Your Community
a Liveable & Sustainable Place

Our approach is simple. We empower and enable local leaders—from community- and city-officials to citizen advocates and business leaders—with tools, information, and support to create more liveable places. Through our Training & Assistance programs, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with community partners to craft practical solutions that fit their specific challenges and opportunities. Along the way, we work to build their civic capacity to better tackle new challenges down the road. Because we can’t be everywhere, we further provide Tools & Insights to give local leaders and those that want to be part, the resources and support they need to drive positive change in their communities.

How We Make It Happen

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Three Structured Steps

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1. The Community Incubator

Trigger local leaders
Inspire to engage in structured learning-&-doing
Inspire integral community vision & action

Local leaders are fundamental to building strong communities. Yet, leadership extends beyond an elected office. It is the collection of individuals and organisations working tirelessly to better their community for those who live there. We create a culture of civic leadership that empowers local leaders to drive greater impact.

Lasting success emerges from and is propelled by a community — it cannot be delivered by an outside entity. We assist in building the capacity communities need to take sensible action. Through our tools, insights, analysis and validation, communities can forge their own future.

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2. The Community Accelerator

Enable Real Progress
Learning & Improvement

We emphasize progress and impact by working with local partners to establish better policies and programs, while also providing resources that support implementation of best practices and validation of the contracted impact.

It is the regular reflection on the progress that is essential to building capacity and improve next community initiatives. Through our tools, insights, and validation, communities can forge their own future.

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3. The Community Booster

Organisation & Funding

Sustainable community development is an on-going process. People develop and so do communities. The fastest way to have knowledge spread and embraced, is formalisation of collective learnings exchange.

We help communities finding their best way of formal organisation to forge their own future, using the volume to create best needed funding solutions.

And initiate other (potential) communities to get started.

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Four Building Blocks

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Influence people to change their mind

People can be influenced to change their mind

Large-scale change has always been difficult, and there’s no shortage of research showing that a majority of transformations continue to fail. Today’s dynamic environment adds an extra level of urgency and complexity. Companies and society must increasingly react to sudden shifts in the marketplace and to other external shocks. The stakes are higher than ever.

So what’s to be done? In both research and practice, transformations stand the best chance of success when they focus on four key actions to change mind-sets and behavior: fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing changes through formal mechanisms, developing talent and skills, and role modeling. Collectively labeled the “influence model,” these ideas were introduced more than a dozen years ago in a McKinsey Quarterly article, “The psychology of change management.” They were based on academic research and practical experience—what we saw worked and what didn’t. In a recent McKinsey Global Survey, successful transformations were examined and it was found that they were nearly eight times more likely to use all four actions as opposed to just one. (link to original article)

Community development guidance

Self-Sustaining Community requires Guidance

There is usually a multitude of small- or medium-scale initiatives in neighbourhoods ranging from a yearly BBQ to collective purchasing of solar panels. Very few of those initiatives make it to become a real community sustaining habit. Borrowed from team maturing knowledge, community building and the building of self-sustaining communities of practice is this approach, guiding initiatives as potential communities to grow and mature into formal self-sustaining habits and institutionalisation of community development. Learn more >

Transformation = collective

Transformation is a collective process

Leading change through people will be one of the most powerful capabilities as we move into the world ahead of us. As change becomes a constant and accelerating reality in our world, the ability to harness change quickly to expedite our goals will be the basis of our impact.

The defining characteristic of a future leader won’t be the one with the best strategy, it will be the one with the best ability to execute strategy through people, creating a movement of people to achieve a shared vision together. That’s why we believe the building of local leadership to be a fundamental element of the community incubation process. Learn more >

Integral community framework

Integral framework for sustainable community development

Sustainable Development

Sustainable development can be defined as development that meets the environmental, social and economic needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. With a growing population and increasing demands placed on the planet, it is one of the biggest challenges facing the world today and the subject of much debate by politicians and business leaders. In the end, though, many of the concrete actions to build a sustainable future are made at the local community level by the citizens themselves, and this is what this standard has been designed to support.

Who We Work With

Community Unlimited works with those involved in the process of building strong, equitable and prosperous places. This includes local governments, regional and national entities, foundations and philanthropists and private sector professionals working in support of sustainable community development efforts.