Appendix 1: Review of the proposal for good practice from
the perspective of Indigenous crime prevention issues
Summary
Introduction
External review of the good practice proposition: an Indigenous
perspective
Ms Linda Burney, Deputy Director General, Department of Aboriginal
Affairs, NSW
Mr Sam Jeffries, Chairman, Murdi Paaki ATSIC Regional Council
Mr Bill Bell, Aboriginal Projects Officer, Department of Juvenile
Justice NSW
Conclusion
Appendix 2: Research Method
Summary
Introduction
The action: the Project's method
Building the Project infrastructure
Stage 2: Reflection stage
Stage 3: Interpretation stage
Stage 4: Decision-making
Crime issues used by Level 2 to assess the validity of the early
proposition
Stage 5: Action
Stage 6: Evaluation
Participant evaluation
Some participant comments about their experience of the Project
A summary of the participants' evaluation of the Project
using Heron's criteria
External evaluation
Critique, from The Learning Enterprise, of the Project's
good practice product
Critique, from the University of Western Sydney, of the consultants'
training program
Critique, from the University of Western Sydney, of the Project's
method
Appendix 3: Monitoring tools in detail
Summary
Introduction
The templates
The original templates
The redrafted templates
The redrafted templates
Foreword to the Good Practice Kit
Appendix 4: A map of community crime prevention in Australia
Appendix 5: John Heron's criteria for validity
Introduction
Heron's criteria
Appendix 6: References and bibliography
DISCLAIMER
The contents of this report are a true reflection of the research as
conducted by the consultants but they do not necessarily represent the
views of the Australian or State Governments or the Project
Management Group.
The Project, in its research, worked directly with two Indigenous initiatives in community crime prevention. The first was a Community Youth Service in NSW, which participated as a Level 1 research project. The staff of the Service sustained participation up to the Action Stage, but then withdrew because of uncertainty about funding and a lack of resources to invest in adapting their current ways of working as recommended in the draft Action Kit. The second initiative was a non-Indigenous service in Western Australia, which needed to make its domestic violence services more inclusive of Aboriginal communities. This service successfully used the draft Action Kit to achieve significant changes in strategy design, professional practice and overall agency operations so that Indigenous Elders could exercise their decision-making rights in designing appropriate interventions for their community members.
The Project was left with conflicting outcomes with regard to the usefulness of its propositions to Indigenous crime prevention and, by implication, any other contexts that had cultural assumptions different to the western notions of middle management, as reflected in good practice theory and literature.
It was apparent that the propositions were accessible and effective for non-Indigenous
workers who were developing inter-cultural protocols for crime prevention. Indigenous
workers, however, while they contributed to the development of the proposition,
had not had the opportunity to put it into practice. The Project Management
Group directed the consultants to seek feedback from Indigenous representatives
who were working with crime prevention in Indigenous communities. Accordingly
three responses in New South Wales were sought. These responses were reviewed
by the NSW Premier's Department to endorse their release in this Report.
This appendix records them and draws out some ideas about how to use the Project's
outcomes for the benefit of Indigenous communities addressing crime and its
prevention.
The feedback suggests that the Project has laid down the right foundations for
crime prevention to be effective in Indigenous communities. Of particular relevance
are the following characteristics:
Use of the good practice support groups to develop a continuous improvement process that uses collaborative learning provides a means of cultural translation of the Western concepts of good practice and crime prevention. The support groups also go towards crime prevention helping Aboriginal communities to adapt to change in reference to their cultural values. They support community workers who are not resourced to think about the quality of their practice as a quality management approach would require. The ten domains are applicable to the core business of community crime prevention in Aboriginal communities, particularly with their emphasis on attitudinal change, collaboration, learning and transparency. There are two important differences with regard to crime prevention in this context however:
The Proposal uses a crime prevention approach that is based in community development and learning concepts. While it also has the capacity to draw in prevention methods that are not community development oriented, the emphasis on community development is fundamental to effective crime prevention in Indigenous communities, as well as in mixed communities that are addressing crime issues that affect Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people.
Without a community development approach, crime prevention risks ignoring problems that are deeply entrenched in a community, in the interests of short-term gain and at the cost of long-term community safety. In the hands of a competent worker (voluntary or otherwise), a community development approach allows intervention to do more than respond to the fear and frustration a community may be expressing.
An intervention that is limited to reacting to fearful responses will not prevent crime. A community development approach enables intervention to educate a community to the point where it can responsibly prevent crime for itself without endangering any of its members. This is the objective of community crime prevention.
When the Project's consultants were building its research community, they were referred by the Department of Juvenile Justice to an exemplary Aboriginal youth service in New South Wales. The Service was developing a five-year plan for cultural tourism to bring economic security and cultural integrity to its community. While this Service was still in its early stages and had very few resources, it was already seeing some success with, for example, young Aboriginal students being accepted for work experience by local Aboriginal services, and others returning to school or participating in tertiary training. One of the Good Practice Project's facilitators visited the Service's project officer to present the concept of the Project and negotiate participation by the staff. The project officer could see the value of their involvement and secured the endorsement of his Land Council.
The project officer and a second staff member participated in five of the eight days of training and created some reporting that was integrated into the developing framework for good practice. However, the language, concepts and practices of action research and good practice, as they were being presented by the consultant, were felt to be too complex and irrelevant to how the project officer and his staff experienced community crime prevention.
For them, the causes of crime were simple - hunger, family violence, substance abuse, unemployment and few opportunities for appropriate education in a town with a history of racial polarisation. Their concept of crime prevention practice was to make basic services available to their community, and secure the funding to support their community to use them. This concept of providing basic services to Aboriginal communities has proven to be effective in reducing crime rates many times over, as the accounts that follow show.
The project officer from the youth service perceived that action learning and research practices were not a possibility in the midst of managing crises and battling for funding. They described their lack of time to commit to the research, and their lack of funding security that resulted in continual diversion of their energy away from their actual crime prevention work and towards simply staying open as a youth service. As well, their community at that time was not interested in participation either at the Land Council level or the residential level, because of the many (and what were considered more urgent) problems it was facing. That the good practice proposal had the potential to help alleviate these problems was not accepted or explored. As a result of their training in the Project, the Indigenous project officers changed their practice to include much higher degrees of community input in the way that they managed their programs, but this input was not being reported back to the Project.
As a consequence, the data that action learning and research were generating from the other projects were not being contributed to or from the Aboriginal initiative. This lack of grounded data from an Indigenous experience resulted in the research project having less and less capacity to reflect Aboriginal concepts of good practice or crime prevention.
Given the high degree of interest in community crime prevention in Indigenous
communities as practised by Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers, this loss
of input was felt as a serious limitation to the Project. The Armadale Domestic
Violence Intervention Project compensated for this to some extent by addressing
similar issues of Indigenous participation in community crime prevention strategies
that were dealing with family violence. They used the draft Action Kit to review
their operations and change the way that they worked with Indigenous community
representatives, and they enjoyed some early signs of success. It seemed that,
at least in this instance, the proposition for good practice could be of value
to Indigenous community crime prevention in the hands of a non-Indigenous practitioner.
The Project was left with conflicting outcomes in this regard. The Project Management
Group requested that the consultant seek critical review of the final outcome
of the Project from Indigenous crime prevention workers. Three interviews, with
subsequent reflective documentation, were carried out to create this review.
The first two were with Ms Linda Burney, Deputy Director General, the Department
of Aboriginal Affairs, NSW, and Mr Sam Jeffries, Chairman, Murdi Paaki (ATSIC)
Regional Council. The NSW Department of Juvenile Justice, which had referred
the original initiative to the Project, also reviewed the Report through the
voice of Mr Bill Bell, Aboriginal Projects Officer. The process involved circulating
the text of the Report and engaging in unstructured interview to ascertain responses.
The documentation was compiled and recirculated for final endorsement by the
respondents and the NSW Premier's Department. The documentation has been
left in the form that the speakers required so that the reader can clearly hear
the first-hand experience of Indigenous crime prevention.
Crime prevention in Indigenous communities has to be understood in the context of the historic and social factors that have influenced the development of crime in those communities. Whether the community is urban or rural, Aboriginal people share common experiences of the way the wider public perceives them in relation to crime.
To begin with, because of their colour, Aboriginal people are more visible, which makes them an easy target for blame - particularly Aboriginal kids, who do not have the money to spend on entertainment and tend to hang out in public places. This discriminatory blaming promotes negative or destructive stereotyping of members of the Aboriginal community, and these stereotypical assumptions cause division in communities. The local media often have a role in distorting and sensationalising stories so that fear and distrust are instilled. Racist attitudes develop, and are too readily accepted by local police and by local power brokers, who refuse to invest in programs that prevent crime.
It is not true that crime is accepted in Aboriginal communities - Aboriginal people suffer as much as anyone else when their homes are broken into or their children get into drugs. It is not true that substance abuse is any greater in Aboriginal communities. However, when a drug problem exists, it is particularly destructive.
We also have to bear in mind the socio-economic environment in which most Aboriginal people live. Poverty is difficult for anyone, and it generates lots of problems. Then there is the issue of deaths in custody, linked with an historic negative relationship between police and Aboriginal people that is so culturally ingrained within both groups that it is difficult to overcome, and which results in high arrest rates. The historic and socio-economic situations of Aboriginal people and relationship between Aboriginal communities and the police are fundamental to any discussion about crime prevention in these communities.
Aboriginal communities require early intervention strategies and the same community crime prevention practices that have been identified in the national research project. However, some of the most effective solutions are those initiated by the senior women in Aboriginal communities, which are generally voluntary and simple in nature. They are strategies that are carried out in ways that the community decides. The funding body and the administrative agency listens to the community's needs and experience, and acts accordingly. For example, a program that has been very effective in Bourke involves Aboriginal women driving around in a bus to pick their children up off the streets. A funding body worked in partnership with the Aboriginal community and the local government to purchase the bus.
The role of local government in community crime prevention is critical. Successful crime prevention strategies in Aboriginal communities need to focus on meaningful ways for people to spend their time. For example, employment opportunities, school and community development programs, and sporting events - these are all successful strategies. When the local business community is included, the strategy works even better.
These solutions, however, are long-term ones and require planning. Effective crime prevention in Aboriginal communities requires good collaborative work between community and funding agency - a collaboration that improves relationships between Aboriginal people, government authorities, and the business and general community. The strategies must deal with the issues that are identified by local people, must be designed to address these local issues, and must be implemented in a way that the community determines. This can only be achieved if the partnership between the funding body, the community and the government agency is managed with equity and respect.
To achieve this, practitioners have to develop a working relationship that makes no reference to race when developing the strategy, but does make this distinction when implementing the strategy. For example, everyone, regardless of ethnicity, has a right to live in a society that is free from fear and the threat of violence, and they have an equal right to participate in crime prevention. The partnership arrangements must reflect this equity. However, the way in which the crime prevention strategies are developed needs to recognise the history of the relationships between police and the Aboriginal community, the role of Elders within the community, and the socio-economic realities of community life. This perspective on the environment for Indigenous crime prevention is significantly different to perspectives appropriate for crime prevention among non-Aboriginal people.
The Project's proposal is very appropriate for crime prevention strategies in Aboriginal communities. The definition of community crime prevention encompasses crime prevention in Aboriginal communities. The definition of "good practice", with its focus on ethical considerations, is also appropriate. In fact, crime prevention strategies will not work in Aboriginal communities unless there is an improvement in relationships between authorities and community - in particular, the building of relationships that accommodate Aboriginal history. The Kit lays the right foundation for community crime prevention work. However, it is important to recognise that community workers often have limited resources with which to accomplish their tasks, and the language needs to be simplified for non-professional workers, the community members who often deal with such major issues. Consequently, a kit for Aboriginal crime prevention practitioners should target voluntary, community-based workers.
Our work in crime prevention is something that we try to focus on from a regional basis rather than selecting an individual community. Having said that, however, I would like to talk about Wilcannia. Some years ago, under a government employment program, a central shire worked as the regional broker for this program and 20 to 30 people were employed for about six months. This had a dramatic affect on crime rates. While the program was running, the monthly number of court appearances dropped from 110 to less than 10. Visits to the emergency centre at the hospital dropped 80 percent; ambulance call-outs dropped 90 percent. Police call-outs dropped from 130 per week to less than 30. As a result of our experience with this program, we are of the firm belief that employment is one of the most powerful ways of preventing crime.
The quality of the employment opportunity at this stage is not an issue. Any program, however, must be sustainable. When the employment program funding dried up, the crime rate went back up, and no comparable program paying near-to-real wages has been available since. There are economies of scale: the employment program saved costs to other government services who were no longer dealing with the costs of crime. We suggest that if the program had continued, court sittings in Wilcannia would have dropped to one a month or perhaps every two months. Police costs would also have dropped.
Support for such programs requires individual politicians to work to influence their party, with regard to what they believe is true to the communities that they represent. "Blanket solutions" do not have the capacity and ability to deal with a specific problem in a real way.
Community crime prevention has to work with the whole range of factors that create the crime problem, which is why economic development and employment are so much a part of a crime prevention strategy. For example, Goodooga has no industry except a pastoral industry, which is in decline and does not support the community. Through the ATSIC Community Economic Development Program, traineeships were offered with DEETYA funding. This community now has a less than one percent unemployment rate, there is no juvenile crime, and adult crime is of a nature that can be dealt with - it is controllable, in a community that previously had a very high crime rate. But so often, these programs come to an end-and when they do, we will see the crime rate climb again.
Crime prevention is a process of dealing with incidents as they happen. Within Indigenous communities they usually involve "the trifecta" as we call it: abusive language, resisting arrest and assaulting police. We know that police often incite this interaction. The Black Deaths in Custody Report showed that a lot of the people who died in custody were arrested on "the trifecta". We believe that different policing methods could have prevented these deaths. The report recommended that lock-up is the last resort for Indigenous people. For many police it is the first resort.
With the support of our Aboriginal Community Liaison Officers, however, police are getting guidance about their practices and accordingly, we are seeing a major reduction in arrest rates.
Community crime prevention has to take a whole-of-community and whole-of-government approach - not just one agency or section of the community. It depends on coordination. Currently in our region we have community councils delivering projects. They first started as Aboriginal Community Working Parties. They received funding from ATSIC for housing and infrastructure. We found that if we funded only one of our organisations we created division in our communities, so we put the money into trust under program management. We created a community working party with representation from all sections of the community. In some of these communities, working parties have expanded to include the local police, the hospital chief executive officer, schools, chief engineers, and the local mayor. They deal with the community as a whole. They deal with petrol sniffing, domestic violence, coordinated care programs, Community Services issues, alterations to infrastructure, and new programs. They include Aboriginal community interests in responses to all agencies.
The definition of community crime prevention that the Project has developed is what we need to address crime in Indigenous communities. In particular, it emphasises negotiation and participation rather than consultation - we have been consulted to death, with no benefit to us. It is only through negotiation and through enabling the participation of our community members and their leaders that crime can be effectively prevented. As well, the definition focuses on the crime phenomenon rather than just crime, which makes it very appropriate for us. Crime statistics provide evidence of police practice - they do not reflect the quality of safety or wellbeing in our communities. It is the other factors such as employment, housing, health and education that must be included in understanding crime in our communities. We have the evidence from the employment program and our current Aboriginal Community Working Parties to demonstrate that this is true.
The quality of good practice that the Project developed uses ethics as its frame of reference. This is also an imperative for effective crime prevention in Aboriginal communities. Respect for human rights, fostering dignity, and sharing learning, for example, allow for solutions to be identified at a community level to address a community problem. These are the best solutions - and we have the data to prove it. If a solution is imported through an agency's policy, it does not fit the local problem. Often, however, a local solution does not fit the current policy of the agency responsible for the problem. Even though some of the best methods of crime prevention are created at a community level, inflexibility at agency and political levels can make the difference between preventing crime or not.
Flexibility is needed, but flexibility can work in both ways. Crime prevention needs guidance to ensure that flexibility does not mean losses in our community's right to determine their future for themselves. The focus on human rights in the Project's definition of good practice ensures that there are no ifs or buts about what is acceptable and what is not. Human rights are so simple but so hard to achieve. It is a basic human right for someone to have a job - if we forget that then it is possible to accept unemployment as a reality. Human rights are the platform from which we draw our stand - they must be included in any definition of good practice in community crime prevention. If you don't include human rights, a crime phenomenon will become so unmanageable that the agency would never able to address it. We are trying to get a situation of equity, regardless of cultural difference - but without human rights, people's attitudes get in the way of accepting the equal right of existence. Without this acceptance, crime prevention will not ensure that all sides of the argument are looked at; that intervention does not take place in isolation. Intervention must be coordinated, accepting that each person's idea is different, but at the core there is an equal right to exist, to participate and to access resources. This ethical commitment is the right to self-determination and co-existence.
The Project's proposition that continuous improvement process has to be based on shared learning is also absolutely necessary for crime prevention in our communities. Knowledge is power. For us to have a better way of life and participation in society, we have to know what each other does. It will not work for agencies to drive their strategies unilaterally, doing their own thing - we have to share knowledge if we are to make any difference to the quality of life in our communities. Reconciliation is very broad - not just about getting to know each other, but about how we do what we do, why we are doing it, where we think we are going from here. We have to put it all on the table through public education and continuous improvement processes so that everyone can be informed. Continuous improvement of this kind must extend into the community so that crime prevention is a two-way street between community and agency.
The support structure for good practice that the Project proposes must be used to enable good practice to operate with proper resources. A Good Practice Support Group allows for a broad range of knowledge, and the ability to be flexible and to support the individual worker - especially when they are on their own. Monthly meetings to allow for sharing learning and feedback are needed and viable for Indigenous community work.
The ten domains that the Project produced to describe the core business of community crime prevention are also appropriate. Honesty must be addressed particularly when change is taking place. Change has to be transparent - we can weave change into learning and negotiation processes to a point where people can adapt to change rather than be forced to change.
To use the Project's propositions in voluntary community environments, the ten domains need to be simplified into plain English. In the Aboriginal community there is not a high level of education. People can say that they agree because they think that is expected of them, not because they really understand. The domains describe the fundamental ethic of community crime prevention. Changing attitudes is the key to preventing crime, coordination of the whole community and all government agencies is the process; participation is the way we do it; and sharing our learning to empower our community members is the outcome.
The Juvenile Justice system's Aboriginal services in New South Wales comprise five clusters. Our services include youth justice conferencing, bail houses, and a young offenders program. There are five Indigenous administrators to run the pre-release programs and seven Aboriginal Project Supervising Officers who implement youth justice conferencing. Our Aboriginal workers are stationed at or rotating between regional centred services.
The issues involved in crime prevention among Indigenous young people are captured in a recent event I was involved in. A local school told a young Aboriginal student that he could not come to school if he did not wear shoes. I intervened on the child's behalf, pointing out to the headmaster that, if the child needed shoes, the school should simply provide them, so that the child could stay in the education system rather than become vulnerable to crime and poverty on the streets for such an irrelevant reason. This sort of thinking, still prevalent in non-Indigenous systems, demonstrates the lack of understanding about Indigenous issues that is reflected in crime and anti-social behaviour. It is an indicator of where white colonialism continues to exist today.
Self-esteem, health, employment and housing are critical issues if crime is to be prevented. And yet, in spite of this cross-cultural gap in understanding, there is no specific crime prevention program for Aboriginal people in this State to address these vital issues. We must have Indigenous workers supporting Indigenous youth if we are to intervene to change with the public assumption that Aboriginal people are inevitably "welfare" people. However we are never asked how to respond to crime issues, our representation in the overall community is small in numbers, our representation in tertiary institutions is very small, and our representation in policy and senior management positions even smaller. This leads to unworkable pressure being put on Aboriginal people in these positions - further reducing their ability to guide, monitor and inform appropriate measures for preventing crime in our communities.
The problems of poor understanding, lack of appropriate advice, and human resource pressures on the scale that we experience them are not limited to Juvenile Justice. They are common across all the departments that reflect the issues that are a part of community crime prevention strategies. It is a common experience that programs are, first, poorly informed because they are not designed to fit Aboriginal culture; second, poorly resourced by Indigenous workers; and third, poorly managed because our workers are not adequately trained to monitor implementation or evaluate outcomes. You could say this of a lot of crime prevention project management - but the consequences for Indigenous communities are more extreme because Indigenous people are seen to waste public money and not be responsible people (being seen as "welfare people").
Given that this is the state of affairs as I see it, the Good Practice proposal that this Project developed has real value for Aboriginal crime prevention. The domains that have been identified emphasise collaboration, participation, evaluation and accountability, which are precisely what our community wants and needs to develop. Locating good practice in a continuous improvement process ensures that the learning potential for our workers and their communities is built into the funding process - with real benefits for policy makers, public education and professional development of our workers. The system begins with a review process which would slow the death of initiatives in our community, identify weaknesses without losing the whole program, and build the reality of self-determination for community-led initiatives. This system is intended to enable community ownership of the issues and their prevention, and this community ownership element is what works for us, what will enable our communities to get it right where so many other initiatives, that do not facilitate local ownership, have failed.
The problem for us is how to bring this proposal into our funded strategies and communities - given the general lack of expertise and resources. I recommend that the Project should deliver a "train the trainer" program specifically for Indigenous workers in this form of good practice, and that the people being trained be local Aboriginal community members - our Elders or community champions. These people would be advocates for the system within their own community, but would also need to be supported. A strategy of introducing talking circles to develop local understanding and participation in crime prevention, and which in some cases could also include non-Aboriginal people who support reconciliation principles, could play a vital program support role. This would enable local community participation and the increase of human resources at no cost to the government or the community. By using the system that the Project has created, in this way, local community experience could be directly linked back to Aboriginal policy makers in the relevant government departments without reducing their energy levels or changing their focus from their current priorities.
Aboriginal crime and its prevention is a special case - it neither operates, nor can be responded to, in ways that are relevant in any other cultural group in Australia. This is because of the specific history of colonisation that has had a particular impact on Aboriginal communities, and has not been experienced by any other social group. The Project's proposal and its supporting tools, including the template system, enables this special orientation to develop without alienating intervention or prevention strategies from overall government policy and public accountability. It has the capacity to build our human resources rather than reduce them, to keep us in the mainstream system and to enable our specific needs to be addressed.
It is apparent that the proposed definition of good practice has considerable and important value to Indigenous communities. The tools and systems need to be attuned to the needs of relatively untrained and voluntary workers and to take into account the history of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander experience under colonisation, the relationship between Indigenous communities and authorities including the police, and the real resource issues that such communities and their services face.
The purpose of this section is to assist decision-makers in assessing the potential gain from using the research Project's outcomes, and the degree of associated risk. The Project's activities are described, integrating research method with knowledge generation. It draws on three points of view:
In their evaluation, using established criteria for assessing the validity of collaborative research outcomes, the participants rated the shared research capability that developed between the consultancy and themselves at 76 percent. The participants' evaluation of the Project is summarised in terms of new knowledge output, research method strengths and weaknesses, and the relationship between the research method as experienced in this Project and the sustainable knowledge that it generated.
The underlying principle is that "validity" in this form of research is judged by the method's axiology (the degree of "goodness" or social worth). This is identified by the participants' experience of working with the methodology in their every day life. For action researchers:
the emphasis is on the interplay between enactment and feedback in real time with the purpose of developing more valid social knowledge, more effective social action, and greater alignment among self knowledge, action and knowledge-of-other.
Realin, 1999, page 117
The outcomes of action research result in proposed changes to thinking, knowledge and strategic action (or practice). However, while researchers are inclined to rate their research highly, decision-makers are often conservative about changing policy and practice. The rigour of the methodology used, and of its application, are key determinants of the social value and usefulness of the new knowledge generated. It is incumbent upon researchers to support their claim for the validity of their research outcomes, and thereby to support decision makers in determining whether, or to what extent, to implement the research outcomes. The purpose of this appendix is to provide this support.
The research methodology used in the Project was "participatory action research" (PAR). This form of research is grounded in a philosophy of science referred to as constructivism. In brief, this form of research:
The method is based on clear definitions of participation, action and research. The Project participants used this method in reference to these definitions.
The Project participants claim that the research outcomes are valid and should be considered by decision-makers as a low risk and effective way of introducing good practice to community crime prevention. The following evidence is presented to substantiate this claim:
This methodological evidence in conjunction with the Project's output (the concepts of good practice, their tools and structures, and site-based demonstrations) can support the decision-maker in assessing the risk of changing policy and practice as a result of the research Project.
The participants' claim that the Project output (as distinct from outcomes) is valid was made on four counts:
The validity of the Project methodology is supported on three counts by both the consultants and the participants:
The participants were invited to evaluate their use, and the consultants' translation, of the methodology as a way of assessing the strength of the knowledge that the Project generated. Following extensive evaluation procedures (described in the last section of this Appendix), they claimed that the quality of their own application of the research methodology rated at 72 percent, and the quality of the consultant's application rated at 79 percent, with an overall quality rating of 75.5 percent. This rating is made in reference to John Heron's criteria for validity in research (in Reason 1998, pp 43-58), which are discussed in more detail in Appendix 5.
The participant rating was lower than the consultants had hoped or had experienced it to be themselves. We had to disallow some of the higher ratings because they were not substantiated by any evidence (as requested in the evaluation questions).
The low rating responses regarding participant use of the methodology were a result of:
The low rating responses regarding the consultants' practice were largely to do with:
Given these constraints and with regard to the "arm's length" nature of the way the consultants facilitated the Project, the overall assessment is felt to be accurate.
The Project was programmed over five stages of research, each stage using a particular learning skill to apply action research. There was also a "preliminary" stage which was less about research and more about establishing the infrastructure for the Project: who were the inquirers going to be and what was the framework of action?
Once these variables had been established the research activity began moving through the five subsequent stages:
This sequence of research stages and their descriptions is unique to the consultants' work and compares with the generally accepted definition of action research (distinct from participatory action research) as articulated by Kemmis and McTaggart (1983, p 88) who listed the essential stages of action research as being:
In our experience, this schema does not adequately address the constructivist paradigm necessary for participatory practices, which is why the consultants developed (and published1 ) an alternative research schema.
Stage 1 began in November 1997 and ran for three months. In this preliminary process we established our management and communications networks, and completed a literature review (15 December 1997) to determine established language and beliefs about good practice in other industries and in international reports about crime prevention.
We critically assessed these ideas by interviewing senior officers, who also referred us to projects currently operating in their jurisdictions that they considered to be exemplary of good practice as they saw it. The interview survey with the senior officers identified some shared beliefs about the nature of good practice in a generic sense, and the extent to which good practice was being used in their jurisdictions; however there was mixed feeling about the extent to which good practice was being realised in crime prevention in Australia. There was agreement that:
The Project responded to these issues by:
We created a briefing document (16 December 1997) that brought together the Project method, the literature review and the senior officers' views, and circulated this document with a survey to the thirty-nine project officers around Australia who were responsible for the recommended "exemplary projects". We received thirty-three responses. The project officer survey identified many structural and procedural characteristics of the crime prevention field:
We brought all these ideas together in our first report to the Project Management Group (29 January 1998). Through the survey we had also identified those projects which had self-selected for participating in action research (which were referred to as "Level 1" of the Project). As there were several more than the required number of six, we assisted the Project Management Group to select participating projects in Level 1 by providing a good practice matrix against each project, using the survey feedback as the source of the data. CultureShift did not make any recommendations or participate in any way in the selection of Level 1 projects (which took place at the committee meeting on 11 February 1998).
To create a communication database, the SA Crime Prevention Unit gave us their Compendium. The Project was introduced to over 140 initiatives across Australia in the first newsletter. This was the first step in what became an additionally funded communication strategy supporting the Project, which was intended to inform the national field of research progress and to bring a broad range of crime prevention stakeholders into the research process.
At its first meeting, the Project Management Group requested additional tasks of CultureShift, the two most significant being:
These developments were budgeted and the budget was approved by National Crime Prevention (then known as NCAVAC, funding agreement: 11 March 1998). The Project Management Group endorsed the first report as a valid starting point for research, selected the Level 1 inquirers, and endorsed initiation of the second stage.
Stage 2 lasted for two months. Its purpose was to establish strong collaboration with the Level 1 projects, introduce the research methodology and begin the research process.
We began with a lengthy process of negotiating letters of agreement between CultureShift and each Level 1 initiative. The form of the letters followed a format recommended for internal evaluators of good practice2 , and the letters were endorsed by the National Anti-Crime Strategy Coordinating Officer who coordinated the Project. Not all the Projects that were initially recommended by the Project Management Group followed through to signing the letters.
Eight community crime prevention initiatives agreed to participate as action research environments. They were (as identified in the Introduction):
The Project Management Group reviewed their selection and confirmed it as being reflective of community crime prevention. After confirming participation, the first two-day training session was held. Inquirers were introduced to each other, the consultancy company and the Project. As well, they learned experientially the principles of participatory action research, and conceptually, the ideas of good practice and good practice in crime prevention. They were then introduced to the practice of "reflection" as the first participatory action research activity to bring data into the Project.
CultureShift's view of "reflection" distinguishes it from interpretation. This means that we limit the consideration of "what is crime prevention?" to an analysis of a practitioner's direct experience of a Project and we refrain from elucidating the meaning of prevention until the next, interpretive stage of research. Our purpose in doing so is to enable as rich a description as possible of grounded action and, within the next, interpretive stage, as detailed an analysis as possible of many kinds of action, with particular reference to the values underpinning both the reflected data and the participants' means of making meaning (referred to as "reflexivity").
Inquirers were requested to reflect on "what is crime prevention?" with specific regard to:
With the exception of Woorabinda, all projects submitted reports. The reporting however, at this early stage, was largely from an "objective" or observing perspective and did not actually include reflection on the individual prevention practice of the participants. From this data we developed the first ideas about the range of crime prevention activity which the Level 1 projects shed light on and we sketched eleven potential "domains" of activity and some ideas about critical success factors. The early domains drawn from the inquirers' reports and considered by the Project Management Group were as follows:
Having identified the participants' concept of the domains that they saw as being relevant to good practice in community crime prevention, our next task was to assess how wide-spread their relevance might be outside of the Level 1 participation. In the next stage, therefore, a second survey was sent to Level 2 participants (the national network of non-participating exemplary projects).
Before designing the next training session, we evaluated our training program with the inquirers. Feedback indicated that:
The feedback on the training was critical to assessing how well the consultants had presented the research method and negotiated the principles for collaboration with the participants. It was also essential in supporting the participants to carry out their own negotiations in their working environments.
The Project Management Group commented upon the second report at its second meeting (13 May 1998) and CultureShift was endorsed to proceed to stage 3, referred to as the "interpretive" stage. A second, four-page newsletter was circulated to the whole research network to inform the national field of progress.
Stage three was implemented over two months. A second one-day training program was delivered to all Level 1 inquirers to introduce the ideas of "interpretation", specifically referring to Argyris and Schon's concepts of double and triple loop learning with which to identify and modify governing values. Inquirers were asked to work with local stakeholder groups of their choosing, and with issues that fitted their immediate Project priorities. The question at hand was to research the worth of working with the early domains within their current initiatives.
As the participants reviewed their work, they were encouraged to reflect on the purpose of their crime prevention strategies and the value of this purpose to funding bodies, management, crime prevention practitioners and beneficiaries. By identifying the values, an early construct of community crime prevention was made and used to direct the next stage of the research action. As well, the qualities of change that all the stakeholders experienced as a consequence of community crime prevention were described. This aspect of the quality of change was a key informant for designing the continuous improvement process.
With the exception of the Anti-Violence Project, which was committed to a major promotion strategy during this time, all eight projects (including Woorabinda) submitted reports. From these reports, the values of good practice (or critical success factors) were identified, and these sharpened the domains and the language being used. We were able to include the phrases and words of the Level 1 inquirers themselves in our next version of the framework (reported to the Project Management Group on 1 July 1998).
Because of the participants' focus on the social worth of community crime prevention practice, CultureShift introduced the concept of "social capital" to the framework, and we also looked at restorative justice and civility - three powerful concepts that the participants' fields were reflecting. It should also be noted that other, non-participating crime prevention arenas were moving away from the concepts of "social worth" at this time. In particular, and influenced by the recent policy development of the SA Crime Prevention Unit, a focus on the technology of "problem solving" without explicitly addressing the social worth of this technology was being felt throughout the Project. As none of the Level 1 inquirers were using this form of crime prevention in their community strategies (the Project Management Group had not selected any projects that were so doing), there were no data within the collaboration that related to this trend. The surveys that were sent to Level 2 maintained a check or balance on the developments of Level 1 to keep the relevance of the developing concepts as wide-reaching as possible.
The second survey of Level 2 (the third survey for the Project) requested simple feedback on the relevance of the early domains. We reduced the original 39 respondents to 33, deciding to survey only those projects that had responded (after follow-up calls) in the first stage. Twenty of the 33 listed Level 2 projects responded, from all States and Territories except the Northern Territory and Tasmania, so that some cross-jurisdictional reference was gained. Their answers (Survey Summary, 8 May 1998) indicated that the domains that were listed as "direct benefit to the offender" and "reduction of hate-related violence" were of low relevance and that all the other domains had medium to high relevance. "Program generation" received the highest rating.
The Level 1 participant reports for this interpretive stage and the survey feedback were both used to redesign the proposed framework, from the initial simple listing of "domains" and potential success factors to a much more integrated system made up of several components. This second round of reports also reflected on each participant's personal inquiry question, developed in the training, which led to a slightly more self-reflective form of reporting. As well, they included interviews with their consumer groups and peer collaborators. From these data we made adjustments to the developing proposal:
In our third report to the committee we presented eleven domains again, but this time with a much more sophisticated structure with which to map and generate good practice. The following diagram lists the categories of good practice criteria that we arrived at.
| Field of action | Social capital | Intended consequence | Quality factors | Quality experience |
These terms were used as follows:
The Project Management Group received a detailed report (1 July 1998) explaining how the framework had been designed and how it could be used. The Group endorsed the tables but raised the issue of language. Group members requested that the inclusion of research method descriptions in the general reporting be changed so that action reporting was covered in the main body of the text, and research method, if needed, covered in the appendix. The Group also expressed a desire to participate in its own workshop to address the questions of language that it was raising. The workshop did not take place, but informal discussions did and they resulted in very valuable communications with the consultants.
In the report for this stage we identified that the Project needed to focus on some important issues in the next stage of research, the decision making stage:
Stage 4 was delivered over six weeks. It was seriously hampered by school holidays, which took place at its start and delayed all training activities. Our request for more time to the Project Management Group was unable to be accommodated due to other scheduling requirements of senior officers. Three of the Level 1 projects were involved with holiday programs, and one of these followed its program with mid-year planning events for another week.
During this delay we generated a document to send out to Level 2 for its third survey, to test the relevance of the developed framework. Twenty responses were received again. In summary, the good practice framework as developed in stage 3 received a 66 percent approval rating.
Its key weaknesses were perceived as:
The respondents to the survey described in detail the following range of crime prevention activities as being the basis upon which they tested the relevance of the research proposals:
The consultants noted with interest that this range of crime prevention activity (which included non-community crime prevention) only referred to actual preventative practice in the "implementation" category. The seven other categories of crime prevention work (listed above) are management activities that could pertain to any community-oriented service.
This was a strong indication to us that the concept of good practice had to be more than identifying crime prevention methods and their outcomes, and more than better managing limited human resources. It had to address management practices, including those of the host organisation, and link those practices directly to community crime prevention outcomes. In other words, and albeit rather obviously, internationally recognised crime preventative approaches will have little impact on the issue if the organisation that is using them is not using good practice management. Alternatively, the best managed organisation has to know about effective prevention methods if it is to produce good practice crime prevention. While this may seem obvious, in reality the Project found some instances where organisations had developed good practice management systems, and others where the focus was on good practice preventative strategies, but there were none within the Project's networks that, at that time, could demonstrate an integration of management and prevention capabilities.
The issues about which the respondents were intervening, and to which they referred in order to assess the Project's proposal, were described as follows:
The consultants noted that these projects were largely dealing with behaviours, attitudes, emotional intelligence and service effectiveness. They were not intervening with crime after the fact but dealing with social issues that were seen to contribute to social and physical environments in which crime takes place.
The consultants asked respondents to decide whether the framework could assist the community crime prevention worker in managing their current, listed priorities. Their answers are tabled as follows:
| Yes | Maybe | No | No understanding of concept to answer | Other answer |
| 11 | 5 | 2 | 1 One person answered in both the "no" and the "no idea" columns. As they agreed that they had no understanding about the framework we decided that their judgement of "not relevant" was an uninformed assessment. |
1 Already have good practice in place |
This gave the proposal a 55 percent high approval rating, on relatively detailed consideration of how it had been developed and some early ideas about how it could be used. Twenty-five percent saw the framework as having potential or limited relevance pending certain factors, 10 percent saw no relevance, 5 percent had no idea what the framework was about even given the extensive briefing and 5 percent did not comply with the question. On further discussion, it transpired that this person had not read any of the material.
This survey, along with the review of the framework which Level 1 participants carried out in their training and during the weeks which followed, became the basis for revising the framework a third time, in the iterative (feedback) research process. It was this revised framework that was presented to Level 1 participants for endorsement by those stakeholders with the highest level of interest in their various initiatives, to conclude the Decision-Making Stage of the Project.
We re-drafted the proposed framework to reduce the tables, clarify some of the language and respond to the input from Levels 2 and 1. We addressed the recurring issue of language by modifying language where there was clear direction. In response to the feedback we replaced the following terms:
| # | Good practice term | Crime prevention field replacement |
| 1 | Producer | Crime prevention practitioner |
| 2 | Investor | Funding body |
| 3 | Crime prevention | Community crime prevention |
| 4 | Domain | Field of Action |
| 5 | Social capital | Action value |
| 6 | Quality factor | Quality check |
| 7 | Quality experience | Performance indicator |
The consultants were reluctant to make changes 1 and 2, as they regarded the assumption that the producer is necessarily a crime prevention professional, limited the responsibility for good practice to the paid worker, which is by no means the case. The same problem existed for the "investor" concept-the role of investor not always being limited to funding bodies. These limitations are both untrue and unproductive for crime prevention. Committees at this point, however, were having difficulty with interpreting generic good practice terms into their contexts, so for the purposes of endorsement the consultants identified who these entities might be. Several Level 1 inquirers agreed that changing the language in this way was not useful. On their advice, the consultants did not maintain this decision in the draft Action Kit.
Some of the survey responses suggested that the good practice framework did not have strategic value because it focussed on community crime prevention issues:
The framework sits well with social crime prevention, but does not necessarily fit as well with other models of practice. Target hardening and situational crime prevention may rely more heavily upon statistical data and direct action rather than community participation, collaboration, individual choice, harm minimisation and other social domains as presented (Survey comment).
The focus on community crime prevention was authorised by the Project Management Group at its first meeting. It was a key factor in their selection of participating Projects, which skewed the data from the Project in this direction.
While the Project Management Group advised us to limit the Project to community crime prevention, for the Decision-Making Stage we broadened the language to all crime prevention to test its relevance. We re-drafted the fields of action to identify where good practice could be developed in crime prevention. We did not include target hardening and situation community crime prevention as specific domains of action any more than any other method of crime prevention. Under the umbrella of good practice is a wide range and choice of crime prevention models and practices, with specific preferences that are influenced by jurisdictional policy, as well as local community variables. These choices need to be considered within the context of the good practice management system developed by the Project, to ensure good practice outcomes whatever the preferred model of intervention. The Project's output is specifically designed to adapt to any model that an initiative uses because models and policies are continually evolving or changing. The good practice framework provides some continuity in this environment of uncertainty and flux. The revised fields and all the component parts that the participants used to devise the Action Stage of the Project are included in Appendix 3.
We created a generic template that described a "field of action". Each template was made up of eight integrated elements:
The templates were designed as action learning tools, allowing for maximum interpretation to suit each person's context, while retaining consistency of form and generic reference. Each element was designed to integrate with every other element - there was no incongruency. We developed eight original templates to match eight identified fields of action. Each field of action could be used individually, in a mixed group with selected other fields, or as a whole strategic set. They were used in many ways to orient the project officer and team into thinking about good practice and determining a cultural change strategy which served their current priorities either at strategic or operational levels (or both). The cultural change was towards establishing continuous improvement process. The tools and materials to support consultants were brought together in a draft Action Kit.
Already the inquirers were identifying that this draft framework was both a guideline and an evaluation system. In fact, and as the participants stated, it could be used for any crime prevention activity, using any theory, any strategy and in relation to any issue in any setting. In other words, it is both propositional and reflective and was demonstrating generic properties.
We circulated a summary of the revised framework to each of the Level 1 management committees and received written endorsement in principle for the revised framework from all. Queensland's change of government meant that Woorabinda had to withdraw from Level 1 and that Sunshine Coast Community Policing Project, while continuing with crime prevention work, was unclear of its status.
In this stage we devised three forms of support for the consultants:
Our guidelines for support structures for each participant were delivered in the third training session, which reviewed decision-making processes. First we advised inquirers to consider the range of decision making which they would need supporters to embrace - for example, would their stakeholders need to sign off on the whole detailed concept, or only one specific element of it? Having thought these details through in the training session, they decided that they needed a group of people with the following attributes to support them in the Action Stage:
Sunshine Coast Community Policing Project, the Anti-Violence Project, Glebe Youth Service and Bush Law followed these ideas through to create special purpose support groups for good practice in their Projects.
At this stage, we also proposed a definition of the term "generic" which we drew from our experience of working with the many projects within the one research initiative. We sensed that this term was becoming a victim to the "paradigm wars" and we needed to clarify our understanding of it. The confusion stemmed from a simple assumption, which we detected in the survey responses, that "generic" meant "generalised".
We suggested the following meaning of "generic":
Level 1 inquirers spontaneously identified that the good practice framework served the function of allowing common processes of planning, dialogue and design which could significantly enhance communication about crime prevention within their initiatives, with collaborators from other agencies, as well as across jurisdictions. This recognition was important evidence that the proposition had a whole-of-government potential that would enable quality collaboration.
With regard to social capital, we investigated the current good practice for local government in Australia project (LGCSA Position Paper, June 1998). We regarded that project as an excellent companion to the good practice research Project and well placed given the relationship between crime prevention and local government. There is overt reference to concepts of social capital in this document, but within our own Project, we found that this was too confronting for some of the Level 2 participants (who saw it as being "academic").
The participants' feedback showed that the idea of social or community benefit was easy, but the more abstract idea of "social capital" required their management to make a conceptual leap to see social benefit as a form of capital. Without the benefit of training, and given the already challenging nature of the good practice framework, we chose to change our approach and refer to values in reference to action instead.
The Level 1 participants were introduced to decision-making concepts in their training and were guided as to whom they should seek endorsement from, how it should be recorded and the accompanying reporting. The intention of endorsement is to establish the socio-political viability of the proposition, and to create resources for action in the next stage of the research.
The intention of the Action Stage was to achieve a scientifically valid and grounded proposition for good practice in community crime prevention and to test the validity of that through participant evaluation. The term "scientifically valid" refers to the constructivist paradigm:
The Action Stage was implemented by nine projects over six months. By "action" we mean implementing and developing through reflective practice the knowledge that the participants developed from the previous three research stages-reflective, interpretive and decision-making. In essence, this meant participants using the draft Action Kit, which brought the learning together with support materials and systems for continuous improvement process. This use would be reflected upon with regular reports generated by the participants and developed through collaborative reflection.
Participation in the Action Stage was designed to be congruent with the definition of terms with participatory action research methodology:
The Project Management Group encouraged CultureShift to extend an invitation to the Level 2 projects for their participation in the Action Stage. The purpose of this was to extend the test of relevance beyond the limitations of the crime prevention activities with which the Level 1 projects were engaged. As well, we could explore the extent of support that was needed to implement continuous improvement process.
The idea was to simply send the draft Action Kit to the inquiring Project. If a follow-up conversation was needed, then we were given permission to do this, but intensive mentoring was to be avoided. The Kit was sent out to eight additional Level 2 Projects, and three declined to participate. The projects that committed to the Action Stage were:
In South Australia:
In New South Wales:
In Tasmania:
In Queensland:
In Western Australia:
Each draft Kit was supplied with a standard reporting system and due dates for sending the reports into the consultants. Each report identified:
Every month to six weeks the reporting round was completed, and the consultants integrated the data and recirculated the draft report for each stage to all nine participating Projects. E-mail communications enabled responses to be received as a way of creating an agenda for a teleconference - with the foundation (original and remaining Level 1) projects only, due to budgetary constraints. The teleconference was documented, circulated and integrated into the first draft monthly report. A final report and summary for each month was then recirculated to each inquirer and the Project Management Group.
The consultants accept that in pure participatory action research methodology, this process of data generation is not appropriate. The methodology requires that the participants meet and reflect collaboratively on their practice, to arrive at shared constructs of their actions, as determined by them, not the consultants. The budget did not allow for this workshop process. The original contract allowed for monthly collaborative workshops within each State, but these did not occur because the wide geographical spread of the participating initiatives made monthly meetings impossible to fund. This loss was compensated for by the wider spread of the additional five parallel projects.
Extensive developments took place during the Action Stage, and these make up the body of this final Report. Briefly the issues that were addressed included:
All these issues went into continual modification of the proposal and were used to create the final Report. The use of teleconferences significantly improved the quality of collaboration (reflection, critical analysis of each other's work and documentation), but the mentoring relationships that we had hoped would develop between the participants never eventuated in any sustained way. We tried to encourage the participants to facilitate their own rounds of reflection, but they were unable to achieve any support from their management groups to carry out this extra work, forcing us to maintain coordination and interpretation of their reflections.
The Project Management Group also carried out its own survey of senior officers in the National Anti-Crime Strategy to assess the level of support for the developing proposition. Only three States responded, two of which were already involved in the Project Management Group. The participants considered the issues identified by those who did respond. The overall conclusion was that the senior officers were not taking responsibility for the development of good practice in community crime prevention, leaving the participants unaware of the senior officers' priorities, particularly with regard to policy matters. This resulted in an understanding that a significant gap was emerging between practitioners' and policy officers' views of good practice.
In the last stage of the Project, inquirers in Level 1 (including parallel Projects) were invited to attend a three-day Evaluation Workshop. Not all inquirers could come, either because of pressing work schedules (as with North-West Centre Against Sexual Assault) or because they were unable to participate in the Action Stage of the Project (as with Purfleet Youth Community Centre). The six projects that participated were:
School Watch also joined the inquirers on Day 3. North West Centre Against Sexual Assault answered the questions from their workplace after the Evaluation Workshop took place.
The data from the evaluation was used to create the Project's output as required by the terms of reference:
The evaluation used participatory forms of reflection, interpretation, decision making and action to evaluate three aspects:
The data developed throughout the workshop was reported and recycled back to participants for confirmation before being used in this Report. This participant-generated and critiqued information comprises the body of this final Report, but for this element of the Research Method chapter, we include a summary of the participants' views. They identified what new knowledge was created for them from the Project, the strengths and weaknesses of the research method, and the secrets of sustainable knowledge that they discovered.
The inquirers saw the new knowledge output as being about:
They saw the following strengths in the research method
The following were seen as weaknesses in the research method:
The participants recognised that they had developed new awareness about generating sustainable (robust and workable) knowledge through the following strategies:
The Project concluded with the writing of this final Report, which was circulated in draft form to the Level 1 inquirers and the Project Management Group for endorsement. This Report is a reflection of their input and is made available for public access with their endorsement.
The evaluation program was designed to enable the inquirers to reflect on their Action Stage and the reflections that had taken place every month throughout that stage. The purpose was to create a proposition about good practice in community crime prevention that was truly drawn from practice, by using the disciplines of action research and the assumptions about the nature of good practice and continuous improvement process that the inquirers had learned from the Project. This high degree of methodological consistency was intended to produce a highly congruent, and thus resource efficient, outcome from the Project.
Many questions were asked to evaluate the Project. The questions were devised by the consultants, developed by the inquirers and endorsed by the Project Management Group. The following text is in two parts:
The following comments are taken from the evaluation report.
The Armadale Domestic Violence Intervention Project (a parallel Project) describes their role as facilitators in the Action Stage:
...It helped us to realise our great need to revisit and re-evaluate our primary objectives for the organisation; i.e. why we are here? We learned what it means to be a change agent in terms of inclusiveness of the stakeholders... Through involvement in the Project, we came back to what we had learned about community ownership - this is a direct result of working on the Project. To create change and to be an agent of that change I need to be aware of the process of how I want to achieve it - inclusiveness at all levels and all points of the process....
Sunshine Coast Community Policing Partnership (original Level 1 Project) reflects on the relationship between participatory research and sustainable change:
Sustainable change is a change in process/practice, which is transferable and able to be realised in differing contexts over time. Participatory action research does this as it acknowledges the "worth" of experiential learning as being valid, irrespective of any academic background. This becomes particularly important in terms of key stakeholders who do not necessarily have any academic experience BUT do have life experience. Expertise, knowledge, and ideas regarding issues surrounding the crime prevention strategy or initiative being developed or implemented [is able to be used to sustain change].
Bush Law (original Level 1 Project) reviews the quality of the research community of which they were a member for over a year:
The research community grew - it became everyone I was working with in one sense but in terms of their experience of the research they had different windows to look through. I never really opened the door completely and let them in. This was really only experienced by the co-researchers from the Bush Law committee. Even though I would have experienced the value as we have, this was not achievable in the context of the Project.
Glebe Youth Service (original Level 1 Project) comments on the consultants' training program:
The CultureShift training environment was positive, their preparation of material was great! There was a lot of information to digest so it was quite challenging, particularly without set boundaries for development of strategies and methodology, definitions etc. This learning context was very valuable to me personally and I believe to any future work I do in the field, as I take the learning experience with me and the constructive use of the core principles underlying this approach. Sometimes it is difficult to strike a balance between pushing participants who are feeling overwhelmed or stagnated, and supporting them. Resilience is a key attribute in the remaining participants. The learning environment was challenging on many fronts, CultureShift training sessions, in local stakeholder groups, work teams, beneficiary groups and so on. Risk management is often right alongside of learning environments.
Young Males and Socialisation (original Level 1 Project) comments on their difficulties in using the training:
There is a distinct "distance" between the learning environment and the field experience. The learning environment provided concepts to reflect upon, and an element of safety that does not exist in the field. Learning took place by interacting with the field. The meaning of the learning process only becomes apparent through interaction with the field experience.
Project Hahn (parallel Project) reflects on how they brought State funding bodies into their research program:
We included State Government funders in our monthly report writing. Discussions on process [were] incorporated into their wider program audits. For example, the Tasmanian State Government through the Office of Sport and Recreation responded through being an active observer in the process, commenting on reports and holding the process up to the light for examination and possible replication.
Big hART (parallel Project) reflects on the costs and gains of participating in the Project:
Personal gains [from participation] were satisfaction, creation of relationships, learning, learning about the value of alternative skills. The professional gains were an opportunity to apply those skills for the benefit of those that I am working with, eg. community, Project workers, organisation, the Project. The resource gain was that it is more efficient for me to travel 5 hours to a community where I will access a whole group of people by using this process - also that the participants' learning became aware of and acknowledged their own skills - again that becomes a resource issue... I can't think of any losses because it actually opened up more learning and enhanced service development.
This section summarises the strengths and weaknesses of the Project as perceived by the participants and recorded in their evaluation charts.
The participants considered that they had achieved research method capabilities in the following areas:
They regarded their low level capabilities to be:
They regarded the consultants' capabilities to be:
They regarded the consultants' weaknesses as being:
The Project provided a challenging and productive learning environment for everyone.
The last section of this Appendix is a record of external critique of the Project. The first critique, from the Learning Enterprise based in the Northern Territory, appraises the good practice product that the research created in reference to international Quality Management principles. The second critique is an appraisal of the consultants' training program followed by an appraisal of the Project method, from the University of Western Sydney's School of Social Ecology.
| THE LEARNING ENTERPRISE P/L THE NATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT into GOOD PRACTICE IN COMMUNITY-BASED CRIME PREVENTION Introduction The writer has used the underlying principles that guide quality and continuous improvement internationally as one means of assessing the soundness of this project's methods, outcomes and conclusions, together with learning gathered from five years' experience working with Australian organisations pursuing continuous improvement as a management strategy. My overall observation is that the methodology of participative action research has truly engaged all stakeholders in the field of community based crime prevention in an equitable and consultative manner. It has put into action a fundamental principle for sustainable change and that is: placing the design and ownership of the process in the hands of all key stakeholders in the area of study. The process has been non-prescriptive in its implementation and as such, has enabled participants to take responsibility for their own implementation and be accountable for, and have ownership of, the resulting outcomes. There is clear evidence of each stage of the project informing the next and future stages and this has ensured congruency in the hierarchy of values, principles, ethics, tools and processes that have emerged from the project's implementation. The following paragraphs focus upon particular aspects of the project and its structure and their relationship to my current understanding of good practice. Process Orientation Underlying Principles of Quality (sic Continuous Improvement) Guiding Principles versus Rules and Procedures The Quality Principles7 Organisations benefit from decisions that are based upon facts and
data Quality is determined by the customer The most important resource of any organisation is people-especially
their creativity and knowledge All systems (sectors, organisations etc) and processes exhibit variability,
which impacts on predictability and costs In order to improve the output, improve the process Impact on the community and the environment are key influencers of
future sustainability Concluding Remarks |