So What is CoLocal?

So you are wondering what CoLocal is all about? If you google it in scientific terms it means occurring in the same cell. We think this is kind of apt as community advocates with a passion for creating connection and collaboration and a strong inclusive community that can live and work and support one another in the local space.

Our journey over the last few years has seen a number of us collaborate with many local stakeholders and work on lots of local projects, that have delivered or created fantastic outcomes, built social cohesion, advocated for better resources and amenities etc. and we wondered how we could create a better, scalable system to work together.

This video below on Collective Impact by CMM Social Change explains how we work in an easy to understand way:

Connecting community and people

We often see many hardworking individuals, community groups, local business and local organisations working hard in disparate ways to solve common problems. Rather than work separately, bringing together like-minded individuals,  the dreamers and doers, can create greater social impacts.

Empowering our community

We aim to build capacity and shared resources that allow our community to do more together, aligning a shared vision that creates a sense of belonging and pride and encourages a supportive local economy.

Governance and transparency

Leading by example and creating a strong vision and mission supported by a viable governance structure that focuses on accountability, transparency, and the bigger picture and leverages partnerships and collaboration. We intend to template this process so we can build capacity and support and auspice others to do the same.

Bringing positive change and impact

We will be building our structure to support social procurement at the local level too! We know how hard it is for local, micro businesses and social enterprises to apply for tenders on their own and we know this needs to be supported from an agency perspective to enable pre-qualified local skills access to this bigger contracts and tenders.

We want to focus on building a values based organisation around real people, strengthening our communities to be able to be self-supporting and sustainable. We cannot change the world but we figure we can work on making our local communities inclusive and supportive. 

Is there room at the table? Hell Yeah! We need skills, partners, associates and sponsors who share a like-minded vision and are invested in seeing strong supportive systems working together.

Please reach out and help us build CoLocal - after all Local is at the Heart of what we do!