Who Changed Tara? A Case Study of Community Participation and Engagement

Cruickshank M¹*, Darbyshire A²*

1. Department of Primary Industries & Fisheries, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
2. Department of Communities, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Government service delivery ‘silos’ are a commonplace experience everywhere, so for disadvantaged rural communities penetrating the seemingly impervious layers of bureaucracy can be a difficult task. This is the story of Tara, 200 km West of Toowoomba, where years of hardship and the negative impacts of rural residential sub-division development have been turned around. Tara’s dedicated government and non-government service providers have engaged fully at the strategic level with ‘whole of government’ to take perceptions of Tara from being in the ‘too hard basket’ to now being a showcase example of an effective ‘place’ based collaboration between community and government. So, in the Darling Downs and western regions, it has in effect become a ‘Tara engagement model’ that is often referred to.

Evidence based practice and key socially conducive values or practice principles have underpinned the change design and successful implementation process in Tara. Some of these practices and key social values are: promotion of local leadership, using non blame as a operating principle, running parallel consultation and capacity building processes and underpinning this with theoretical frameworks that are applicable, by way of making sense of the realities experienced. This case study presents numerous lessons about what works and what doesn’t, but more importantly provides some insight into why things work or don’t work.

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