Brighton Alive is a local network of community groups, services and individual community members facilitated by Brighton Council. Brighton Alive meets each month, bringing community together to collaborate on activities, events and training that help build a stronger community.

On this basis, Brighton Alive has been invited to participate in a project that is simply called The Place Project. Place-based approaches target the specific circumstances of a place and engage local people from all walks of life as active participants in development and implementation of ideas to improve people’s lives and experiences.

What is this project?

The Place Project is funded by the Paul Ramsey Foundation (PRF) and Tasmanian Community Fund (TCF).

Why is it needed:

The project is about collabora­tively building a better under­standing and learning about the experiences of place-based work in Lutruwita / Tasmania.

• Six communities are involved who have histories in place-based work (Brighton, Clarence Plains, Northern Suburbs Launceston, George Town, Devonport and Burnie).
• There is interest from the funders, who through this project, want to learn and change their ways of doing things. We can all contrib­ute to the conversation and potential change.
• This work is unique because benefits can come from working together on things that matter to communities, using good processes.

Some of the opportunities:

• We can think about ‘what can be?’ and ‘what can we have?’ because presently some of the systems are not working as well as they could.
• What are the issues around the work? How else can we do this work? How can we best fund it and support place-based work?

Who is involved:

Currently in Brighton, Communities for Children South-East Tasmania, Brighton Council and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Legal Service (TALS) have been facilitating discussions, but the goal is to open the project up to the broader Brighton Alive community or anyone who would like to be involved.

Next steps:

1. There is an opportunity to tell some of the place-based stories of Brighton, our work, the learn­ings along the way and what is essential to make place-based work happen in this community. We are hoping to do this via film.
2. The call is for community members to get together and have a conversation about this in the next few weeks, so we are looking to support these conver­sations in a way that works best for anyone who is interested.

If you would like to get involved or just have a chat about the project, please contact: Kylie Murphy, Community Development Officer kylie.murphy@brighton.tas.gov.au Phone: (03) 6268 7000