Building Your Personal Practice Framework

🌿 You are warmly invited to 

Three Rivers Initiative Masterclass
Building Your Personal Practice Framework

📍 Hosted at Camellia Cottage, Jinibara Country
Maleny, Sunshine Coast
🗓 Thursday 18th & Friday 19th September 2025
🕤 9:30am – 4:30pm each day

www.threeriversinitiative.com.au

Join us for a deeply reflective and practical two-day workshop, supporting community practitioners to build or evolve their personal practice frameworks.

This masterclass will:

• Draw from Chapter Two of Participatory Development Practice (Kelly & Westoby, 2018)
• Guide you through processes for ‘generating data’ from multiple knowledge sources:
  • Reflective practice knowledge
  • Embodied knowledge (intuition, emotion, body awareness)
  • Knowledge-on-country (listening to and learning from place)
  • Academic knowledge (theories and ideas that have shaped your practice)
• Support you in identifying key patterns and dimensions in your practice
• Help you distil a symbol, name, and shape to hold and honour your unique framework

This experience is perfect for:

• Community workers building their first personal framework
• Practitioners wanting to refresh and deepen their current framework
• Managers in community-focused organisations seeking to develop a community-oriented management framework
• Social workers and social practitioners centred on community development

Why build a Personal Practice Framework?

• Move from what you think you do to understanding what you actually do
• Work authentically ‘from the inside-out’, integrating your gifts, story and character
• Strengthen confidence and clarity in your practice
• Bring a disciplined integration of intuition, theory, and reflection to your work
• Be transparent and accountable about your practice
• Embody the integration of head, heart and hands 
• Honour both personal and collective journeys in community work

Facilitators
✨ Dr Peter Westoby and Rachael Donovan (see bio's below)
Experienced community development practitioners, educators and writers.

Important Details:

• Dates: Thursday 18th & Friday 19th September, 2025
• Times: 9:30am – 4:30pm each day
• Venue: Camellia Cottage, Jinibara Country (Maleny)
• Accommodation: Stay in one of the many local B&Bs or Airbnbs to soak in the beauty of the region
• Catering: BYO lunch. Morning and afternoon tea + coffee/tea provided
• Preparation: Some pre-reading and reflection work will be required prior to the workshop.

This will be a special gathering of community hearts and minds, held on beautiful country, with deep respect for land, story, and spirit. 🌱

We would love to have you with us.

About your facilitators:

Peter Westoby was introduced at a keynote of the 2018 International Association of Community Development as a community development scholar, activist and analyst. Peter kind of liked the ring of it; almost poetic. Yet, more accurately, from age 20 years Peter has been on a journey of community development (CD) practice, deeply shaped by a grass-roots tradition, Freirean in nature, and place-based. That evolved over many years, particularly as he worked in places such as South Africa, Uganda, the Philippines, Nepal, PNG and Vanuatu.

Then at the age of 40 he found himself as a late comer wading into the academy, and perhaps by chance took up a position as community development scholar just as Anthony Kelly retired from 40 years of teaching/practice service at The University of Queensland. Since then, he has loved the journey of a more intentional dance that links theory and practice together – the rigour of the academy intersecting with the responsivity of daily CD practice. 

He has been a writer or co-writer/editor of 15 books (3 more soon to come) and over 60 professional journal articles on CD, and loves that there is an emerging global ‘community of scholarship’ growing around the world.

But more importantly, he loves reading, walking, sitting by a fire under the moon or stars, wandering daily in Mary Cainross Park, exploring his bio-region, being with friends, sipping a coffee at dawn, and going to bed about 8.30pm (yes, he’s a lark, not an owl).

At this present moment he is also:

• Director/consultant at Community Praxis Co-op;
• a P/T practitioner at Hummingbird House,
• an Associate Professor of Community Development and Social Science, Murdoch University, Australia and Visiting Professor, University of the Free State, South Africa.

Rachael Donovan has worked in community development and environmental management across the public and not-for-profit sector in Australia and South Asia for the past two decades. Utilising a framework of being, connecting and transforming she has worked at the intersection of environmental issues and social justice and is passionate about protecting the rights of both people and the planet. She believes that sustainable and authentic practice begins with a deep understanding of the self, guided by personal practice frameworks that integrate reflection, intuition, theory, and action. Grounded in respect for land, story, and collective wisdom, her work centres on building frameworks that enable practitioners to move from the inside-out — cultivating clarity, authenticity, and accountability in community practice.