Finding Ground - Building A Better Way Back Together

This is a professional development opportunity for CEOs, frontline workers, Board Members, students, researchers, and supporters of the community service sector and beyond. Representatives from all levels of government, community services, and the social and human services will get the most value from this conference.

It’s time to break new ground. As old systems buckle and collapse under the strain of the entire novel challenges we have faced, spaces of opportunity open to remake and rebuild better together.

The social divides, wealth inequities, uncertain climate futures, and continued colonial impacts that our communities faced prior to the pandemic have been amplified and accelerated. We find ourselves in unimagined and tumultuous terrain that we have had little time to map as we continue to respond to immediate needs.

We are at a juncture. It is critical now, more than ever, that we mobilise our collective efforts to establish the foundations for more cohesive communities, more effective social service systems, more collaborative and joined-up service design and delivery.

The WACOSS Finding Ground: Building a better way back together conference will be one of the first major opportunities for the community service sector to take stock since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to meet, and early 2021 is both timely and imperative to affirm pathways out of response and into recovery.

Like the Nyoongar concept of djenna bidi, journeying together, we need to build and walk forward in unity, here on Nyoongar Boodja where we are gathering, and elsewhere, to realise a future that is genuinely inclusive, sustainable, and grounded in equity.

The WACOSS conference will be the place and space to plot and plan with our peers about how we might do things differently together to make a real difference. A chance to explore not what we want, because we are clear about this, but how we are going to collectively and effectively take action to get there.

The focus will be forward, recognising what we have learnt from this crisis, those COVID adaptations that have revealed better ways. These innovative changes and agile responses will be our footing while we consider how these lessons can inform future service design and social policy.

This conference will provide us with the opportunity to seize these emerging and urgent openings, and find ground from which we build back more resilient and connected communities.