Sally Paulin

Homeless Connect, held annually in several Australian cities and fashioned along the lines of similar days in cities such as San Francisco, has now been conducted in Perth for a number of years. As the name suggests, Homeless Connect is designed to reconnect homeless guests, as well as those at risk of homelessness, with government, non-profit and business services, personal care services and social opportunities. The research question being addressed in this paper is: How can the strategies of Homeless Connect impact on the personal agency of those who attend on the day? The findings are based on feedback from guests, service providers and volunteers who contributed to Homeless Connect Perth 2011. The one-stop services approach, as well as affording opportunities for social connection for homeless guests, is critiqued in the context of providing an opportunity to address two of the components of personal agency: knowledge and activation. We propose a model which depicts the contribution of volunteers, organisers and service providers to homeless guests' personal agency via connections and reconnections.

WISALTS Inc. is one of the oldest Environmental Community Organisations (ECOs) active in Western Australia (WA). The organisation has been tackling the issue of land degradation in the agricultural areas since 1978. However, declining membership as well as the departure of key leaders has cast uncertainty over its future. It has been argued that the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach has the potential to induce sustainable transformative change within organisations. Grounded in the theory of social constructionism, AI is a different approach to organisational development; one that focuses on past strengths and successes rather than the weaknesses and failures. In this context, this paper discusses the principles and processes of AI and explores its use in supporting a lifespan change process within WISALTS Inc., as a case study.

The bottom of the pyramid (BoP) approach popularised by Prahalad and Hart (2002), calls for the engagement of business with the bottom segment of the global income pyramid, and has attracted considerable attention and debate. The BoP lens is applied chiefly to communities experiencing ‘extreme poverty’ in low income countries with little reference to the growing number of people living in ‘relative poverty’ in high income countries. For the purpose of stimulating academic debate this paper seeks to explore the role of the so-called fourth sector, a domain for hybrid business ventures of social (and, in the case of this paper, Indigenous) entrepreneurs, at what we refer to as ‘the bottom at the top of the income pyramid’ in Australia. Using examples of Indigenous and social entrepreneurship within disadvantaged communities, we seek to highlight the scope for fourth sector enterprises at the lower end of the income spectrum within developed countries. It is suggested that the business models found within the fourth sector offer promising, alternative approaches for addressing the economic as well as social and cultural needs of those living on the fringes of today’s increasingly fragmented high-income societies.

Australia has a fragile natural environment which has been radically altered over the past 200 years by land clearing for agriculture and urban development. It has become very urgent that measures are put in place to halt this degradation and in recent years federal and state governments have put in place various policies and funding mechanisms to encourage communities and landholders to take some responsibility for rehabilitating their natural environment. These policies and mechanisms are in a state of constant and ongoing change and this paper examines the effect of these changes on a local community based catchment group in Perth, Western Australia.