Community Enterprise

Getting To Better Together

In this podcast series, we have drawn on the words of the American anthropologist, the late Margaret Mead, as a recurring inspiration for our theme of getting to better together. “Never doubt” she wrote “that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. Indeed, it is this belief that provides the foundation for virtually all that we do in the Centre for International Development, Social Entrepreneurship and Leadership, at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

While one of the leading objectives of CIDSEL is international development, our mode of operation, in the quest for betterment, is through helping in the development of communities as groups of people who share something in common. It might be geographical location, or mutual interests and aspirations, or common values, or typically, combinations of all of these. From our own experience as well as from the experiences of others, we have come to recognise the significance of collective efforts to develop shared visions of desirable futures, to collectively establish clearly defined aims and objectives, and to identify opportunities for achieving these outcomes. Vitally, we have come to appreciate the need for communities to mobilise their own social, natural, and financial capital resources to support practical initiatives in these development contexts where a communal spirit of enterprise can be translated into actual community business enterprises.

In this episode, Richard talks with his guest Bill Mcdonnell who, in conversation, draws particularly on his own life experiences in community enterprises starting with his memories of life as a child living on a sugar cane farm in Queensland. From these foundations, he has developed a lifelong interest and very considerable involvement in capacity building through enterprise. He has been an adjunct with CIDSEL for the past 8 years. For nearly four decades prior to that, Bill followed a career in banking, with a particular focus on corporate commercial small businesses often in an international institutional context.