Held on a beautiful 1 acre space on Jinibara country in Maleny, this workshop is facilitated by Peter Westoby & Rachael Donovan of Community Praxis Co-op and invites participants on a journey that:

• Reflects on what both depletes you in your community development practice, and on what brings you joy and enlivens you - as a way to help you reconnect with what matters
• Re-attunes to living social practice (not just the linear, mechanical, manic, machine world)
• Explores your community development practice through the lens of both the spirit AND soul of the work, drawing on the mythopoetic traditions of depth psychology along with critical thinking such as "Bifo" Berardi's work on 'colonising the soul' 
• Supports you to deepen your commitment to a powerful courageous soul-force - (remember Gandhi).
• Enables you to pause and reflect on your practice in 2026 and consider your deeper intentions for 2027.

The workshop will explore personal levels of heart-felt and soul-work, public work through case studies, and collective work through dialogue. 

Peter's book Creating Us: Community Work with Soul  (Wesoby, Tafina Press), with Michael Leunig contributions, will be available . 

The workshop includes morning and afternoon tea; but please bring your own lunch. 

---

Peter Westoby is a highly sought-after thought-leader in community and social change work. Combining a long history of domestic and international practice, along with a rich academic life, Peter brings practice wisdom and rigour to organisational efforts and effectiveness.

Peter has worked in youth, community and organisation development for 30+ years, within places such as South Africa, Uganda, Vanuatu, PNG, Nepal the Philippines and Australia.

He has published 17 books, and 60+ professional journal articles, his most well known being monographs such as Dialogical Community Development, Soul, Community and Social Change, and 40 Critical Thinkers in Community Development. 

Peter's work is informed by reflective social practice, story, and theory. He has a love of both critical theory as a way of reflecting on the forces that shape the world and our work, and also phenomenological inquiry, ensuring embodied consciousness is foregrounded in practice, learning and research.

Peter is currently: Director/senior social practitioner at Community Praxis Co-op, Associate Professor of Community Development, Murdoch University and a Visiting Professor, University of the Free State, South Africa.

Rachael Donovan is a community development practitioner, educator, researcher and writer with more than twenty years’ experience working across Australia and South Asia. Her work has spanned grassroots community development, international development, environmental sustainability, social justice, government and systems change, with a particular focus on participatory and people-led approaches to social change.

She has spent significant periods working alongside grassroots organisations in India and Nepal, as well as working with communities in remote Australia. Her practice is grounded in participatory and Freirean traditions and shaped by a strong belief in dialogue, relationships, lived experience and collective learning as foundations for social change. She sees community development as incorporating both the social and the ecological, and supports this through facilitating nature connection processes that create space for slowing down, reflection, embodied awareness, and deeper connection with self, others and the more-than-human world.

Rachael is a Director and Senior Social Practitioner with Community Praxis Co-operative, where she works across community development, facilitation, research and practitioner education. She is also a co-author of two books published by Practical Action Publishing: The Community Builder’s Journal and Transformative Community Development: Learning from Freirean and Humanist Praxis in Nepal.

She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of the Sunshine Coast, exploring practitioner interiority: how our histories, identities, embodied experiences and ways of being shape how we practise community development, and how attending to this interior terrain might deepen our capacity for social and ecological change.