Pride In Place

2025 Community Roadshow & Listening Tour Report

Introducing the Pride In Place Report: What We Heard, What Communities Know

PLACE’s Listening Tour report captures the voices, wisdom and lived realities of communities across the country. It reflects what we heard on the ground and what communities have long known to be true - that trust, cultural grounding, local leadership and strong backbone coordination are not optional, they are essential.

When these elements are in place, and when communities are resourced with long-term investment, community-led data and support for informal care, real and lasting change becomes possible.

Too often communities are being held back by the same barriers; short-term funding cycles, burdensome compliance, unpaid labour, fragmented systems and consultation that feels more like a box-ticking exercise than genuine partnership.

We must shift power, fund stability, recognise local authority, and act on what communities already know works. It’s time to stop asking whether place-based change is possible and start backing it properly.

This report introduces PLACE’s four-layer model for systems change. It’s a model that doesn’t stand above or around community, but walks alongside it—universal in intent, responsive to place, and grounded in trust.

Read the Snapshot of the report here or the full report is available here.