Bringing together systems change and community-led into prevention work is innovative and needed.
In that, it’s important to consider when co-authoring systems change, it means moving from a model of doing for communities to doing with them. It’s about recognising that communities already hold deep systems knowledge, insight that comes from lived experience, connection to place, and years of navigating structures that were not always designed for them. As professionals, our role is not to overwrite that knowledge with technical expertise, but to sit alongside it, bringing our evidence and experience into relationship with community voice. What we are seeing and learning is that this approach changes not just the outcomes of our work, but the way we understand change itself.
Across Aotearoa, community-led and systems-focused work streams are beginning to intersect. The kaupapa and intent are clear, yet bringing these together requires time, thought, and careful attention to how we hold power. Community-led means maintaining an unbroken line of sight to community; asking where ideas have come from, whose perspectives they privilege, and how we create the papanoho, the shared ground, where knowledge and action meet.
Evidence from the Johnson Centre for Philanthropy and Firelight Foundation’s work on community-driven systems change supports what many of us have observed locally: that enduring transformation moves at the pace of trust. In their research, funders and community-based organisations took years, not months, to co-design priorities and learn together what meaningful change looked like. The process was intentionally slow, allowing local leadership and reflection to take root. When communities led the conversation — defining what success meant in their own terms — the shifts that followed were both deeper and more sustainable.
The KM4D Journal’s research on participatory systems learning echoes this, showing that change emerges through cycles of shared learning and adaptation rather than linear planning. Their findings highlight that genuine systems transformation depends on the relationships built along the way, on our ability to value different kinds of knowing and to create space where lived experience and professional expertise stand alongside one another.
We are learning that co-authoring systems change feels different. It is slower, often uncomfortable, and rarely clear at the outset. It means learning to sit with uncertainty, to resist the urge to fix, and to focus instead on creating the conditions where communities can act with agency and confidence to shift systems above them and advocate for that change. It asks us to equip, champion, and walk alongside, not to lead from the front, but to support from within.
This kind of work takes time because it rebuilds the relationships and trust that systems have too often eroded. Yet in that time, something powerful happens: communities begin to see themselves as the authors of change, not its subjects. The systems begin to reflect the values, voices, and aspirations of the people they exist to serve. And when we move together, at the pace of trust, the change that follows is sustainable, embedded, and has the potential to be generational.
Links to references: https://johnsoncenter.org/blog/slow-train-coming-taking-time-for-community-driven-systems-change
and https://www.km4djournal.org/index.php/km4dj/article/view/539/647