Deep Experience learning community

These communities bring together people from different organisations with deep experience around a specific area of social enterprise activity or challenge. They have an intention to learn together, solve problems related to the focus area and develop practices to share widely. They may be open to growing numbers of participants, or they may have specific criteria and limited numbers of participants depending on their purpose and capacity.

Key attributes of Deep Experience learning communities are that they:

-Focus on a specific area of shared inquiry and relevance to the social enterprise sector.

-Leverage wisdom across diverse individuals, organisations, and roles with expertise in the focus area.

-Build trust among participants to enable free exchange of information and knowledge.

-Facilitate interactions that enable members to gain learning from the group and contribute to the group’s learning in the focus area.

-Have an identified coordinator (or co-coordinators) and processes to support regular communication, interaction, and learning.

-Convene regular meetings (online) and pursue activities between meetings that create learning value.

-Develop agreed terms of reference and ways of working.

-Develop and share knowledge and practice resources with the sector to advance the area of practice (eg. guidance, tools, and strategies).

-Provide thought leadership, insights, and advice to inform development of a collective and strategic voice on the topic.

-Monitor how active, responsive, and valuable the community is to participants.