Good Practice Guide
Purpose & Background
The Good Practice Guide Self Assessment System (GPG) is an evaluation tool for Neighbourhood Houses and Learning Centres (NH&LCs) in Victoria. It assists NH&LCs to evaluate their strengths and identify opportunities for improvement as they strive for organisational excellence.
The GPG is a step by step process that guides you through a thorough investigation of your House or Centre’s governance, management and delivery practices.
The GPG can also be used as a professional development tool for Co-ordinators, Staff and Committees of Governance, and will assist in ensuring the ongoing viability and sustainability of your organisation. For Committees of Governance this tool will assist in ensuring you meet your legal, financial, reporting and employer responsibilities. For Co-ordinators and staff, it will assist in ensuring you have the systems, policies and processes in place for effective management of your house. It is important that committees and staff work jointly with the GPG to ensure there is shared responsibility and accountability for the overall operation of the House.
Neighbourhood Houses Victoria is committed to supporting and improving the quality of programs activity and services within the sector.
To many, the term ‘best practice’ is probably more familiar than ‘good practice’. Best practice generally refers to methods or techniques that have consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means and are used as benchmarks. Best practice is often used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organisations can use. A key difficulty is that there is not a general consensus on what constitutes best practices and ‘best practice’ assumes that it is not possible to go beyond what has been already prescribed. Though based on the same principles and practice and sharing the same aims and objectives, NH&LCs implement community development in different ways to suit their respective communities and citizens. To suggest or impose prescriptive best practices that do not align with specific individual or organisation contexts would be counterproductive. Therefore, this document is about good practice: a term that is less prescriptive than best practice.
Good Practice Guidelines outline broad strategic areas and well regarded practices, thereby allowing choices to be made to best suit specific circumstances and contexts.