ABSTRACT
Children and young people have a unique sense of playful leadership when it comes to community engagement. In Chapter 2, Wendy outlined the rationale for acting like a child to invoke the spirit of spontaneity and play. In this chapter, she talks more about welcoming the spirit of play through evoking the spirit of our inner child in the example of the Aurora Team Development Workshop. As this three-day workshop was a process with land development professionals that pre-dated any engagement with the wider community, Wendy evoked imaginative and playful processes to invite the spirit of children and young people into this initial stage. This playful spirit would help the planners and others to create a new culture for achieving innovative and transformative solutions for this residential development in Melbourne. Invitation
Revisit the justifications for play in professional work explained in Chapter 2 by witnessing Wendy’s practice of welcoming new spaces for ideas, relationships and sustainable site development objectives. Using this example of working with land professionals in a team development workshop, Wendy encourages us to explore the benefits for community engagement of accessing our inner child.
