Di Winkler's Blog

Indigenous Women's Bush Camp

I recently spent an amazing week as a guest at an indigenous women’s bush camp with the women of four language groups near Fitzroy Crossing. The indigenous women of the Fitzroy valley have an annual bush meeting.  There were over 100 women at the camp.

What I loved about my time at this camp was the opportunity to spend time in an indigenous community and listen to women discuss and describe the issues in their lives and the progress they are making to rebuild their families and communities. I also learnt a lot about community building and addressing issues from a grassroots or bottom up approach which appears to be a more logical and effective way of resolving issues related to social injustice.

These women know a lot about community building to address community health issues.  I first met June Oscar and Emily Carter through a film produced by some friends called ‘Yajilarra’.  Yajilarra tells the story of June, Emily and the other women of Fitzroy Crossing who lobbied to restrict the take-away alcohol sold at Fitzroy Crossing.  These women were sick of children, women and older people feeling unsafe in their community. They successfully lobbied so that take away full strength alcohol is no longer sold in their community. This has made a dramatic difference to a whole range of local health issues e.g. less alcohol hospital admissions, dramatic reduction of violence etc. Full strength alcohol is still available within the pub and light beer is available for take-away.

Indigenous communities are losing their culture through grog – they become disconnected with their land, their culture and their family. Substance abuse sometimes means that children and young people do not have the brain function to be able to carry their family’s stories or be leaders in their communities. Programs to address this try to bring young people back to their culture and work with them on other skills such as parenting. One initiative involves a mobile playgroup which includes indigenous songs, stories and looking for bush tucker.

When women thrive all of the community thrives – this is also evident in many developing countries where it is usually the women who make the most of Micro Enterprise Lending opportunities and start their own business so that they can feed and educate their children.

I came away inspired by what a group of women are working together to achieve for their children, their family and their communities. Part of me is also jealous of their strong sense of belonging and connection to extended family and the land. Many of the grandmothers at the camp had little choice but to be the primary carer for their grandchildren because some parents are either not alive or not able to care for their children because of issues related to substance abuse. However, I also got a glimpse of how an indigenous community may have functioned before the scourge of alcohol abuse, with a whole range of relatives providing care for each child e.g. ‘it takes a community to raise a child’. In western culture we tend to be a little isolated in our nuclear families. Indigenous women and communities have a range of strengths that they can use to make a significant difference and rebuild their communities.

I look forward to watching the progress of the women at Fitzroy Crossing, they have a whole range of health, education and economic challenges but they have identified their priorities, are getting organised and working together to create a future for their children and their communities. It is exciting to watch and hopefully will become a model that inspires other indigenous communities to develop a similar approach to their specific issues and challenges.

Here are some of the things that I took away from the 5 days at the camp that I think are also relevant to the marginalised people that we work with - young people in nursing homes and their families.

The first step to resolving a social justice issue and empowering people is to listen to the people at the grassroots and ask:

What are the issues that are real at the moment?
What can we do to support you with the issues that matter to you?

The voices of marginalised people matter and they will be heard.

The people in a marginalised community have the answers to the issues that concern them.

We need to build coalitions to work together – that’s when change happens.

Mission Driven Governance

I have just read an interesting article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, which talks about mission driven governance. Given that the Summer Foundation is less than four years old, we are still working out our board culture and trying to find a balance between a ‘command and control’ focus and looking at ‘performance and impact’. I found this article really useful in the way it articulates the need to balance the legal aspects of governance with the behavioural elements to be a very effective board.

Following is a summary of the key points made in the article:

The prevailing governance model is fundamentally adversarial, pitting board members in a never-ending struggle with executives. This model may ensure that the legal requirements of oversight and compliance are met, but does little to advance the organisations goals. An alternate and more effective framework is one where board members and executives work together to advance the organisation’s mission. The inability of boards of directors and non-profit executives to keep their organisations focused on clearly articulated mission is a significant and overlooked governance problem. 

Legal perspective 

An adversarial model emphasises that the board’s function, as overseers of the organisation, with a focus on making sure that bad things don’t happen. This often results in a boardroom dynamic that looks something like “Let’s look for what is wrong with proposal x”. Accountability and oversight are absolutely necessary in achieving and maintaining public trust and the organisation’s legitimacy, and therefore are necessary elements of good governance. But there are many examples where governance structures that were adequate from a legal perspective still produced bad outcomes. In fact, it is not unusual to observe the simultaneous presence of poor governance and legally adequate accountability. 

Behavioural perspective 

An alternative focus encourages boards to make sure that good things happen. From the behavioural perspective, the goal of governance is organisational success as defined by the organisations mission (not accountability) and it is preoccupied with performance (not structures and controls). To produce good outcomes people have to work together, taking advantage of individual strengths. Consequently, the ideal relationship is based on trust, not rules. The primary role of the board is not oversight, which often creates a climate of conservatism and risk aversion; it is a group decision making that is robust and open to opportunities. The behavioural perspective often manifests itself in a cooperative dynamic that looks something like this “If proposal x will make us better, lets figure out a way to do it.” The legal perspective focuses on control. The behavioural component focuses on performance. 

The key to improving corporate governance is to incorporate both approaches into a single framework. The legal and behavioural perspectives exist in tension, which help explain the conflicted feelings board members and executive members bring into the boardroom. These tensions can’t be eliminated – they are an inherent part of organisational life – but if both perspectives are embraced, the tensions can be made more productive. 

	Legal perspective	Behavioural perspective
Goal	Accountability	Success
Preoccupation	Structures and controls	Performance
Means	Relationship based on rules	Relationship based on trust
Primary activity	Oversight	Group decision making

Summary from article by Fisman, Khurana & Martenson in the Stanford Social Innovation Review; Summer 2009; 7,3; pp 36-43

Construction of New Service in the ACT

The ACT government announced yesterday that work has begun on a new home for four disabled people under 65 who are living in Canberra nursing homes.  The development of this service is part of the COAG $244 million Young People in Residential Aged Care program. As part of this initiative $6 million will be spent on the Young People in Aged Care program in the ACT. The house has been jointly funded by the ACT and Federal Governments. There are currently 17 disabled people under 65 in the ACT aged care facilities. 

Disability Services Minister John Hargreaves is quoted:

"Now we have this facility though, we can move forward into the future and construct more as we go down the track and therefore it will give people the opportunity of choice."

What is really interesting about this quote is that the ACT government is making an ongoing commitment to this target group and building the capacity of the disability sector in the ACT to met future demand.  This is in contrast with other jurisdictions that seem to see this as a once off initiative that will create alternatives to the current cohort of younger people in aged care but do not appear to be committed to developing services to meet future demand.  This statement also reflects the fact that the ACT government have been actively involved in creating alternatives to young people living in nursing homes for many years.

ABC News article

Media release