New briefing paper | Processes to enable community-led, systemic and collaborative change
Published on the 19 March 2024
Processes to enable community-led, systemic and collaborative change is a new Yuwaya Ngarra-li Briefing Paper by May Miller-Dawkins, Wendy Spencer and Ruth McCausland. It examines some core questions around the work of the YN partnership.
The Yuwaya Ngarra-li Partnership at its core is about doing things differently, and is guided by the following questions:
- What would it look like for a university to partner with an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation (ACCO) in a way that is truly community-led? • What does it look like for a place-based and community-led initiative to influence thinking, policies and practices far beyond its own geography?
- How can we ground and grow our collaboration through embedding key values and principles?
- What does it mean to respect Indigenous sovereignty in how we research, learn and evaluate?
These questions draw us to how we do our work, not only what we do. This orientation has required the Yuwaya Ngarra-li team to invest in and experiment with a range of processes and practices to centre community leadership, catalyse systemic influence, and enable ongoing learning and adaptation.
This paper details the core practices that Yuwaya Ngarra-li has adopted, developed or tested since 2018. Some of these were already practices of Dharriwaa Elders Group (DEG), some have emerged from the work, and others were introduced and supported through Yuwaya Ngarra-li's work with advisors, in particular May Miller-Dawkins.