Kimberley Aboriginal Women’s Council: Rise & Shine
21/11/2024
Overview/summary
At the November 2023 Kimberley Aboriginal Women’s Leadership Roundtable, over 100 First Nations women and girls from across the Kimberley gathered as volunteers to discuss critical projects and programs for people in their region to achieve self-determination and gender justice. The women identified and discussed that one of the priority areas for the next 10 years is to support young girls to grow and glow. They agreed to trial this through developing and running a program where First Nations women from across the Kimberely volunteer their time and wisdom to support and nourish girls from childhood to womanhood. The idea for Rise & Shine began to take form.
The situation/problem being solved
The Kimberley Aboriginal Women’s Council stated that “Our women and girls are strong and resilient, and have much to give to our people and communities. However, currently there are significant barriers to our people participating in structured volunteering programs. For example, volunteering often doesn't take into account the way that our communities interact and engage, and our cultural and kinship obligations, meaning volunteering doesn’t work for us and can be culturally unsafe.”
Strategy
On the back of the work conducted in November, 2023, the KAWC has designed five phases of program development that will lead to the full scale launch of the Rise & Shine program:
Phase 1: Roundtable & Initial Volunteer Mentoring Strategy Design (completed)
Phase 2: Community Consultation & Co-Design Workshops
Phase 3: Stakeholder Mapping & Development, and Program Design
Phase 4: Initial Pilot Launch
Phase 5: Formal Program Launch & Scaling Goals
Outcome
The excerpt below summarises the shared voices of the Kimberley Aboriginal Women’s Council as they discussed the importance of deep listening to support their young women.
"We acknowledge that it takes a village to raise a child.
We want to formalise our voluntary commitment to support our girls to grow and glow by providing mentoring support, role-models, and establishing pathways for our girls to rise and shine.
We want to treat young women and girls as individuals and show genuine care for them. We will build holistic, wrap-around support for young women. We will ask them about what they want, and we engage in deep listening, and act as role models for young women.
We will teach history, cultural stories, and kinship systems, and take young women and girls on Country. We will connect young women and girls through camps, with other young women and girls with Elders. We will engage in storytelling and yarning.
We will use our local knowledge to connect with young women. We will help out, lend an ear, and take time to listen. We will reach out to the young women and girls in our lives, our sisters, daughters, and nieces.
We will build public and visible pathways for young women and girls to connect with other young and older women and girls in their communities and across our state and nation.
We will support mothers and kinship carers and create a village for mothers and caregivers where they can reach out to us for support. We will talk about parenting, and the cultural impact of western-style parenting, and what cultural parenting for us looks like.
To do this we will create a program and call it Rise & Shine. We commit to prioritising the Rise & Shine program as one of our first programs of support that will be launched by the KAWC.
We commit to supporting this program through acting as voluntary mentors, spreading the word, working to co-design content and all other support required to achieve this aim.
Our girls are our future, and it takes a village to raise a child. We will take responsibility and make sure that our village is strong, supportive and ready to make sure our girls have what they need to grow into powerful and empowered women, mothers and sisters."
Key learnings
Volunteering is not a term First Nations communities often use to describe how they work.
Janine Dureau, CEO of the Kimberley Aboriginal Women’s Council said “In contrast with western communities, we often have extended familial and cultural commitments and expectations and already informally contribute significant time and resources to look after our families and communities. Not only do we have a duty to our people, but we have responsibilities to place, culture, and land. This, alongside the impacts of colonisation including significant intergenerational trauma, block our ability to self-design and create structured volunteer opportunities for our Aboriginal women and girls in the Kimberley.”
The Volunteer Management Activity Project Grants are funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services.
