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5.1 Collaboration within regions
Jawun became a reason for people to get
together and collaborate, to talk about
capability and capacity and to share their
organisations’ ideas.
—SEAN GORDON,
CEO, DARKINJUNG LOCAL ABORIGINAL
LAND COUNCIL
An existing level of collaboration is a key entry
criterion for Jawun in a region, but also something a
Jawun partnership seeks to strengthen. Many regions
that Jawun supports describe how collaboration
existed but in a limited sense—on an ‘as-needed basis’
as one partner put it, or just for NAIDOC week and
similar events. Often this is because organisations are
simply ‘too busy doing’, and the Jawun model aims to
unlock the untapped potential of collaboration.
Once Jawun has formally partnered with a region, an
advisory group of Indigenous leaders is established.
They help shape and steer a collaborative Indigenous-
led development agenda across organisations.
Living and working ‘in place’, a Jawun regional
director supports the group and organisations
individually. This may be across vast distances: in NPY
Lands for example, Mark Jackman, general manager of
the Regional Anangu Services Aboriginal Corporation,
says the Jawun regional director role is crucial:
Our region is spread across three states covering
350,000 square kilometres of the most remote
parts of Australia. Our Regional Director
Fran Whitty is forced to operate within and
navigate this. She understands the Aboriginal
organisations in our region—our diversity, our
goals and our challenges. Without her support,
the Jawun program wouldn’t be the success it is,
and wouldn’t be a true partnership.
A Jawun regional director helps connect
organisations together and into wider networks.
Belinda Russon, CEO of Tranby National Indigenous
Adult Education and Training in Inner Sydney explains:
What the Jawun regional director did brilliantly
was community networking—he knows everyone,
and everyone knows him, and we were able to
draw on that to bring Tranby actively into the
reform conversation.
5.2 Collaboration across regions
Individual organisations aren’t going to
make the necessary impact; it is going
to take a united approach. It is going
to take all those communities coming
together strategically. Coming together
and supporting a shared vision of what
we want to achieve.
—SEAN GORDON,
CEO, DARKINJUNG LOCAL ABORIGINAL
LAND COUNCIL
Collaboration between Indigenous leaders from
different regions can be a vital source of inspiration,
support and connections. It is also central to ideas
of Indigenous empowerment that depart from a
historical context where dysfunction thrived on
division and disunity.
Jawun facilitates executive visits as a chance for
Indigenous leaders to develop their networks or
business opportunities through exposure to senior
corporate, government and philanthropic executives,
around 650 of whom have been on 53 visits to date.
Each visit sees a group of executives travel for several
days across a region supported by Jawun, to meet
Indigenous leaders and see first-hand the reform
agendas, initiatives and enterprises they are driving.
For Indigenous leaders, Jawun Executive Visits
are an important opportunity to gain first-hand
exposure to leaders and initiatives in other regions.
To date, 35 Indigenous leaders have taken part
in executive visits to nine regions supported by
Jawun. They typically speak of the new ideas, new
connections, and welcome sense of solidarity created
by executive visits.
62 JAWUN
2017 LEARNINGS AND INSIGHTS