Attachment 2: A detailed case study
Case study no 1: Several SRAs in a larger size remote community
This larger remote community has signed three SRAs, one for a community facility, one for a small arts complex, and the third a larger and more complex set of services related to health and wellbeing and involving the building of a facility to deliver wellbeing and recreational activities for all young people. The population is in excess of 4,000 people and this includes some outlying areas with very small populations. The SRAs for the community facility and arts complex are complete and the SRA for the well being facility and services is signed and being implemented. This community has several large Indigenous NGOs in the community.
The SRA process for all three SRAs is contentious with some of the NGOs and several non-Indigenous staff working in the NGOs expressing strong concern to the SRA review team that they did not support SRAs. They argued that the community did not fully understand what it was agreeing to in signing them and are opposed to one of the initiatives in particular. Other non-Indigenous staff did support them and at least one of the NGOs had undertaken a survey of adults in the community to see how they felt about SRAs and found a high level of support for the SRAs. Hence this CEO had decided that the organisation must support what the community wanted irrespective of any personal views held by staff. The larger SRA has funding in excess of $3m allocated across seven government agencies - four Australian Government and three state government.
In the case of each SRA, the ICC staff raised the option of using an SRA with the community to address the issues the community wanted to see addressed and the community leaders agreed. The planning and development for the health and wellbeing SRA had involved numerous community meetings and workshops, regular visits of two to three days at a time by at least two Solution Brokers for over a year, and numerous meetings with individuals – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. The ICC Manager and Deputy Manager had led some of the early work in the community and built on their good relationships with the community leaders. The community is now exploring within its members what other SRAs might be possible.
The government commitment was to:
- provide funding
- coordinate their involvement and funding
- work together to make the SRA happen
- work with the community on the SRA
- work on supporting NGOs to work together.
The community was to deliver on:
- providing labour and resources through CDEP
- support for the involvement of young people in a number of ways
- mentoring young people
- develop a number of support strategies for young people
- encouraging NGOs in working together.
Some of the issues raised by non-Indigenous staff with the review team were that:
- the community had originally wanted a much more simple outcome in the form of attracting a particular form of activity into the area and did not want the wider focus or wider recreational activities proposed
- the community did not understand SRAs and had no idea of the concept of shared responsibility
- the funding should have gone to their own agency to do whatever paid staff thought were the issues (several thought this)
- the ICC should not have been talking to young people as that was not part of the culture
- the women were not the leaders and spokespeople and that therefore the ICC should not be talking with them
- there was a very low level of cooperation between the local NGOs and the SRA would not change that.
What the review team heard from around 12 community leaders were that:
- they strongly supported both SRAs and wanted the facilities and the agreed focus for all young people
- they fully understood shared responsibility and had found the SRA process a very good change in being listened to and heard by governments
- the NGOs needed to work better together and the SRA might help that
- the ICC had been very good at listening to young people and to women (from three male Elders) and they wanted their young people in particular to ‘step up’ to being leaders
- it was time for change in the community and they wanted more government agencies to come out and listen to them like the ICC staff had done.
The young people interviewed had strong views about how well or otherwise NGO entities
had listened to them in the past. Several older people interviewed echoed these views.
In this case study the review team was struck by the lack of respect for the views of the community within some of the NGOs; the very poor relationships between NGOs; the lack of awareness of gender issues and of the role of women in the community by some NGO staff; the high level of respect the community had for the work of the ICC staff over the past two years; and the level of optimism this community felt about the future which was significantly attributed to the SRA process. The other issue noted was the frustration, expressed by several male Elders, about the unwillingness of some non-Indigenous staff to respect what the community wanted. One of the Elders in this site visit gave one of the most sophisticated descriptions of shared responsibility agreements the review team heard across every interview, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This same Elder described how the work of the ICC was giving them hope and optimism including how important it was to talk with young people and with the women in the community.
The review team explored the issues raised by the non-Indigenous staff with the ICC and sought some clarification of how they perceived the issues and process, what had been done to build links and ownership, and how they thought these issues might impact on the SRAs into the future. The ICC staff reported spending considerable time with these staff making consistent overtures to them to engage with the process, and having a high level of respect for those staff who did try and engage with the concept and the process irrespective of their personal views. They saw significant challenges ahead for this community and SRAs.
Asked what they would do differently in hindsight in this community, ICC staff said they would probably try and do several SRAs instead of one comprehensive SRA. However the review team is not convinced that this would have worked as well for the community as the current process. The community members see the interconnectedness of the issues for young people between strong families, access to education, recreational opportunities for girls and boys, rehabilitation, health advice and services, and employment. The Elders and other members also see a need for supporting strong Indigenous leadership for the next couple of years to help the community to deal with what they see as tensions between family groups which are not helped by some of the NGO staff involved. Elders in this community (male and female) see SRAs as a chance to build understandings across family and language groups and to making a big difference for young people.
This SRA might benefit from some formal mediation to engage the non-Indigenous NGO staff in getting behind the community and to implementing the SRA in accordance with what the community wants. This mediation could ensure that the NGO staff are fully aware of the community’s views. Most of the NGOs involved attract significant sums of government funding for programs and services. Ironically it is a financially independent NGO which is currently offering the most in-principle support to this SRA process.