 Before we proceed any further, I like to acknowledge the traditional owners on the land where we are beaming in from. In particular I like to acknowledge our elders past and present and emerging and I'm talking from Wajak Nunganah Buja which is based in Perth. Firstly I would like to hand over to Sharon and Donna who's the co-presenters to introduce themselves and Lee who will be gathering questions and comments and who will be facilitating a short Q&A at the end of the presentation. So welcome aboard and over to you Sharon. Hi everyone, thanks for joining. I'm Sharon, I'm a non-indigenous working, a non-indigenous woman and it's my great pleasure to work in a First Nations organisation and alongside colleagues like Doyin and our First Nations Research and Evaluation Fellow Donna. I'm living and working on Ngunnawal in the Nambri country and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. Over to you Donna. Thank you, thanks Sharon and Doyin. My name is Donna Stevens. I'm a Moran woman from the northwest of Arnhem land. My language group is Iwaja. I'm actually on Arndaland today and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and other First Nations people who are joining our meeting today. Thank you so much for being with us. Leah, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I will. Hi, my name's Leah Gage. I'm a senior researcher for Community First Development. I'm really happy to be here and it's so good to see so many faces. I'm a Pahlua woman from Tasmania and as Doyin said, I'll be relating the Q&A at the end of our session today. Thanks Leah and I'll just a quick shout out to everyone if you're not presenting, if you wouldn't mind turning your mics off. Doyin, I'll just bring up the slides for you. Okay, before we get into the research with the 11 communities that we work with, some of you may be familiar with Community First Development and some may be new to the organisation. I'll provide a quick overview before we dive into the research and practice and findings of our recent pedestrian action research project. Community First Development, as people know, we're a First Nations national community development research organisation and our vision is to see First Nations people and communities thrive and that's very important. We promote skills, talents and culture strength of our people and facilitate activities that lead to positive change for our communities and the approach that we take, we actively listen and we share our learnings. We also take the time to understand the community's challenges and vision and build on local strength knowledge and resources and work with communities to match school volunteers to the activities designed and driven by communities. We also acknowledge that we work at the community's pace when we develop in these projects so that's very important. We don't just go on with our own agenda, we work at the community's pace and that's very, very important when you're working in the community development space and research area and from the very beginning we embed with the community the monitoring and evaluation of our activities with the communities with volunteer input and participation. You can move over to the next slide. Okay, now this is the model that we work to, it's our community development framework, it's very important. We've only just released it on our website last week and we're we're going to talk further on another webinar about our framework and how it all works so this is the key to our success and how we work with communities. So it is a practical well documented approach that has potential to apply to a range of co-designing collaborative settings with First Nations people. We invest a lot of time in the first two stages and building understanding. It's very important to build the understanding and the key thing is relationships. Relationships are very important. We just don't jump in and start building. A lot of ground work is laid out first before we start working with communities and that key fundamental is is is developing those relationships and building that trust. When we work this way over time we are building trust and that's key trust and building relationship with community members is very important. This is critical to the way that we work and if we work with First Nations people it's a key fundamental. It's building that trust and relationship with communities but also understanding understanding what the community needs are. So here are a couple of quotes have taken from our research report where the community has explained to you how we work and partner with them on community development activities. The next section we've got a short video of our team and community members we have worked with and talking about our approach and ensuring that self-determinations at the core of the business that we work with in the way that we engage and work with communities. Everything we do is based on people's self-determination. It really is it's about being able to be decision makers for your own life. One of the reasons why I work with community first development is to get back what we lost over time to get our self-determination our pride our thoughts and to be first people as we were 200 years ago. I think it's like that they understand self-determination that their specialist professionals have had a lot of training in culture and how to work with Aboriginal community members that they don't actually dominate the conversation that they let us tell them what we need and they come along for the ride so they bring their expertise into it but they very much let us determine how a project should go. I think there's an expectation or an idea of what it is to be an Aboriginal person and we're very self-determining and we want people to know our individual stories and I think you just have to go in with an open mind and just to listen. The organisation that we have community first development understands what's needed and we don't impose anything so they don't feel like they're doing things to people and they understand the values of the organisation it really is about nothing about us without us you know it really has to be driven from community. Okay self-determination is very important and and and how we work with communities it's that the forefront of how we work. We're a national organisation and our community development team members are based in six locations over the past 20 years we engaged with over 800 communities and completed 5 000 community development projects. In 2019 to 20 we engaged with 159 communities across Australia on 209 community development activities so it keeps our work keeps us pretty busy and there's a high demand out there in the communities in the work that we do. And part of our and as part of our monitoring and evaluation journey as a not-for-profit we have an ongoing focus to strengthen our monitoring and evaluation capabilities. We kick off with a monitoring and evaluation and learning review in 2014 to 2017 and more recently we focus our learning through this three-year pedestrian action learning project with 11 communities. We'll be sharing what we learned in this research project about governance throughout this presentation. So just just to talk a little bit more about community first development we were actually a learning organisation so the key fundamental is that we learn as we go to improve how we work with communities and to catch the information how we work with communities and the data and information. The next slide is about our story of change. The story of change is the theory we work to so in our theory of change governance is one of the building blocks in the poor communities to be able to achieve that long-term future dreams. So the research project tested this theory to learn more about the different forms of governance and governance practice. We dramatically changed the story of change as part of a research project and it was originally a linear approach a more traditional formal project logic. Our team challenged this approach and as it did not show the interconnected nature of how we work and so we redesigned our approach so it's more organic like an ecosystem. Nothing's ever in a straight line we found and there's something that challenged us over the over the last three to four years and this is this is our story of change. The next I will hand you over to Sharon to talk further about the activities that we're going to be talking in this seminar. Thanks, Doyen. It was good fun redesigning this story of change. It was really something else. Hopefully we get a chance to talk a bit more about that at the end when we're taking a few more questions but do keep firing your questions off. As we move through I think they are sitting there ready to collate them all and we're hoping to have a bit of time to talk again and I think Donna's got a few reflection points throughout the presentation as well where you can engage with us because I know we often feel like we're just sitting here talking at a screen all day or particularly in a webinar just to be listening but yeah there is an opportunity to engage throughout if I keep the questions coming. So picking up where Doyen left off from about governance this is a snapshot of the types of projects communities have been requesting over the past years the past five years four years as you can see there's been a growing interest in projects that lead to stronger governance. This is one of the reasons that we decided to focus the recent research project on gaining a better understanding of governance with 11 of the communities we were partnering with. When we started the research project all of the 11 communities had an existing relationship with us so we were already working with them on community development projects at the time the research project started. So the communities are spread across urban regional and remote locations and we've been partnering we had been partnering with half of the communities for three years or more at the time the research project started. We were really stoked when 11 communities wanted to partner with us on this research we didn't even know when we started if there would be an interest or an appetite for this work but there was. After phase one one of the big discoveries was yes there's common knowledge that there are two forms of governance in operation in the communities but there was confusion around the term governance. For us this would felt like a bit of a what we call a fail forward moment. We felt that some of the methods we'd used had really stifled the conversation that we were having with communities and as a result we'd not learnt much about the First Nations governance systems in the communities and the discussion around western governance had really dominated the conversation. In phase one we'd jointly completed a written matrix with communities on governance and we'd also taken a formal approach to our research using a semi-structured interview. So we mixed things up for phase two after our fail forward we adapted and we applied what we'd learnt so this involved returning to what we were more familiar with here at community first development and that was organic and rich conversations. We framed this by creating a yarning tool which had some visual prompts and questions and the questions also had short explanations on what each question was about or what it was getting at. This yielded much richer conversations particularly using the visual prompts were really helpful. We also tried different approaches to court co-authoring case studies throughout the project. Towards the end of the project we think we had a more engaging way of interacting with communities using prompt questions and informal conversations together with staff where appropriate. This is something we're still learning about but it really was through a research yarning approach that we really started to unearth some of the challenges that occur in that interacting space between First Nations and Western Governance and I think Donna is going to talk a little bit more about that now. Oh your mute's on. There we go thanks thanks Sharon and Doyin. So as Sharon and Doyin suggested the community first development staff were exploring governance with organizations and there were different ways the term governance was framed by organizations and the people working in them. It was a really layered space that organizations were working in and in particular how governance was discussed and I guess one illustration which is up on the screen at the moment of why or how this occurs can be taken from the work completed by Aboriginal researchers at Yundamu together with Dr Lisa Watts in 2017 and this work was a part of a whole of community research on education pathways and as a part of looking at education pathways they explored some of the roles and responsibilities that people in community had. So Yundamu is a medium-sized remote community in Central Australia with around about 800 to a thousand people at the time of the research in 2017. The community had a strong record of community achievements which is sometimes lost in media. They also had quite a number of community focus boards and organizations around about 14 key different boards and organizations within their community which addressed areas from aged care to education to health and media. So the slide we're looking at here was produced as a part of their work and it shows the network of activities and the boards in the community which was around 16 at the time. In this community 12 to 14 percent of the community people were actually involved in these boards and many of them were on two or more boards and one person was on 17 different boards one being external to the community. The boards themselves varied in size from three to 25 members and while I mentioned that most had at least that most of the people who were on boards were on at least two boards some people around about 19 were on three or more boards and five people were on five or more boards. So out of the 118 people involved none were in leadership or management roles and most were in low-level jobs and most of the board members were actually volunteering their time and were in unpaid positions. So I guess this comes back to as the Walgreens researchers noted in their report the contrast between the board level responsibilities and the employment level is stark but it also I suppose tells us a little bit around Aboriginal communities and the complexity of the term governance and how they engage in governance within their communities. So we're just going to stop there I suppose and just see if there's any questions or reflections so far and I know we've got a few questions there Lee. Okay so one of the questions I mean it's great we're getting quite a few questions and they're really good questions as well like they really get you thinking. Just to go back a little bit could one of the panel please have a bit of a talk about how the story of change was developed I think that's quite important there's a few I think that would be quite interesting just the process or what made the organisation develop that yeah. Yeah I really enjoy this story I'll jump into it and then I'll throw it at you if that's okay because I'll own my fail forward as a non-indigenous person I put together a quite a basic program logic that served a purpose for us to start our I guess monitoring and evaluation structure and you know I got feedback straight away it's not right it's not right and we needed to work with it to structure some things to start with and so it was really really fantastic as part of this research project where we had a little bit of luxury of time to build it into looking at governance so we were looking at governance and originally in the program logic governance was quite if you were looking at inputs outputs outcomes I think governance was down the bottom somewhere wasn't it doing which acknowledged that it was really significant in our model but it still wasn't quite right so that's when I had feedback it needs to be circular it needs to be interconnected and as a non-indigenous person I'll say I struggled with that I was saying what does that mean explain to me what does that mean so we had a lot of yarns around this and really it started by sketching it as a circle and truly it was really funny for me because as soon as I put a circle it just started playing with it everyone jumped in but before that it was like oh what's that what's that ugly thing so look I think fail forward is important because without that we wouldn't have had those discussions I could have just dug my heels in and said look no this is what we're having and then yeah Doyne and then Donna chimed in as well so do you want to pick up from there you two on our ecosystem approach yeah um I'll talk because I I knew it wasn't living here because of the challenges communities face and there was more organic and I think donna come up with the ecosystem design approach and which fitted the purpose because just because a plus b plus c equals d that wasn't necessarily the approach the challenges based in communities could be so much different and it didn't always work out that way and I knew that wasn't I knew that wasn't the case and the circular approach was kind of always been the thinking around well it's more circular and it's more interconnected but the organic the organic and ecosystem was um was um Donna discussed that with Sharon and and that's how we just that's how it was come up with and I'll let Donna talk a little bit more about that um thanks Doyne I think um one of the things that we really talked about and what struck me um about the work that community first development does um is the relationships and um I think we were having a conversation at an AES conference or something around this and it really did come back to the relationships and so that fitted really nicely with um the way that community first development um works because you know as Doyne pointed out before um the relationships and going in and actually building those relationships first um and then the second part it comes from a strengths model because um I guess you know when we're thinking around um how ecosystems work one part um you know if one part isn't working well it does actually affect all the other parts and so I think our conversations really um you know centered around some of that around um when communities are are working when they're thriving those different parts of the community are building on their strengths and and how do we show that in a in a you know two-dimensional model yeah awesome thank you do you guys have time for one more question before we move on or do you just want to move on yeah I think we've got one time for one more okay um I'm sort of there's one question here around um which I think is quite a it's a good question because I know lots of people would be wondering is that when we have um First Nation communities involved and participating in the projects and plus the research one of the questions was is that do they get paid for their expertise but I think it's also important to talk about the relationship with the First Nation communities that community first development has as well if you guys can share about that as you know or how that works that process works and how the engagement happens yeah I think um we're in a position where we go in by invitation from the community so we just don't go in and come in with our own agenda we actually get invited in the community so we're welcome in to support what we do and that makes our work a lot more easier in in a sense of of um the community wants us there it's not we come in and and stamp our foot and say this is the way you do it we're actually invited by the community so the community actually wants us in there so it makes our work a lot easier and and building that relationship and everything it's all part of and trust it's all part of that um next step in in developing activities or projects but I'll let Sharon talk a little bit further uh yeah picking up where Doyle and left off I guess monitoring and evaluation has been important for us for quite some time now and we've really done a lot of investment into monitoring and evaluation so doing the research was was quite new to us and so we went through the IATSES um ethical research committee and um did the process for that and I guess as part of that we were challenged to think about the what are the benefits to community for the research so we we landed back where what Doyle and said you know community development projects is the core the core benefit and their projects that have been requested by communities um so that's the key benefit but then we're also hoping that you know obviously inviting communities to opt in so it was their choice to to be part of the research and in that we're hoping they saw some benefit for them um one of those was the case studies that we were hoping would be able to be used for um say funding applications or partnership development or general communications and marketing um so the short answer is no we didn't um pay communities for their expertise but I would highly recommend that as an approach um in I guess that it is suitable and would be a great thing to do in other contexts but for us using this participatory action research approach it was able to be embedded into a project or program that communities hadn't requested and we hope was was intended to benefit communities and with that community request so that's a long answer for a short for a short response really which is no we didn't um going Donna did you have anything to add to that um well I think we possibly will talk about that in the next couple of slides but um I do think that uh the approach that community first development took um throughout the whole process was actually um a side-by-side model and one of the things that kind of came through from the um from the data was that um in the busyness of of governance of running communities of everyday kind of work that um there isn't always time for people within the organizations to stop and reflect and think around what we're doing and how we're doing it and what impact is that happening what what impact is that having on our organization and on our community and um and I think that you know if if payments can be in many different ways and so the space that community first development created in actually working with those people who wanted to work with them on this project it was an opportunity the payback was that space and time to really reflect and talk about governance for themselves and I think that there was there was probably quite a number of um learnings that happened um through that process um particularly you know going back and writing the case studies and that sort of work that community first development did. Thank you um I think we can move on now that would be awesome. Oh you're still on mute. I guess the next slide um really talks a little bit about some of these insights um that the research findings from the community first development action research project found and you know that as Sharon and Doyne have said early analysis and some of our early underlying assumptions suggested that um the community first development uh partner communities um that uh two-way governance um could be one way to describe the governance in their communities um and you know this is the picture that we've got here this this bridging governance was our early understanding um but in actual fact the the two-way governance required um quite a bit of quite a bit of work and um is there another another bit to that Sharon is there a click on that on this bridging governance one yeah okay lovely um so the two yeah the two-way governance really really required required um navigation um it required navigation of people terms language reporting um both within their communities and with external organization and funders um this early kind of understanding of governance required negotiation of timeframes of outcomes of expectations and people um and it it really came from the necessity it comes from necessity um to achieve the social economic health and community develop outcomes that um all of these communities are wanting and uh what we did was we really unpacked this through um this underlying assumption of bridging governance and in this space communities were doing a lot of the heavy lifting um that two-way governance was really an assumption that needed to be challenged and one that suggested a current different model of working which um Sharon's possibly um and so here are a couple of the uh interviews um snips that we got from some of the community members that actually suggested um you know that this two-way governance model um really needed to be challenged and some of the assumptions around it um needed to be explored and if we just move on to the next one so we kind of went back and proposed a different model of governance one that um looks a little bit more like this um so what was initially thought of as bridging governance the model from community first data suggests that this is a more model a more current um uh illustration there is no bridge into the third and intersecting space only expectations and rules to be negotiated and navigated participating communities in the action research are seeking a more balanced model one that particularly recognises the need for deep listening for adaptation it is place-based and it respects the cultural knowledge and practice um of each of the communities and so we want to move from this model which is kind of where we're at at the moment to one that we call right-way governance so right-way governance provides an opportunities for communities to explore and strengthen community governance and um we did actually put in a research application and unfortunately weren't able to get the funding so that we could really explore this right-way governance a little bit more and um we had three communities who who really wanted to work with us um and unfortunately we we couldn't get the funding it's not that the work is not going to continue though um so what does right-way governance do right-way governance holds accountable um the western governance and that previously assumed bridging governance model and it asks the western governance this uh to listen deeply and to give time to listen deeply it asks for a bottom-up approach built on mutual trust mutual respect and community ownership um it values uh community ownership and within that it values the monitoring and evaluation from community that has community let outcomes and measures of success uh right-way governance understands the role of community ownership and delegated authority and um we will stop again here um just on the next slide to have a have a picture or have an opportunity for you as an audience to think about this process of right-way governance and how it how it might be enacted I suppose within your own research and evaluation models that you work from and if anybody's got any questions you know we're going to have a little moment here to have a chat yeah there's a um there's a couple of questions once actually on the research itself is um would you be able to sort of share a little bit more um you briefly talked around applying for funding for the research would you like can you share a little bit more around the effects of the actual research project and what that looks like and how that happened yes so yeah it took us through quite a journey uh didn't it Doyen so we thought we had a really good idea cooked up and then then we went through the research and ethics committee process and that was a huge learning curve for us as a organization we got some really great feedback I mean we I would call us a values driven organization so the ethics in this organization continued to astound me from the top to the bottom and back again um at every level and so as someone that's I guess working with the community development team to design monitoring and evaluation approaches and all the rest I'm always encountering values and going well but does that align with our values and you know is it by community request is it community driven is it top top down um is it providing the flexibility we need so the research and ethics committee I guess we went into it with a an assumed knowledge oh they should get all that but no we really had to document and evidence how we were doing those things and so that took time and it took patience especially because we were learning along the way so thank you to our access as we the ethics committee as we did our learning with them um and I guess for us as I mentioned one of the things was uh discovering through that process how to think about how the research would benefit communities so um that was really valuable so I would recommend the process I think um it was tricky and that I think in some ways so back to I recommend it I think it is really helpful it was a fantastic process one of the challenges was actually I think we tried to be something we weren't um we found ourselves getting caught caught up in all sort of sorts of technicalities that tripped us up in the first phase um so I think we learned a few things in that about just being true to what we know works in in our model and not letting that I guess stifle the amazing work that our CD team is already doing I don't know Doen did you have anything to add to that um yeah just with the ethics it was yeah I knew it was very challenging um I don't know whether I'm answering this right um it was very challenging and and a little and part of the process of all the way through that we had to learn and adapt our thinking all the way through the research project so we discovered a lot of things which now we we have adapted in our community development practice but also in capturing um and monitoring projects and thinking differently so um and we done that through a lot of uh challenge ourselves through reflective thinking going back rethinking stuff um and even even the just even going back to that story of change you know that that challenged us in how we adapt this model it's about adapting and and improving the way that you do work when you're working with First Nations community don't assume that your way of thinking is the right approach sometimes you got to adapt and and bid in with the current environment when you're working with First Nations community and that's the challenging environment that don't you gave me wrong because there's a lot of barriers impacting on communities we work with even even just um you know we want people to thrive and grow and there's challenges and we've got to think outside the square and be solution focused and and I suppose a part of this research project is that we had to rethink a lot of stuff so I hope that catches what you're talking about um do you have time for one more question or would you like to move it along I look I'm looking ahead at the slides and thinking I don't want Doyne to um miss out on important storytelling time so I think we move along I'm looking at the next slide and getting a bit excited about this story over to you Doyne okay I suppose when you're looking at a pathway to right-wing governments governance is that one of the ways that First Nations organisation bridge into the third space is through a delegated authority and there's a number of reasons for that one of them is precious put on boards and and and people are spread out there's a lot of demands put on community organisation for instance a place like Jigalong they had something like 80 odd agencies going through there through what in just one year only so sometimes to bridge into that third space what a lot of communities do is use a delegated authorities and and a delegated of authorities are individuals that have highly developed schools in brokering partnership sourcing funding and also navigating through that western governance system um they're being delegated authority by the elders or those in authority in the community um to act on their behalf and there's a and it is very important responsibility that comes with this role and it's an expectations undertaken you know you've got to do things the right way and we are calling it this the right way governance the key component of their roles is soliciting and engaging with the wider community and also facilitate and understanding community consensus that's very important and understanding the defined goals and navigating pathways through the western governance to treat us um all while shielding and maintaining the community's cultural values practice and meeting also making cultural obligations um it's the delegated authorities and connect through their community through western governance um through a legal entity or other structures um for here we had um here's a picture of um Thomas Cameron now we've worked with him for seven years to get back uh Littlewell um Littlewell Reserve which is on the border of Eminyu and WA it's a former reserve and many of the former residents um were part of the stolen generation and they were spread out um and the Littlewell working group nominated uh Thomas to become their delegated of authority and part of his role was to not only talk to the community but also operate in that third space and part of that was developing a MOU with the Shire or many you to protect um to protect and put an interpreted trail on the Littlewell reserve it was very emotional time for them for the Littlewell mob um seven years work and part of that seven-year journey though they were awarded the NAIDOC 2009 in Care and For Country Award um it was a very emotional time as but also part of that journey was healing but Thomas lived out of a suitcase traveling many miles to make sure that he was engaging with his own mob and telling and getting their feedback um of what they wanted on the reserve and also as part of that they become the spokesman or delegated authority and not only enough it's um out of the 11 communities who work but this is the only um organization that wasn't a um incorporated body but they were still able to achieve that by um finding other ways or solutions to get back Littlewell so at the moment Littlewell is preserved for future generations um and that's that short story of a delegated authority and importance of them um stepping into the into that third space to to to benefit the broader community to step up to the mark um the next slide I hope I catch that right um the next slide is um is is um this is Devin Kumara um bending over with his son talking to Uncle Colin Peterson and this is a slightly different model they have a council of elders and he was delegated been given a delegated authority by the senior elders in the community and that was to start working towards developing Aboriginal males healing center he too like um Thomas stepped into that third space because of many of their um elders Martin, Yverley, elders um talking with government was um foreign to them and and Devin's role was to step step into that third space but also ensuring that the cultural values of of of what the old people one of the elders one of were incorporated in into that incorporated in their plan and their plan for the future so and doing the things the right way was was really great this is Colin showing um Devin on country um and telling him about the cultural value of the land and looking at stone artifacts and telling these stories and more importantly Devin has a cultural obligation um to those old people to ensure that he does things the right way and right way governance so um anyway um I'll look over to the next slide um we studied our approach and comments from the communities come up with this definition right way governance and practice um right way governance are actions approaches and behavior undertaken to empower people to meet community expectation right way is a familiar term used um across many indigenous communities and implied in different um different situation importantly right way governance are for everyone interacting in or with communities so right way and governance is very important for First Nation people um it's very important that because it's based on trust respect relationship integrity and shared understanding so it's very important um when we work on with First Nations people and that's one of the key findings that we come out of this at this research and um I'll hand you over to Sharon thanks Doyen um so some of the key learnings we thought as we're putting this presentation together are really relevant for us in the evaluation space so when we were working out what to say we thought I will dive straight into methods and approaches and then we thought hang on a second as Doyen rightly pointed out the finding very how do you engage with communities what do we personally know about First Nations governance practices um in particularly in a we're operating in a space where western governance really dominant dominates this is something that we can all learn from hopefully some of the insights communities have shared can have shared can guide and inform our practice so if you're interested in learning a little bit more there's two reports from the project and they're available on our website and we welcome you to have a read but we will now spend some time yarning about the practice learnings so we've picked up some of the questions along the way but we've left a bit of time here at the end not long now because we did take some of the questions throughout um to look at the methodology and the approaches and answer any questions um so we'll move along Leah as you know has been collating questions while we've been talking so over to you Leah with these prompt images up here these are the different things we touched on throughout so if the questions are about this great if they're not happy to field other ones and I know there's a few there so we did talk about this if we were we've had too many questions and we couldn't get to them all we'll endeavour to write up a blog and share it on our website and also as part of the AES blog series over to you Leah okay thanks Sharon I think we will be doing a blog um just so that we can answer some of the questions more in depth and we don't have time for that today but um one of the questions which is um really relevant is around the yarning and research tool is how how did you guys come about using that the yarning and research uh the yarning research tool um if you could share a bit about that and how that worked if there was any fail forwards yeah be good to hear Doen do you want to pick up on that I think um yeah I mean I mean as an organ as community development organisation and as community development practitioner one of the first things that we the yarning has always been a part of our approach how we engage with communities even just when you get out on on on to communities like for instance with Littlewell you know I walk through the long grass with um Thomas Cameron and and and some members of the Littlewell working group to start having a yarn about just walking through the long grass to understand the importance of Littlewell and and like with Devin Kumara with the Abyssal Males Healing Center it was already there it's already embedded you know we just brought it out a lot more and it developed a more um as part of the research a lot more um as part of um what we call you know sitting down and cup of tea like sitting down and yarning in a circle and having a cup of tea and having a yarn and talking about things so we went back to the more organic approach as part of the research and capturing the information and I and importantly we we recorded a lot a lot of these questions on what we found as part of the yarning and cup of tea approaches that will get a lot more richness in the information that was coming out of the data even through the coding and analysis and I think Donna can pick up a little bit on that um what she saw in the riches of the data by just yarning and and uh struct yarning and using different tools or pass it over to you Donna. Ah thanks yeah um I think one of the things that we did and and people have you know uh mentioned this is that um the way that community uh first development work um really kind of um provided a very easy platform to use yarning as a as a tool and um but a couple of the things that we kind of talked about so the in the first interview you know talking about that failing forward approach is that um community first development staff were kind of like I'm a I'm a um you know I'm a um I'm a staff member I'm not a I'm not a researcher kind of was what they were saying I'm not a researcher and I'm not an evaluator and so we did quite a bit of work I think um you know and Nicole Nim ran communities of practice and we were actually able to come in and and talk a lot more about um strengthening practice from the community first development officers and just really um using that strength to say how can we use those conversations that you have to inform the work that that you're doing and so um if we once we once they were kind of feeling a bit comfortable with that um I guess there are a couple of key things that we we talked about and um one of those was that um you know yarning provides a safe and familiar format uh that it is around providing the time uh you know as Doyen said going for walks in the bush and that kind of thing um is not traditionally where where research data is gathered um but it was also about um it was also about uh turning it around and understanding that yarning the the the person who's collecting the data doesn't have the control it's the person who's telling the story who has the control and the person who is um collecting the data their job is just to listen deeply and so um in listening deeply they're not listening for a response that they're wanting to get from the the people that they're talking to but they're listening for connections and they're listening for um you know for these kind of rich narratives so the way that we talked with the team was around how do you build on those responses can you tell me a little bit more about this you know um what do you think that connects to and so the kinds of questions that um the community first development staff started to ask in their you know in their um researching and evaluation um uh just grew richer through the discussions that we had as a team in those communities of practice does that I'm sorry did I thank you um do we have time just for one quick question it won't be a quick question but do we have time for proven out of time I don't think so we're bang on 130 so but we will we will write up a blog everyone I can see there's a lot of questions there so keen to engage with you all so look out for the blog it'll be through the AES blog series and we'll also put something up on our website um and there's actually some blogs sitting up there now already around um the seed to tree that you see up there on the screen story of change some of the case studies are available and of course the reports so we've got you covered there but also Donna and I worked on a project with better evaluation and some and some other amazing first nations women um was a couple of years ago now it feels like ages ago but anyway whenever it was the resources still there so that's another one um that you might like to check out and um a quick read a quick cap of what's next overview what's next for us do I mentioned at the start we've got a webinar launch of our cd framework next week so please do come along you can register at our website um and I think when AES might even be sending out a little um invite to that after this presentation as well so we're not done yet everyone we've got another action research project in the works um as Donna's alluded to we are looking for funding as well for for more opportunities to engage around um our research so if you if you know anyone send them our way but also I've put that little image down there in the base of the um bottom right hand corner we've actually done something had something really exciting happen just in the last few months we've got an amazing bidger man that works in our organization that has Wayne Harvey who's developed a an app in-house to that houses our monitoring and evaluation framework and this has just been moved to the cloud in this year so we're really excited about all of the potential for that for our field team to capture data in real time and also all the reporting capabilities so I'm sure you'll be hearing more from us on that um plenty of opportunities to keep connecting and engaging with you all but thank you so much for coming along um yeah it we're privileged to share an hour in your day