Transcript for
Organisational allyship: A non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander view

Narrator (00:02): 

Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast. 

Jacquie Lee (00:07): 

Hi, I’m Jacquie Lee, and you’re listening to the Emerging Minds Podcast. We’d like to pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was recorded, the Turrbal and Yuggera people of Meanjin, and the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We also pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors, and elders past, present, and emerging from the many First Nations across Australia. 

(00:32): 

In today’s episode, Auntie Nancy Jeffrey continues to explore the concept of organisational allyship. This time from a non-Aboriginal perspective. She’s joined by Lisa Hillan, a social worker with over 20 years experience in the child and human rights and social justice space. Lisa has led and managed multiple human services organisations, including Save the Children Queensland and Northern Territory, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Foundation. 

(00:59): 

In 2006, she completed a Churchill Fellowship to study effective models of residential care. Most recently, Lisa worked as the director of policy research and evaluation at the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Peak, where she assisted in building transformative knowledge systems and policy processes to lead reform of the child protection system. 

(01:22): 

Lisa has a passion for amplifying the voice of children and young people and realising children’s rights through advocacy and policy development. Her work harnesses co-design principles that preference the wisdom of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to create meaningful programmes and policies that lead to real change. 

Nancy Jeffrey (01:45): 

Thanks, Jacquie. I, too, would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we are recording today, the Turrbal and Yuggera people of Meanjin, Brisbane, and pay my respects to my elders past, present, and all of those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are joining us today. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing a very good friend of mine, Lisa Hillan. So Lisa, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Lisa Hillan (02:09): 

Well, my name’s Lisa Hillan and I’m a social worker by profession. I have worked in a variety of localities and places, but most of my career has really been working alongside communities in the work of children and families. 

(02:27): 

So much of it has been around supporting vulnerable children and their families to really thrive, to move from places where they have been on the outer to being at the centre of decision-making and really trying to make a difference in how children and their families can live healthy, happy, strong lives into the future. 

Nancy Jeffrey (02:49): 

So what are the things you’ve learned and challenged you working with community? There must have been times you were just like really, really uncomfortable. How did you get over that, and what did it feel like? 

Lisa Hillan (03:02): 

Well, interestingly, I didn’t start my career working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. My career began really working with children and young people. And I wasn’t deeply exposed to that, although I must say, during my degree, I probably had the great privilege of learning from Auntie Lilla Watson. She was one of the first Aboriginal women who ran tutorials and the entire class on working with Aboriginal people in my social work degree. And I remember that very deeply because, interestingly, at the time, there were only 10 of us who did that course. 

(03:42): 

We were offered some work up in the Northern Territory, and that was the first time that we had entered a community that was not known to us or wasn’t really party to our community. And it became really clear to me very quickly that you don’t do anything without the people whose community you’re a part of. I guess I just searched out the traditional owners to think about how it is that we could work in their places and spaces and work alongside them to deliver this work. I had always thought that wisdom lay in other places. It never lay in me. And so I always thought that some of the greatest teachings I had as a social worker were from children and young people. 

(04:23): 

So it just, I suppose, naturally, I assumed that if you were to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, you had to have Aboriginal and Torres Islander people delivering and directing and supporting that work. It was challenging, but not so challenging. I suppose I was more shocked at how invited in I was to those spaces. And that shocked me because I thought it might be a lot harder what I came with. I guess I was always really humble about what I didn’t know. I knew how to run programmes. I knew how to deliver. I knew how to actually make something work on the ground, but I was really humble about I didn’t know what that meant to deliver in Aboriginal communities. 

(05:05): 

For me, I knew Aboriginal people, and I knew Aboriginal practitioners would do much better than I would in serving other Aboriginal practitioners or Aboriginal people. And mostly because I guess I was deeply humble about the fact that I knew lots of people that had really bad experiences of white fellows, right. White fellows in our fairy makeup are colonising. You almost can’t help it in some respect. And you see that in how lots of non-indigenous organisations, they want to expand. They have a really great sense of business, how business gets bigger, gets more kudos in that way. 

(05:45): 

And so I guess I really had to be very mindful of people’s experiences, that they were the experiences people had. And I was respectful of those experiences. When people would tell me terrible things that white fellows or organisations had done to them in the past, I would just sit with that and hear it. And I never felt it was targeted at me. I just felt people were telling me the truth of their experience, and in that, there was some truth for me about either a caution in what I shouldn’t do or a lesson in what I could do, as Paul Gibney would say, to be the difference that could make a difference. 

Nancy Jeffrey (06:23): 

As a non-Aboriginal person, to be a really good organisation ally in a non-Aboriginal organisation, what are the skills and the tributes that you need to get around? 

Lisa Hillan (06:33): 

Well, firstly, I think people think they understand the impacts of colonisation, but one of the things I would… I always caution people about is that colonisation has been different in every locality, in every community. It’s had different impacts. It’s had different outcomes as a result. And so you have to actually understand what happened in the place you’re going into. I think when you understand that deeply, then you understand something about what you’re going to bring to that and what people’s experience has been then of non-indigenous interactions, because people hold that in their story, and in people’s stories, it’s held in their spirit and it’s passed from generation to generation. 

(07:23): 

So their expectations of how you’re going to act or what you’re going to do are framed in that context. And I think it’s really important if a show of respect is to be had is to understand that context firstly. Often, I see people come in and go, “I’ve got this programme, and it’s going to be a saviour, and I’m going to deliver this, and it’s just going to be amazing,” without really any understanding then, well, what is the programme that might be needed in the context? What do community want for themselves, and how would it be best delivered here and in that place? And that might make you a lot more uncomfortable, right. 

(08:01): 

Lots of programmes you and I delivered in the past meant people went into pretty challenging environments. They were hot. They weren’t really super pleasant. Sometimes it could feel challenging in that things like dogs and all sorts of things that you had to battle, right. But that’s where community wanted the services delivered. I think there’s a difference between listening to being deeply able to think about how does this change or change up or to deliver. So lots of people now talk about programme fidelity. I think that’s crazy because fidelity is only as good as it being delivered within the place and space that it is. And it really isn’t then fidelity to that community. 

(08:51): 

It’s just fidelity to yourself. So I feel like that’s one. I feel like that whole concept of resource sharing is really, really important, and mostly because there’s nothing worse for Aboriginal communities, I think. And you hear this a lot. I do a lot of work with communities where people say, “Well, that more than making all this money, and they’re making money off our back.” So, where is money going back into community? How do people have a sense that they’re getting employment, support, dollars back in a broader way? That to me, that resource sharing, people haven’t shifted there. 

(09:27): 

We’ve got pretty amazing Aboriginal services who are doing astounding work, and people still want to compete with that and not think about, “How do I invest in that to grow that to do the work?” I don’t have to deliver this to Aboriginal people on my own. I could invest in this organisation to deliver alongside me, and mostly because they’ll do it very differently. So for me, I’m always aware that I’m on Aboriginal land. It’s never been ceded. It’s Aboriginal land wherever I am in the country, and that Aboriginal people best know how to deliver for other Aboriginal people. 

(10:03): 

And if you take that as your primary understanding, if you move and shift your thinking to that, then you can only ever have cultural humility. You can never be in a culturally capable place. I never expect to be culturally capable. It’s not a view of myself that I will ever have. And not because I don’t… I mean, I love working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait people, but that is not my lived experience. I will never, ever share that history in the same way. 

Nancy Jeffrey (10:36): 

So Lisa, when we talk about allyship, what does that mean for you? 

Lisa Hillan (10:40): 

Well, one of the things is that I think it’s easy to see what you give versus what you got. And I think the work changed me and changed our organisation in working with Aboriginal people. So I think it’s my point about lots of indigenous orgs go in saying, “We’re giving. We’ve got this great thing to do. We’re going to give to you. You’re going to do this amazing work.” But it changed the very nature for me about how I saw delivery. It’s changed the nature for me about what it meant to think differently about how people delivered services. And it changed for me how we delivered services in our organisation. 

(11:26): 

So I think the whole way that people value kinship and kinship leadership, lots of things in Western… And this is tricky, right. Lots of things in Western organisations are very hierarchical. They’ve got a very hierarchical structure. You’ve got a CEO. You’ve got a board. The board set a strategic agenda. The CEO follows that. The CEO then tells senior managers what they should do. And then there’s all these astounding amount of then staff who have to kowtow to these type of arrangements. But Aboriginal communities are not set up like that, right. They are much more diversified in leadership. 

(12:07): 

They have a very strong sense of elders and community and Aboriginal leaders setting… understanding deeply how to manage and support community and problem solve. And so that challenges a lot of non-indigenous orgs because the hierarchy is not the same. And who you are paying attention to really doesn’t matter what the board think in an Aboriginal community. It matters what the elders and it matters what the community leaders think. So that’s a real struggle because sometimes that’s completely against what the board of a non-indigenous organisation might think. 

(12:46): 

And it’s also suddenly the CEO is not the hierarchy, right. So in this situation, I’m not the hierarchy. I might have been the more senior staff member, but I know my place in those places. Elders were the people who had to tell me what we could or couldn’t do or how that would work for their families and children. And I think that is a real struggle. So that’s one thing, but I would say that what I gained from that was a real sense of how do you create kinship in the rest of your organisation? How do you think differently about how you manage and work and support people to deliver services? 

(13:26): 

And when I was in… working in non-indigenous organisations, that was a bit of a struggle. When I went into Aboriginal organisations, that was terrific because I could work more on a diversified leadership structure where everyone leads, everyone has knowledge. Shared knowledge is how you grow strength. Shared knowledge is how you deliver, and shared knowledge allows you to deliver on a really small team in really substantial ways. And I think I got a lot more from that. And I learned also just the value of kinship structures. So I learned the value of raising children collectively. 

(14:05): 

I learned the value of how important that was of kids to belong and have a sense of who they were and what their history was, and how that history could form for them to be the best that they could be. So I took that back into how we cared for other kids, non-indigenous kids, how we delivered other services for non-indigenous services. But I took it back into my own family and really thought differently about what my role was. So if you really think about it’s what you gain as a collective. And I think being open to that or just being deeply engaged in that work changes you if you allow it to change you, I think. It’s a struggle, I think, for some people. 

(14:49): 

And I think that’s the other thing. Some people shouldn’t do the work. I think organisations sometimes say, “Oh, we should do it, but we don’t select who should do that,” because if you don’t have the right heart and mind, it’s just not going to work in my view. And so not everyone can do that. That’s okay. We shouldn’t be forcing people to, and we shouldn’t be forcing that onto community because we think that’s what we should do. We should be selecting. I think that even in government. I think that in child protection, how do we say, “Oh, all practitioners should work with Aboriginal families and do Aboriginal child protection.” 

(15:24): 

Well, they shouldn’t. Some of them are just not well-versed to having the right attributes or skills. That’s okay. We shouldn’t make that a terrible thing, but we should also be selecting people who really want to do it differently. And I think that’s the challenge. Organisations generally don’t think about that. And I would deeply hope that people would think about that when they are. If you want certain practitioners to engage Aboriginal children and their families, then you’ve got to have the right belief in Aboriginal knowledge and Aboriginal systems to be able to do that. 

Nancy Jeffrey (15:59): 

Tell me a little bit about what courage it takes as an ally to change programmes to suit community. 

Lisa Hillan (16:06): 

I think lots of people get very tied up in the outcomes they have to deliver. And one of the things that I’ve always said to people is process is the product. How you get somewhere is as important as what you deliver. And I think one of the things about that is that lots of… So lots of people talk about an Aboriginal way of sort of cultural way of doing consultations or co-design. And part of the problem about that is that often co-design is really, I’m just bringing things that I want you to say, “Oh yes, that’s okay” about. 

(16:41): 

But true co-design is really sitting and hearing and listening from people about how will we deliver things on the ground that are going to make an absolute difference. How will I change how I do that or undertake it, or create the right environment for it to happen? And that doesn’t always have to be… You can’t always deliver what people want. We’ve had to deliver programmes that are quite small in nature, not loads of funds. But what I have been really aware of is that when you trust people to work that through, to understand it, to think about how to use those resources, and then back that, I’ve never seen an outcome delivered as well, and I’ve never not seen success. 

(17:29): 

And I think that’s a real challenge for non-indigenous people, that often we like to control the environment. We see an agenda. We like to make sure that we’re working through it time by time by time. And you have to relinquish that and go, “Actually, we’re going to get where we need to be in the timeframe. It’s all right. We’ll start at 9:00. We’ll finish at 3:00.” But the agenda might get thrown out the door because the room might need to do it differently, or I might need to rethink how that goes because the Aboriginal practitioners who are delivering that have a much better understanding of what’s happening in that room than I do. 

(18:07): 

They can read that in a much better way. And I think relinquishing control, having the courage to relinquish control, having the ability to really trust in your partners, is a really critical process of allyship. And it’s also the courage to challenge. Sometimes, when I was working on indigenous organisations, you have to be unpopular sometimes because sometimes you can see things that are going to be done that you know are going to create distress in Aboriginal communities, or that people are going to apply for money that should be Aboriginal money, and we should not be applying for as a non-indigenous organisation. 

(18:52): 

And if you’re not willing to speak up about those things, if you are only interested in your own career and your own progression, then what you’re doing is not really being. You’re being the ally that is there when you want to be in the good times. And in the tricky times, in the times when it is less comfortable and less for yourself, you don’t talk up and speak out, then that is actually undermining all the integrity and honour you have that you might have in community. 

(19:24): 

And if you allow only your Aboriginal staff or your Aboriginal people to have to do that and not fight for that, then that and allow them to fight for themselves. And again, you’re not coming with your own honour and integrity in how that works as an ally. So I think if you to be uncomfortable, the uncomfort isn’t necessarily in working with Aboriginal people because I always think Aboriginal communities are so deeply generous to non-indigenous people, to be honest. 

(19:54): 

I mean, most times I’m really shocked why they don’t meet you at the plane with spears and tell you to get stuffed because so many bad experiences occur. So people are deeply generous. It’s actually organisations that have where you have to be more uncomfortable because… And I think this is really one of the important things. Why people are saying divest your money into Aboriginal orgs is because really what happens in non-indigenous orgs is they go well when the people that are in them and in the positions of power are prepared to do something different. 

(20:31): 

But the minute they go, it’s very hard for organisations to hold the line on that because I think non-indigenous orgs are very large. Quite often they’re big. It’s very difficult for that culture to exist across the organisation. And so it’s very difficult for Aboriginal communities because they can come to expect that in the relationship they might have with the people that they have at the time. But when they’re not there, how do you, as an organisation, make a whole organisational commitment? I think that is the struggle in my mind. 

Nancy Jeffrey (21:04): 

Lisa, can you tell me a time where the roles were reversed in community? I mean, the community is the boss and the organisation is the worker. What worked well? 

Lisa Hillan (21:14): 

I remember one of the old ladies in Tiwi who was truly fab, but I remember her once in this strategic planning exercise we were doing, she was terrific. And we had the CEO in there, I think, who had very little to do with Aboriginal communities over a long period of time, but she very quietly just said… When someone asked her about what should happen, she said, “Ah, sister, the people at the top have to look to us at the bottom for the solutions because the people at the top don’t understand at the bottom, and it should just switch around so that we are at the top and you’re at the bottom.” 

(21:56): 

And she said it very quietly, very beautifully, in this very lyrical. And that was just, I thought that’s exactly the problem, right. Community should be at the top, and everything else should be supporting that. That’s what she was saying. “Even you, as a CEO, should be at the bottom because in my community, we’re the people that are looking after our kids, and you’re the CEO here.” And I think that when you think about practitioners, that’s what they have to think about. If you’re a psychologist and you’re working with a family, if you look at the social emotional wellbeing framework, you can help people to maybe think and behave differently. 

(22:38): 

You can work on the domains are about the mind and the body, but those domains that are about cultural connection, cultural identity, if you’re a non-indigenous psychologist, that’s not something you can help with. So how do you think about who are the Aboriginal leaders or practitioners that are going to be your partners in helping those children or those families build the strength of their identity, build the strength of their connections, because that’s about how people understand about being well, right. So I know as a therapist that if I have to work with families in deep trauma, I have to firstly make sure they’re strong in who they are. 

(23:20): 

You can’t unpack distress without having a good sense of self, right. We all know that, but we forget that. So psychologists think, “I come with this amazing amount of skill and understanding,” but they don’t have that. And so, how do we work on the domains that we can work on, and then think about how we collaborate with the knowledge that we don’t have to support children and their families to have the pathway? I might know how to run a programme, but I didn’t know how to talk to those little ones, or I didn’t know necessarily how to have a conversation with parents about some of the challenges, but I could work with staff and learn that together. 

(24:08): 

And then when I was asked to give support or to provide advice, I knew it intimately because I’d been on the ground, and then I could sit there and go, “Actually, I see what that challenge is. I understand what that means, and I can support the staff then to problem solve that more effectively.” So I think there’s a lot of… for me, that’s the challenge about moving your thinking to what am I able to bring the skills, but how do I join the skills of this really significant ways of Aboriginal knowing, being, and doing that are not my skills. They’re not mine to bring, and they’re not mine to hold. 

Nancy Jeffrey (24:49): 

Can you tell me a little bit about the perceptions on having to have formal qualifications rather than lived experience qualifications? 

Lisa Hillan (24:56): 

There is a great belief in non-indigenous society about qualifications. There’s this great deep well of we need to be a psychologist, social worker, clinical practise. And I’m not… I deeply value the education that I’ve had the privilege of having. I’m not taking that away and it deeply supported me in structures, but Aboriginal people over 60,000 years were traditional healers. They had extremely deep understanding of how to support the psychological health and wellbeing of their community. 

(25:37): 

They probably held… would’ve held those positions and had deep understanding that would’ve been passed from generation to generation. And in recognising that, sure, we can help people to get the qualifications that are valued in Western society. And I’m not taking away how important that is because workforce development is really critical and it’s really important, but we should not undervalue that Aboriginal knowledge and that traditional sense and way of thinking and knowing and how we should be backing that and investing in that and supporting people to grow. 

Nancy Jeffrey (26:17): 

Thank you so much, Lisa, for yarning with us today. 

Jacquie Lee (26:24): 

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review in your favourite podcast app or share the episode with a colleague or friend. We also have many more courses and resources with strategies and frameworks to help build your skills and confidence in supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. Just follow the link in our show notes to learn more. 

Narrator (26:46): 

Visit our website today at emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds, the centre is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.