February 2025
These bright spots emerge from collaborative leaders and people in communities who don’t work to news and election cycles. They work to the seasons of inter-generational change and justice.
They work to cultivate trust and equity in brave messy spaces co-created by First Nations and other Australians. They understand there’s work to do on both sides of the river and in the middle together.
These communities understand that unity comes from working across differences – race, culture, power and perspective. Not in trying to deny those differences.
They know truth-telling is essential to reconciliation and healing. Their work comes with story-telling and deep-listening, tension and laughter, sorrow and dancing.
This is what leadership for equity and belonging looks like.
We see it in the ChangeFest movement.
Guided by the ChangeFest Elders, a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders from across Australia, ChangeFest is committed to learning and acting toward:
ChangeFest is demonstrating what it means to shift power and practices of colonial institutions and cultures to centre First Nations’ leadership, culture and knowledges.
In the words of Reconciliation Australia, “our determination to continue that journey towards a reconciled Australia and justice for First Nations peoples is unstoppable.”
As always, we recognise the uneven load in the fight for justice and self-determination carried by First Nations peoples in Australia, especially women.
As a diverse team, composed of First Nations leadership, coloniser and convict descendants, and multi-generation migrants, CFI acknowledges we live and work on unceded Aboriginal lands.
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