There was a wealth of knowledge and experience in the room spanning primary health work, grief counselling, mental health recovery, operational expertise, social and emotional wellbeing, nursing, cultural consultancy, suicide prevention, and government.
On the first day we explored the main themes, priorities and needs identified during earlier discussions we had when visiting communities. The key theming areas covered adult health services, education pathways, SEWB, youth wellbeing, and funding and reporting. The group then took this discussion further - exploring not only the challenges but going deeper to the root drivers and causes, and the barriers to change.
We also spent time deep diving into the values we felt were most important to lead this work. Through this process four guiding principles were agreed:
Culture first
For community, by community
Action oriented and evolutionary
Developing and transferring capability
On the second day we welcomed the Chair of the Board, Kate Cherrington and Operational Change Lead, Lynda McGregor from Te Pūtea Whakatupu Trust, New Zealand to join us virtually and share their learnings from their own journey in First Nations led philanthropic funding.
They shared practical insights into how embedding cultural values at the heart of their funding model enabled them to transition all of their practices to be informed by Maori knowledge - with relationships and community as the first priority. This included reimagining their strategy and approach to decision making, evaluation, collaboration and investments. Kate and Lynda spoke to the need to have a shared, grounded foundation but an adaptive and evolving operational strategy.
"Write your values in pen, and your strategies and tactics in pencil."
After the keynote, discussion centred around models for participatory decision making. We looked at the key components of 5 different models -
ATSIC
Rolling Collective
Representative Participation
Closed Collective
Hub and Spoke
- noting what we liked and disliked about each. From the discussion around these we identified the key components that most people felt were vital to include.
The group then began ideating on how to design a model that took only the best parts of the examples, marrying it with the key components everyone felt were most important, and the agreed upon principles. These models will be used to engage in further discussions with a broader range of community.
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