Read all posts for ‘community development’

It wouldn’t start straight away. My colleague Amanda and I would begin our introductions with a traditional Fijian kava ceremony, being welcomed in to the community officially by the highest-ranking male of the village. All seated on the floor, we were placed at the front with our local project partners, […]

Cairns is a paradise: lush, green and tropical; yet up to 1500 sleep rough or homeless each night, many of them indigenous. Homelessness is but one of the challenges indigenous people in Australia face; another is unemployment due to systemic challenges such as discrimination and poorer health and literacy outcomes. […]

“You cannot drive change into a community and unload it off the back of a truck. That is the lesson of the Intervention.” —Northern Territory Emergency Response Review Report, 13 October 2008, p58 In 2007, the Australian federal government called in the military to intervene in the Northern Territory to […]

Governance isn’t the only thing that is being taken into the hands of civil society. In Australia, the entire premise of the market system is also being reworked. If the state reneges on its promise to provide basic services, the opposite effect will happen – people will start taking things […]

Since the first Gold Rush 160 years ago, Australian history has been tainted by a conflict between mining and indigenous land rights. Aboriginal communities have long been excluded or abandoned by government – forced off their lands into settlements and ignored in terms of health care, resulting in statistics that […]