This year the Business Advisory team at IPS is working with several Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations across multiple states to develop Strategic Plans.

Our team engages on Country to help bring the vision and values of Aboriginal Organisations to life in a document that speaks to their organisation, their Community, their stakeholders and to Government.

A strategic plan defines the direction an organisation must travel to achieve its big thinking goals. For ACCOs, that big thinking is universal: to improve the lives of their people. And a formal document also goes one step further than simply outlining future goals; it creates a sense of collaboration and collective responsibility – an intangible and unmeasurable outcome but so important to the long-term sustainability of any community organisation.

IPS engages with Aboriginal Corporations on Country, in person. Our unique ways of working ignite true collaboration; our experienced consultants enter the project with a blank canvas, so that members can create a future-focused document that they truly own.

When you walk into any room, there is often a voice that hasn’t felt heard, or a conversation that has not been explored. Holding space for that dialogue to emerge, for that voice to thrive, can empower an entire organisation.

It’s important to continue to hold that space - for deep listening. For it is in the silence that a united vision starts to grow, and glow.

Professionally, I have a background in business, innovation and the Arts. But it is the personal growth in my journey as an ally that has been the biggest gift, from the moment I set foot in the Pilbara as a backpacker in my 20s, to becoming an Executive Lead at Australia’s leading First Nations-owned management consultants - IPS.

Today, my work gives me the opportunity to visit communities across regional and remote Australia - every engagement teaches me a little more about gratitude and humility, and the staggering power of First Nations culture.

​Would you like to know more about deep listening in Australian First Nations Culture? You might be interested in this video: 

Reconciliation Action Plans are not, and should not be, a simple box ticking exercise: They are a powerful tool for creating positive change. So what can we do to think outside the box, beyond the mandatory deliverables, and set a strong foundation for reconciliation?
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What extra do you want to do?

This will depend on your company, and where you’re at. It may be appropriate to simply focus on setting that strong foundation within your company by getting the basics right: understanding and building cultural competency, putting together a strong business case, and starting to build your relationships.

Or maybe you’re further along on the journey, and feel it’s time to stretch. If you prefer to view your deliverables as a minimum requirement, you could start think about ways to build on them. What’s the next step? How can we make things more impactful? What are diversity leaders doing? 

Either way, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices should be central to your decision making. Anytime you are doing anything which impacts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, that decision should be made with us, and not for us. This is summed up in the principle Nothing about us without us.

What extra is within your sphere of influence?

There is one factor within everybody’s sphere of influence which is very important to reconciliation: truth telling.
But what is truth telling, and why is it important?

Reconciliation Australia describes how there are five interrelated dimensions to reconciliation: race relations, equity and equality, institutional integrity, unity, and historical acceptance. You can read more about these here. 

Truth telling weaves these five dimensions together, because the successive government policies throughout Australia’s history directly impact the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples now - and making this history known is a crucial part of understanding the past, and building respect and relationships in the present.

Truth-telling is a journey that is both personal and professional. It is not an easy undertaking, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

To return to the original question of what extra is within your sphere of influence, the answer, for everyone, is truth telling: listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who choose to share a story with you. Read about Australia’s history. Make space to absorb those stories, and their implications. These stories are not about non-Aboriginal people being responsible for the past – but about understanding and accepting what has happened until now, and taking responsibility for changing the status quo so that it does not continue to happen.

What can you do in your workplace to embrace truth telling as part of your reconciliation journey?

If you would like to know more about RAP Implementation, please send us a message via the form on this page. We’ll send you some free practical resources to help you build up your RAP implementation toolkit.

• Resource 1: How to start conversations about cultural competency in your business
• Resource 2: Guide to developing a business case for increasing understanding, value and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, knowledge and rights within our organisation.
• Resource 3: RAP Implementation Q and A with IPS

Get your FREE RAP Implementation toolkit:

Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs) are not, and should not be, a simple box ticking exercise: They are a powerful tool for creating positive change.

IPS First Nations Advisory team put together a series of articles and resources this month to assist with implementing your RAP. Follow the links to read more, and sign up for your free resources.

• Building Relationships, Respect and Opportunities
• RAP Deliverables: Building your Business Case
• Think outside the box

Your Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) is built around three pillars: relationships, respect and opportunities. The fourth and fifth pillars, governance and opportunities, underpin these and tie them together to ensure accountability.

So how does this look when it comes to implementing your RAP?
Relationships, respect and opportunities are interdependent. We need to build cultural competence in order to build respect, and from there, forge relationships. That respect and positive relationship is key to creating real and tangible opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to flourish within your company. As you implement your RAP, this may look like:

• Respect: Bringing a team on a journey of cultural competence that involves learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, examining how we are shaped by our own cultures, and becoming aware of our own biases and assumptions. This is not always a comfortable journey for the individual – but it is a worthwhile one, where we all learn about each other, and start to form a new kind of relationship based on mutual respect and truth telling.
  
  
• Relationships: Embracing cultural protocols like Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country as part of everyday life, and a shared, uniquely Australian culture and identity. Forging partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and organisations, both internally and externally. Delivering programs and policies in partnership.
  
  
• Opportunities: Providing a flexible, culturally safe workplace where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees can meet their cultural obligations and embrace opportunities for career development. Increasing the diversity of your supply chain, to both support Aboriginal businesses and benefit from their contribution to your company.

If you would like to know more about RAP Implementation, please send us a message via the form on this page. We’ll send you some free practical resources to help you build up your RAP implementation toolkit.

• Resource 1: How to start conversations about cultural competency in your business
• Resource 2: Guide to developing a business case for increasing understanding, value and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, knowledge and rights within our organisation.
• Resource 3: RAP Implementation Q and A with IPS

Get your FREE RAP Implementation toolkit:

A key deliverable for a Reflect RAP is to Develop a business case for increasing understanding, value and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, knowledge and rights within our organisation. This deliverable is then implemented in an Innovate RAP.

But what does it mean?

A business case provides our reason, or justification, for undertaking a project. It is part of the scaffolding for how we go about achieving our RAP vision. It helps to understand not only why we are implementing our RAP – but how it is good for our business or organisation.

To understand this, we need to talk about social impact. Social impact is the affect our business has on the wider community:

• What kinds of businesses do we support in our supply chain?
• What kinds of employment opportunities do we offer?
• Are those opportunities equitable for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples?

When we contribute to a thriving, economically strong local community, everyone benefits.

When we implement our RAP, we make conscious, deliberate, structural changes in our business operations around that social impact: we build respect, remove barriers, and create equity and opportunities. Essentially, we make changes within our sphere of influence which have a flow-on impact into the community.

Now let’s zoom out for a moment. At this moment more than 1,100 businesses across Australia have a RAP. Each of those businesses, when they implement those structural changes, are creating a major shift across Australia that removes systemic barriers, builds respect, and forges positive relationships. Implementing our RAP, making those changes within our sphere of influence, makes us a part of a larger movement towards building not just reconciliation between two cultures, but a shared future where we thrive together.

If you would like to know more about RAP Implementation, please send us a message via the form on this page. We’ll send you some free practical resources to help you build up your RAP implementation toolkit.

• Resource 1: How to start conversations about cultural competency in your business
• Resource 2: Guide to developing a business case for increasing understanding, value and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, histories, knowledge and rights within our organisation.
• Resource 3: RAP Implementation Q and A with IPS

Get your FREE RAP Implementation toolkit: