The Centre for Human Security and Social Change (the Centre) has won the Research Excellence Award for Industry Engagement and Partnering from the School of Humanities and Social Science at La Trobe University for its work over the last five years with the Warlpiri Education and Training Trust (WETT).
Community development programs for Indigenous communities are often designed and evaluated by outsiders. Rarely are Indigenous people centrally involved in making decisions about what their communities need, what progress is being made, or what value programs are delivering. Indigenous people in Australia and internationally are increasingly calling for programs to be designed and evaluated in ways that support Indigenous people to determine the future prosperity of their communities and deliver better outcomes.
The Centre's partnership with WETT is helping to change this. Over the last 5 years, Centre researchers have worked collaboratively with Warlpiri traditional owners in four communities in the Tanami desert in northern Australia to understand and document their vision for these communities and develop a way of assessing progress that is led by community members themselves.
As traditional owners, Warlpiri people are entitled to royalty payments in exchange for allowing the Tanami goldmine to operate on their land. In 2001 a group of Warlpiri teachers requested the support of the Central Land Council (CLC) to invest these royalties in education programs which benefit community members in Yuendumu, Nyirrpi, Willowra and Lajamanu. WETT was formally established in 2005 as an Indigenous organisation governed by and for Warlpiri people, with CLC engaged to help administer WETT’s royalty funds through a Trust. To date WETT has allocated over $53 million to education and training programs that Warlpiri people prioritise.
In 2019, the WETT Advisory Committee engaged the Centre to help them develop a framework for monitoring and evaluating the progress and impact of their education programs. Centre researchers had already been working with CLC since 2013 to support monitoring and evaluation of their broader community development work. This had included some engagement with WETT and its programs. The objectives for the Yitakimaninjaku, warrirninjaku, payirninjaku manu pina-jarrinjaku or 'Tracking and Learning' project were jointly developed through a workshop in 2019 facilitated by Centre researchers. These included:
- helping WETT and the communities it supports be clear about what they are trying to achieve and understand how the different programs they fund are helping with this;
- making sure important lessons are learned and WETT programs keep improving;
- telling a strong story about WETT that government and other organisations will listen to.
Since 2019, the Centre has worked with WETT to develop and test a ‘tracking and learning’ framework or ‘map’ (pictured). This has been undertaken through a consultative process involving a series of workshops and community consultations as well as research conducted in the 4 communities. A critical part of this process has been centering Warlpiri worldviews and priorities in determining the areas where they want to see progress in their communities and eliciting community members’ own views about what has changed. The Centre is now working with WETT to use the tracking and learning map to assess progress over the longer term, adjust programs in light of learning, and communicate its achievements to others.
The central element in the approach is strong community involvement in co-designing and implementing the project. Throughout the project, Centre researchers worked closely with senior Warlpiri practitioners and researchers recruited from within the 4 communities to design the approach, collect data from communities, and analyse and make sense of this data. This involved developing a set of visual and bilingual materials and protocols to be used with community members. This has helped ensure that Warlpiri people see the tracking and learning map as reflecting their interests and priorities and as useful for informing their community development initiatives. This sense of ownership is reflected in the decision by WETT to use a Warlpiri name for the project. Key decisions to continue or stop projects have also been made using the findings of this work.
A second important aim of the project is to demonstrate the value of indigenous led and owned approaches to monitoring and evaluation to other stakeholders, including federal and state government agencies. To this end, the Centre has worked closely with WETT to engage in knowledge exchange, outreach and media engagement to influence broader debates, policy and practice. This has included joint academic publications and opinion pieces, as well as presentations at industry conferences such as the American Evaluation Association (2019), World Community Development (2023) and Australian Evaluation Society (2023 and 2024) conferences. This has supported WETT to tell their own story to a wider audience. It has also contributed to WETT gaining national recognition, including winning the National NAIDOC Week Award for Education in 2024.
Our partnership with WETT is founded on long-standing, respectful relationships that value two-way learning. The Centre takes a ‘strengths-based approach’ which emphasises Warlpiri worldviews. This is important in a context where researchers often focus on dysfunction, vulnerabilities, and incapacities. The trust was evident at the YWPP/Centre workshop in 2023 at which participants co-designed research protocols, approaches and tools which were then field tested. The process is highly valued by WETT and CLC and funding has been approved for a further two years by WETT.
For more information about our work with WETT and about Aboriginal-led development, please see our compendium of resources on Aboriginal-led development in Australia.
We would like this opportunity to thank WETT, the WETT Advisory Committee and the Indigenous researchers who have worked with us to develop and deliver the YWPP framework over the last five years.
Picture: YWPP researchers Christosh Dickson, Natalie Morton, Belinda Wayne and Glenda Wayne in front of the YWPP map at a community feedback barbeque in Willowra.
