Governments must open their eyes and do something to create the infrastructure needed to have a thriving economy in remote Aboriginal towns across the north of Australia. There is no need to keep thinking that one store, a couple of takeaways and a fuel outlet is all that is needed and then say the people must move to the jobs if they want to work for a living!Indications are something is going to happen - it is a matter of when and how!
There is no reason to believe that Aboriginal people do not need the retail outlets and service facilities that the rest of Australia takes for granted. Regrettably that is all many people know because that is all they have seen living in isolation to the rest of the population.
There is no reason to believe that Aboriginal people do not need the retail outlets and service facilities that the rest of Australia takes for granted. Regrettably that is all many people know because that is all they have seen living in isolation to the rest of the population.
A comparison of an Australian country town, Boorowa in NSW, with Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island shows up some sharp contrasts.
Population of both places 2,000 people
Population of both places 2,000 people 
If it looks as though Boorowa is the bigger
of the two – it is - in terms of number of houses. 950 for 2,000 people compared to Galiwin’ku with 152 houses.
of the two – it is - in terms of number of houses. 950 for 2,000 people compared to Galiwin’ku with 152 houses.
Then you really know what over crowding” means! 8.5 persons per house at Galiwin’ku compared with 2.4 in Boorowa.
The biggest contrast in terms of retail opportunities is the number of
businesses - be they retail or service.
businesses - be they retail or service.
Galiwin’ku has just five retail outlets. One store, three takeaways and a fuel bowser. 
Boorowa on the other hand has 15 retail outlets as well as three
hotels - (none at Elcho), three motels (none at Elcho), eight café/restaurants (none at Elcho) other retail stores including a pharmacy - pictured right - and the gathering of service clubs, special interest groups and supporting organisations mainstream Australians take for granted.
Overall the strength of social capital in Boorowa is huge compared with Galiwin’ku where it has been decimated over the past 100 years as a result of colonisation. There were people living in North East Arnhem Land in the 1930s who did not know the “south” had been settled by the British. They thought Japanese (from pearling) and Asians (from trepang) were the only other people on the planet.(1)
The people of Galiwin’ku are from 15 different clan groups that were at loggerheads years ago and have been thrust together in a “community” with no help in
developing their alternative social networks, activities or sporting opportunities. There is football club run by a group under the auspice of the Council but with little opportunity for the player to have a say in how it is run. 
The clan groups are the focus of social gatherings.
The 24 page booklet (pictured left) lists all the shops, services, clubs, festivals, history and attractions of Boorowa.
Galiwin’ku does not have ONE motel. Only a “guest house” that many walk away from on first sight. (Pictured right)
The following table gives a comparison of other indicators (2) :
Boorowa on the other hand has 15 retail outlets as well as three
hotels - (none at Elcho), three motels (none at Elcho), eight café/restaurants (none at Elcho) other retail stores including a pharmacy - pictured right - and the gathering of service clubs, special interest groups and supporting organisations mainstream Australians take for granted.
Overall the strength of social capital in Boorowa is huge compared with Galiwin’ku where it has been decimated over the past 100 years as a result of colonisation. There were people living in North East Arnhem Land in the 1930s who did not know the “south” had been settled by the British. They thought Japanese (from pearling) and Asians (from trepang) were the only other people on the planet.(1)
The people of Galiwin’ku are from 15 different clan groups that were at loggerheads years ago and have been thrust together in a “community” with no help in
developing their alternative social networks, activities or sporting opportunities. There is football club run by a group under the auspice of the Council but with little opportunity for the player to have a say in how it is run. 
The clan groups are the focus of social gatherings.
The 24 page booklet (pictured left) lists all the shops, services, clubs, festivals, history and attractions of Boorowa.
Galiwin’ku does not have ONE motel. Only a “guest house” that many walk away from on first sight. (Pictured right)
The following table gives a comparison of other indicators (2) :
It does not have to be this way and yet for some reason governments over the past 30 years have believed remote living Aboriginal people only need the most fundamental of services to make their communities thrive.
It is shameful that in 2009 these towns have chronic unemployment, illiteracy among children, poor health through overcrowded houses and phenomenal amounts of boredom that leads to domestic violence, drug abuse and general anti social behaviour.
This is the profile of a town where only 10% of the population has reached Year 10 level at school.
The retail store - with no competition - is under no commercial pressure to do better - although the one at Galiwin'ku is community controlled and does its best (pictured right).
It is hard to expect a child to want to go to school when all they see is chronic unemployment and no industries that attract their desire
It is shameful that in 2009 these towns have chronic unemployment, illiteracy among children, poor health through overcrowded houses and phenomenal amounts of boredom that leads to domestic violence, drug abuse and general anti social behaviour.
This is the profile of a town where only 10% of the population has reached Year 10 level at school.
The retail store - with no competition - is under no commercial pressure to do better - although the one at Galiwin'ku is community controlled and does its best (pictured right).
It is hard to expect a child to want to go to school when all they see is chronic unemployment and no industries that attract their desire
as a future career path.
As Noel Pearson put it in an article in The Australian in August 2008:
"You can educate people as much as you like, but if they've got no jobs to go into, as a young Aboriginal 10 year-olsd told me"Why do we need to be educated if there's nothing for us, there's no future"."
"You can educate people as much as you like, but if they've got no jobs to go into, as a young Aboriginal 10 year-olsd told me"Why do we need to be educated if there's nothing for us, there's no future"."
The answer lies in developing enterprises which the people themselves want to see happen and 
where they are responsible for that development.
where they are responsible for that development. In the world of “Enterprise Facilitation”, and as promoted by Ernesto Sirolli through his Sirolli Institute (3) based in Canada, the facilitator has no original ideas of their own – they all come from the people – and – only work with people who want to be helped. It remains to be seen whether this approach will work in remote Aboriginal towns but it is worth a try.
Let’s face it – nothing else has worked over the past 100 years so why not ENTERPRISE FACILITATION a la Sirolli.
Remote living Aboriginals need some dreams. The dreams they had have been destroyed by Governments with a passion to have them be like us.
What needs to be done is foster and facilitate their dreams so success can come and by example the children will at last see a reason to want to go to school.
The Enterprise Facilitator helps people to live their dreams and provide them with the answers they need to achieve their goals.
Aboriginal people in the main have been to Darwin, they spend a lot of money at stores of all types and sizes. K-Mart and Target are popular as is The Good Guys and Harvey Norman. The amount of money being spent is mind boggling for people who are allegedly living in a state of poverty. For the ones that do not waste their money on grog, gunja and drugs there is plenty of disposable income left for clothing, electrical goods and gadgets, sporting accessories and music.
The big retailers are benefitting but there is no reason why a wider variety of shops in the town would not succeed given the obvious demand.
A concerted effort on the part of the Australian society (including government) is needed to bring these Aboriginal towns up to the same level of services as the towns mainstream Australians call home.
The Enterprise Facilitator helps people to live their dreams and provide them with the answers they need to achieve their goals.
Aboriginal people in the main have been to Darwin, they spend a lot of money at stores of all types and sizes. K-Mart and Target are popular as is The Good Guys and Harvey Norman. The amount of money being spent is mind boggling for people who are allegedly living in a state of poverty. For the ones that do not waste their money on grog, gunja and drugs there is plenty of disposable income left for clothing, electrical goods and gadgets, sporting accessories and music.
The big retailers are benefitting but there is no reason why a wider variety of shops in the town would not succeed given the obvious demand.
A concerted effort on the part of the Australian society (including government) is needed to bring these Aboriginal towns up to the same level of services as the towns mainstream Australians call home.
This has to happen so the playing field is level when a comparison is made between the two cultures.
References:
1. Mcintosh, I., & Burrumarra, D. (1994). The whale and the cross: conversation with David Burrumarra MBE. Darwin, Historical Society of the Northern Territory.
1. Mcintosh, I., & Burrumarra, D. (1994). The whale and the cross: conversation with David Burrumarra MBE. Darwin, Historical Society of the Northern Territory.
2. Australian Bureau of Statistics: 2006 Census QuickStats. Boorowa and Galiwin’ku
3. Ernesto Sirolli: Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship, and the Rebirth of Local Economies. New Society Publishing, British Columbia, Canada
1 comments:
Rollo, good site mate. I am attaching a paper that I wrote for an aboriginal development conference I will be addressing in Canada later this spring. Please share it among your readers. The conference is called International Indigenous Economic Development Symposium. Banff Alberta 28 June 2009.
Beyond paternalism- Respect in cross-cultural community and economic development
From 1972 to1977 I worked for an Italian Agency of Technical Cooperation with African Countries called ASIP. ASIP was one of a number of private sector Agencies created after the passage of the Pertini Act of Parliament of 1971. Under the new law young Italians were able to volunteer for two years of work in Africa in programs designed and endorsed by the Italian Foreign Office.
The role of my Agency was initially to recruit and train the young volunteers bound for Africa but very soon we became involved in conceiving and designing the Technical Cooperation programs that would employ those volunteers. During those years we established programs in a number of African countries including Zambia, Kenya, Somalia, Algeria and Ivory Coast.
What I experienced visiting our projects and our volunteers in Africa during the five years period was devastating. The experience shaped both my personal and professional life and Enterprise Facilitation®, the local economic and community development approach that we have developed over the past 30 years is the direct result of it.
We failed miserably in Africa .Every single project failed to sustain itself and often we damaged the local people by introducing practices and technologies that were antithetic to local mores and inappropriate to local needs.
We started Training Farms by African rivers full of Hippopotami, only to see the crops eaten as soon as ripe. We convinced the native people to come to work by “motivating” them with increasingly damaging enticements; from sunglasses and watches to beer and whiskey.
The Foreign Office started a faculty of Medicine in Mogadishu. My Agency sourced the books in the USA, had them translated in Italian and then established Italian Classes for students who, being well educated middleclass Somalis, spoke English.
During the period I came in contact with many foreign Aid Agencies working in Africa and I came to believe that it wasn’t only us Italians blundering in Africa. It seemed to me that all of donor nations had their own ideas of what the African people needed and were doing their blundering best to impose it onto them.
We collectively failed, and some still fail in Africa, because we made plans in our own countries and then we superimposed our programs, technologies and practices to people who did not ask us for our help and who did not need what we thought they needed! Our programs were about us, not them and without “buy in” from the locals we were always reduced to reward, motivate, cajole and bully people to do what we wanted them to do.
Instead of helping people do what they passionately wanted to do to help themselves and their families we paid them to do what we wanted done no matter how inappropriate. We then complained that as soon as our money would end the program would disappear!
All development I saw in Africa in the Seventies was either patronizing or paternalistic. The root of both words is the Latin “pater” which means: father. And the significance is very clear; we, white people, treated Africans as if they were our inferiors and/or our children.
The genesis of Enterprise Facilitation®
Enterprise Facilitation was born of two ideas:
Only go where invited
Help people do beautifully what they love doing
The first idea, of “only going where invited”, came from understanding the radical work of the German born economist Ernest Schumacher who, after working in Africa and Bangladesh in the sixties wrote “Small is Beautiful- Economics as if People Matter”(1973).
He famously wrote: “If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid.” The implication is that we should only work with people who sincerely want to be helped. The “first principle of aid” according to Schumacher is, therefore, respect. If you don’t respect people you cannot help them; it is as simple as that.
The second idea, “helping people do beautifully what they love to do” come to me from studying psychology and in particular that school of psychology known as “Growth Psychology” also called “Third Force” or “Humanistic Psychology”.
Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Alfred Adler, Eric Fromm and a host of post Freudian and post behaviorist psychologists, hence “Third” Force, advocate a person centered, respectful approach to working with clients that is steeped in the belief that healthy people are always striving for self improvement.
Healthy people, in other words, are self motivated and the role of the “helper” is to simply “remove the obstacles” that are stopping them from “growing” into the beautiful human being they want to become. But “what to grow into” is unique to the individual and has to do with “their” needs and aspirations not the helper, the program manager, the Aid Agency or even “society”.
The idea is that better individuals make for better husbands, wives, parents and citizens and that by facilitating personal growth, by helping people become proud of their achievements for instance, everybody benefits including the community at large.
Enterprise Facilitation is the result of thirty years community practice in facilitating the transformation of good business ideas into sustainable enterprises, but Facilitation, a la Carl Rogers, can be used in many other fields; from counseling to the delivery of education, social and health related services.
The practice of Enterprise Facilitation
Enterprise Facilitation starts with an invitation. Community leaders interested in helping their own people achieve their own dreams invite the Sirolli Institute to explain how they have to organize themselves to do so.
Enterprise Facilitation requires three things:
A committed small team of leaders willing to manage the project ( Management Team)
An Enterprise Facilitator paid to work with every willing person in the community
A group of volunteers to help the Enterprise Facilitator with local contacts and resources ( Resource Board)
We, at the Institute, train all people involved by simply sharing the best practices that we have accumulated over the past 25 years. We share the Do and Don’t of respectful facilitation in general and of “enterprise facilitation” in particular with special emphasis on the three elements of successful management.
We teach the Enterprise Facilitator the Trinity of Management® and we make sure that he or she passes on the knowledge to all clients willing to start a business.
The Trinity of Management says that to succeed in business three things have to be done beautifully:
The PRODUCT has to be beautiful
MARKETING has to be done beautifully
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT has to be done beautifully
Nobody has ever be born who equally and passionately loves to do these three things and the Enterprise Facilitator helps clients to understand their strengths and limitations and to team up with people who love to do what their clients hate doing in the business.
We teach that the death of the entrepreneurs is solitude and that successful entrepreneurs only ever do, in the business, what they love to do but that they surround themselves with people who love to do the rest!
Enterprise Facilitation and Aboriginal people
Australia
The first project of Enterprise Facilitation was pioneered in Esperance, Western Australia in 1985. From inception that first project had both Aboriginal Board members and clients and Grahame Tucker became the first Aboriginal Enterprise Facilitator ever. He was trained by Brian Willoughby, my first trainee, to help him in the Goldfields Region of Western Australia.
Among their first Aboriginal clients was a couple that purchased the Esperance Camping and Caravan Park.
Kangaroo Shooters, selling meat to the pet food industry and pelt to tanneries were also clients and so where wild flower pickers for the international dry flower industry.
After establishing two dozen Enterprise Facilitation projects on behalf of the Western Australian government we were asked to assist in the creation of the Aboriginal Enterprise Center that used the same facilitation methods pioneered in Esperance. One of my trainees, Micko O’Byrne, worked exclusively with Aboriginal clients and experienced great success doing so. His experiences can be heard on line visiting our video library online. www.sirolli.com
An interview with Sam Lovell, a tribal leader, entrepreneur and elder of the Aboriginal people in the Kimberly region of Western Australia can also be heard on line.
Over the year Aboriginal people in Australia had access to both community Enterprise Facilitation projects and specialized Aboriginal Enterprise agencies using the responsive method.
In 1989 we retrained 12 Aboriginal Development Officers in rural NSW and established Enterprise Facilitation projects in communities where the Aboriginal population was very high including Alice Spring, Tennant Creek, Katherine, Broome, Derby, Whyndom among many others.
At present the Sirolli Institute is developing, with Tim Trudgen, a project to “Facilitate Everything ” in Arnhem Land . Tim and his father Richard, author of the best seller book “Why warriors lie down and die” are trusted advisors of the Yolngu People of East Arnhem Land and we are exploring a very ambitious project to introduce the principles and practices of Facilitation to the Region.
New Zealand
Our first trainee in New Zealand was Neville Forman. Neville is part Maori with affiliation to the Ngai Tahu/Waitutu tribe. He is, at present the Chief Executive Officer of the Maori Tourism Council.
Starting in 1989 Neville first served his community of Manaia, South Taranaki and then, on behalf of the State government established 71 Enterprise Facilitation projects throughout New Zealand.
Furthermore the Enterprise Facilitation methodology was introduced by Neville to the Te Puni Kōkiri (Ministry of Māori Development).
During the years the Sirolli Institute has been invited to address many formal Maori gatherings and agencies including Te Puni Kokiri. In ( Yvonne help) a Maori delegation from Rotorua visited a number of Enterprise Facilitation projects in the USA and their experience inspired the development of a tribal Maori project at home.
USA
The Sirolli Institute was invited to address the Standing Rock Tribal Council in North Dakota and is, at present, waiting for a funding application to start a project there. Councilor Dave Archambault and his father Dr. Archambault are behind the push to introduce Enterprise Facilitation principles and practices to the Lakota tribe.
Lonnie James from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Spring in Central Oregon is a founding member of our Wy East Enterprise Facilitation project and his interview can be see at www.centraloregonmicroenterprises.com
During the years we have been invited to address many American Indian conferences including ( Yvonne help).
We also presented to the Samoan community in Honolulu where we were honored with an "Ie Toga”presented to us by Papalii Dr. Failautusi Avegalio, Director of the University of Hawaii Pacific Business Program on behalf of Honolulu' Mayor Muliufi Hanneman.
Canada
The Sirolli Institute has worked in various Provinces training and making presentations to both Metis communities and First Nation Canadians.
( Yvonne help)
Conclusions
Enterprise Facilitation applies to every man and every woman on earth. It is founded on the belief that fundamentally we have the same psychological needs and wants no matter where we live and our cultural background.
We all want to live, love, learn and leave a legacy and we want the same for our children.
But culture is different from each of us and we have to adapt our universal knowledge about humanity to the particular mores of each community. It is the same for medicine.
The human body is the same everywhere but in some cultures is not acceptable for a male doctor to treat a female patient and to guarantee that proper medical help is available to female patient, female doctors have to be trained.
Culture needs to be understood and respected and in Enterprise Facilitation we maintain cultural respect in a number of ways:
• Firstly we only go where invited
• When invited in the community we listen to local people
• We then train local bilingual people who can communicate our message back to the local people in their own language
• We train a local as the Enterprise Facilitator
• We adjust the practices of Enterprise Facilitation to local mores
• We train the trainers to introduce the methodology beyond the first project
Our first Enterprise Facilitation project in Africa is an example of all of the above. Our Enterprise Facilitator there is Fabrice Ilunga Mujinga a native who speaks Swahili, Kiluba, French and English. The training of Fabrice was started in the USA and is still been conducted remotely to avoid “the white people syndrome” i.e. having white people in Africa with all the usual cultural baggage that that implies.
Fabrice is on line to become a trainer of other African Enterprise Facilitators as soon as he finishes his apprenticeship in his own community and we intend to model what happened in the Eastern Congo in other continents and communities.
Enterprise Facilitation can become another economic development tool for Aboriginal communities who are determined to see their own people not only survive but prosper.
It is an incredibly cost effective way to make sure that not one once of intelligence is ignored or lost in your communities. No more death by solitude but a return to the tradition of helping each other. To hunt, to sing, to dance but also…to start a business!
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