In further support and commitment to Indigenous women’s entrepreneurship, the Menzies Foundation is delighted to announce a partnership with Global collective change maker, the Collective Change Lab, focused on innovative collective healing and trauma informed systems change approaches.
Founded by John Kania, the Collective Change Lab’s approach to trauma healing involves understanding and addressing the root causes of trauma within communities. Through facilitating collective healing practices, this work aims to transform individual and community experiences, fostering resilience and leadership within Indigenous communities across Australia and New Zealand.
“This work recognises trauma as a critical barrier to community and systemic transformation, particularly when healing trauma is neglected as part of collective systems change efforts”. She continued, “When communities struggle to make progress and systems seem immobilised, the primary cause of this stagnation, resistance, blockages, defensiveness, and denial is often unresolved and unintegrated trauma within the system”.
– Liz Gillies, CEO, Menzies Foundation
As a key deliverable of this important work, in June 2024, a 2.5-day in-person gathering of the System Healing Collective took place in Queensland, aiming to:
- strengthen relationships and trust across the forming Collective
- share healing practices and experience collective healing together
- explore and build shared collective healing practice
- understand and agree on opportunities to test and try collective healing practices in communities, networks and systems
In the coming months, we look forward to sharing outcomes of this gathering, including recommendations for future systems healing work which will inform the Foundation’s Indigenous Women’s Entrepreneurship platform.
