The numbers of Aboriginal children in Out-of-Home Care and Protective Orders are increasing and the Footprints for Success (Footprints) Early Years Project has a number of families under the scrutiny of DHHS Child Protection. The Footprints project has had an exponential growth in Aboriginal women seeking assistance, referrals, and advocacy to keep their children at home and in school. For example, the Footprints program began in 2018 with 20 families and in 2019/2020 have 70 families on their database who they work with on a regular basis.
The Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC) is located in the west of Melbourne, and it has an increasing number of Aboriginal women (over 70 in 2020) many of whom have children in child protection and are recidivists in the system. The Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency opened its Werribee (2017) and then Melton (2019) offices and are still increasing their staffing and programming to cope with the demand for their child intervention, family therapy, and cultural strengthening programs. These issues have been understood as stemming from what some have conceptualised as historical trauma and ongoing structural violence (e.g. Kirmayer, Gone, & Moses, 2014). Approaches aimed at cultural revitalisation and strengthening have been advocated as central to healing (Aboriginal Healing Foundation) and thus responding to issues such as these.
The Aboriginal women actively engaged in the Footprints project will form the community arm of this research and use the recently opened Wunggurrwil Dhurrung Centre, a safe gathering place for cultural strengthening programs in Wyndham Vale. This project responds to the statistics outlined and the increasing program delivery tensions as well as the opportunity presented by the fact that the location has the highest growth rate of Aboriginal population in Victoria. This collaborative culturally informed project is timely, and will use the opportunity to build a coordinated and community led response to the issues faced by Aboriginal families, women and children.
A key aim of the project is to increase Aboriginal women’s healing, connection to relevant culture-specific programs and practices for identity-making, cultural strengthening and reclamation; aimed at keeping families together. The program will use a community based participatory framework and Indigenous methodologies, similar to other best practice models that have been effectively used in strengthening Aboriginal Communities in the Wheatbelt area of Western Australia by the Community Arts network (Quayle & Sonn, 2019) as well as programs such as Kungas that use arts informed practice delivered by Northern Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency and the Healing Foundation.
Within our approach there will be various phases including, building relationships, gathering stories, engaging in consciousness raising, learning through art making and Aboriginal cultural knowledge, making (re)connections with families and services, and consolidating culturally grounded Aboriginal led programs and interventions. Through storytelling methodology and community arts practice the program will foster engagement, dialogue, and the development of new insights into the opportunities for cultural revitalisation and resilience to have an impact on Aboriginal women’s lives and the responses required to address the issues they face.