The day before

I’m on the brink of a 30 life crisis and have become completely panicked that I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life. So I decided: if unsure what to do, then just do good. And that is why I’m now packing my bags to make a last-minute contribution to society from my 20s. You never know, I might even get some clarity along the way!

Tomorrow I’m heading north to Cape York for a six-week secondment with Jawun, an organisation that facilitates indigenous corporate partnerships.

Big corporates often want to help, but don’t know where to start. Indigenous organisations often want to deliver innovative projects, but don’t have the resources.

That’s where Jawun comes in and provides the missing link – matching skilled secondees from corporate Australia with individual projects and deliverables in indigenous organisations.

It’s more than a team taking the afternoon off work to paint a fence at Glebe Public School – these secondments are making a real difference.  

My bank was a founding partner of Jawun over a decade ago, and since then has sent almost 600 secondees to deliver projects and share skills with organisations that need a hand up, not a hand out. Having previously worked for a multinational pharma company that didn’t do anything for Indigenous Australia, I think my bank is pretty cool for doing this.

Cape York Agenda

When I was back home in Forster one weekend, I was explaining the Jawun model to my aunty Patsy. She’s spent a lot of time working with Indigenous Australians and said that indigenous corporate partnerships have Noel Pearson written all over it. And she’s right.

Noel is the patron of Jawun, one of many organisations working together to deliver the Cape York Agenda: the most ambitious attempt to achieve social and economic reform in an Indigenous region in Australia. The Welfare Reform program is a key component of this, which is all about moving from passive welfare dependence to engagement in the real economy.

Here’s Noel talking in his convincingly evangelical way about Welfare Reform:

Our struggle for rights is not over and must continue — but we must also struggle to restore our traditional values of responsibility. We have to be as forthright and unequivocal about our responsibilities as we are about our rights — otherwise our society will fall apart...

We do not have a right to passive welfare — indeed we can no longer accept it. We have a right to a real economy, we have a right to build a real economy.

It makes sense to me, but seems to be an ambitious goal. Welfare Reform has had its fair share of media attention, so I’m looking forward to getting up there to see what it’s all about … and hopefully contributing something along the way.