Last month, I spent a day in Melbourne at a training called Leading Co-Design in Complex Systems, facilitated by Dr Emma Blomkamp . I work in co-design a lot, but am constantly learning, often from honest reflections in our team on what we could have done better. The session gave me space to slow down, learn and think more carefully about different aspects of co-design. Undertaking this training with Emma and other attendees gave me the opportunity to look through different

“No single agency created these harms, and no single agency can undo them.” Jumbunna Institute Review, July 2025' If you’re passionate about co-design, community engagement, systems reform work, the public sector and policy, then this is the article for you to be across this week. I’m doing a clean-up of my laptop over the holiday break. It was in that state that I couldn’t even make out the picture of my kids behind the endless file thumbnails on my desktop. I am at the pool

I have some rare time waiting for my 10-year-old son today, so I got to read; that reading turned into thinking, and here we are with some quick writing. Like much of my writing, this is often the first cut. I'm too time-poor these days to polish too much, so if grammar and formatting are important for you, here is your cue to switch off. But if you like a bit of a yarn, like you were sitting with me at this cafe, then this might be the yarn for you. Time will tell! The origi

A recent Guardian article (Khalil, 16 September 2025) noted that the youth population in regional NSW has fallen by 12% over the past two years, with even sharper declines in some hotspots. This is in contrast to the narrative of growing youth crime in NSW. BOSCAR reported that in these past two years, there had been an increase of young people in custody by 34%. This was a result of the state government announcing tougher bail laws for youth in 2024. These laws were extended

This week both myself and Kuyan Mitchell were invited onto the 13YARN podcast by the team to yarn about all things men's mental health and wellbeing. We got to link up with Dennis Moran and Alan Heath (Cottle) from 13 YARN. It was an opportunity to reflect in the days leading up about my own experiences with mental health personally, as a trauma survivor and also as a child of someone with a complex diagnosed mental health condition. Our communities feel like they are in an e

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963, Martin Luther King wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate… who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom…” More tha

NAIDOC is now past. But I am here reflecting as we wrap a recent community fundraiser where we have been so lucky to achieve our fundraising goal that I thought, what better way to wrap the whirlwind of the past couple of days than to reflect on the key messages you need to remember from this year's theme as well as share some top takeaways from a recent webinar I co-delivered with Dixie Lee Crawford  from Nganya. Strength was a part of this year's theme, and for me, my messa

Sam’s NAIDOC reflection  this week felt like a call-and-response. These are my thoughts, as I find time in my own way to reflect on and honour the significance of NAIDOC week. I’m choosing to share it, because I know it can be difficult sometimes to envision some of the outcomes here that we’re being invited to imagine. Especially when we're often without evidence or example in our day-to-day lives of the types of positive shifts necessary to bring about the systemic transfor

I was 11 years old when I committed my first crime. When I was 12 years old, I was chased by police after riding in a stolen car and hid out at my neighbour’s house, I’ll never forget when the police came looking for us - my neighbour, a 13 year old girl at the time, refused multiple times to let the police in when they ever so politely asked if they could come in and have a look around (sweating bullets). I was listening from the top of the stairs and was so scared, I hid ou

Connection. Everyone seeks it. When I was a kid, I only every remember an Acknowledgement of Country being delivered in the place of where a welcome wasn’t able to be. Today, we see the modern adoption of this protocol moving into daily practices of schools, workplaces and events, sometimes multiple times throughout the same event. It is something that has shifted from what I remember as a kid, the Acknowledgement of Country aside from its significance Culturally in terms of

Prelude: The following content involves information that is sensitive and which some readers may find triggering, please continue at your own discretion and seek out support if needed, we have included come links below. Impact Policy would like to highlight that it is National Missing Persons Week, held July 31st - August 5th to raise awareness of the significant issues surrounding Missing Persons each year and those people whose whereabouts continue to remain unknown. Specif

Mainstream education is failing to meet the needs of a growing percentage of young people. I coordinated a flexible learning program and work alongside people that have led flexible learning schools. We are deeply passionate about their significance for our communities; we have seen them work and have seen the impact of them on communities where they have grown. I personally attended a flexible learning program when I was 14, my sister attended flexible learning program in he

To borrow the words of The Westerman Jilya Institute for Indigenous Mental Health today: "The ‘system’ has been built by non-Indigenous people, to meet the requirements of non-Indigenous people, and is delivered to Indigenous people by, frequently, non Indigenous people". This quote struck out at me today largely cause of my reflections today of the evaluation into the Youth Koori Courts, there is a plethora of evidence locally and abroad of the success of programs and servi

The power of video, story telling and positioning our old people and communities is quickly becoming central to discussing inclusion within platforms like conferences and corporate functions and events. A few years ago, pre-COVID world. I developed the program for the NSW Aboriginal Languages Gathering, an event that saw over 150 language stakeholders across the state come together over three days. It was an amazing event, extremely successful and was the result of lots of gr