First Nations Community Empowerment Framework
A Framework to support whole school communities to work together to build a positive school environment that will improve student engagement and outcomes.
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First Nations Community Empowerment Framework
Schools, particularly in remote areas, play an essential role as a community hub. Working together with an empowered community can build a positive school environment that will improve student engagement and outcomes by responding to local needs and contexts.
The Stronger Smarter Institute has developed a First Nations Community Empowerment Framework which provides a set of processes to support whole school communities to work together to improve outcomes for students.
The Framework looks at ways to shift the power towards community decision making and community ownership of strategies and outcomes for student engagement, attendance and educational outcomes. It focuses on what the community and the school can achieve together.
While the Framework focusses on schools in remote communities, the principles and processes of the Framework are equally relevant to regional and metropolitan school communities.
Bringing the Spheres Together
The Framework is a rethinking and reframing seeking to move away from deficit thinking and take a strength-based approach that recognises, nurtures and builds on existing strengths, skills and resources within the whole school community. The Framework uses Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and is underlain by the Stronger Smarter Approach (SSA).
The SSA considers the three spheres of the Personal, Community, and School. When schools can change from the traditional view of ‘moving the community into the school space’ and instead shift the school to meet the Community Sphere, this can achieve a true partnership of shared aspirations and achievements.
Ways of Working
Any Community Empowerment project needs to begin in the Personal Sphere to start to build a space where the whole school community, school leadership, educators, other school staff, parents and carers, local organisations, and local Elders, has a belief that their voice will be heard, and they can make a difference.
The Framework describes the Mindset and Ways of Working required for successful implementation. It uses the ideas of High-Expectations Relationships to shift thinking beyond cultural assumptions (often based in deficit thinking) to a more realistic and deeper understanding of the context of individual students and their families. This ‘mindset shift’ unlocks confidence to challenge the status quo and opens up the possibilities for the whole school community to challenge their beliefs around what is possible for students and the school and their personal role in contributing to this. This process requires the space and time for new learning.
School Cultural Responsiveness
In the School Sphere, success in Community Empowerment requires a commitment to assess the cultural responsiveness of the school. This is an assessment of the collective school Mindset and Ways of Working to ensure they provide the foundation for successful Community Empowerment and co-design processes with the community.
True co-design involves a shift from the school or government organisation being the lead or controller of a project to being an enabler to ensure conditions for community to share ideas and take control of strategies.