It is essential that The Gathering Place is able to operate as an autonomous organisation – an Aboriginal organisation, run by Aboriginal people and in ways appropriate to their community. Since they began in March 2017, The Gathering Place has operated in an auspice Agreement with Berry Street which ensures support to the Aboriginal community in self-determination while The Gathering Place works towards becoming incorporated and standing independently.
A key part of The Gathering Place’s way of working is the ‘open door’ approach. As one team member explained, “let’s open the doors and see what the people need. [It’s] no good us telling them what they need.” While The Gathering Place’s core work is with local Aboriginal communities, their open door means no one is turned away. People from a range of cultural backgrounds, who might not be able to access services for cultural safety and other reasons, can find support at The Gathering Place. In effect this means the few funds available are stretched further.
Many people who come to The Gathering Place are living with multiple intersecting vulnerabilities such as lacking permanent or safe accommodation, poor mental health and involvement in the justice system. In order to support these intersectional issues, staff have strong relationships with a number of different organisations and are networked with local service providers to enable culturally appropriate solutions to complex problems. This may mean continuing to check in on people they know are vulnerable or making arrangements so service providers can come to The Gathering Place to meet someone in a Yarning Room, a safe place to talk: ‘a gathering place in our mob is like a healing place’.
The Gathering Place’s open door approach constantly comes up against the ‘closed doors’ of bureaucratic systems that do not allow for the flexibility that The Gathering Place’s approach requires. One team member told us, “We do it totally different. They didn’t know how to categorise it.” The issues and impacts that The Gathering Place deal with on an everyday basis are beyond one government department and require a whole-of-government response to address these complex community needs.
In terms of resourcing, The Gathering Place does not have on-going funding and relies on short term government grants. This makes long-term planning almost impossible. One of the issues with meeting government funding criteria is that The Gathering Place prioritises the needs that emerge within their community so cannot necessarily determine these ahead of time.
A key enabler of self-determination is the transfer of power and resources back to community. Securing long-term, flexible funding arrangements would allow The Gathering Place to be autonomous, sustainable and able to make decisions about the most effective ways to meet the needs of their community, celebrate strengths and build capacity.
The Gathering Place shares many of the features of effective place-based approaches identified in our review of the literature – among them, a commitment to power sharing and self-determination, and a shift from managerial, transactional service delivery approaches to ‘movement building’ demonstrating deep listening of local lived experiences and matched deep hearing that address community-defined priorities.
