ChangeFest NT21 brought people from around Australia to Palmerston on 8-10 June to celebrate community-led change.
Grow Well Live Well supported the Palmerston Indigenous Network to host the national festival brought to the Northern Territory by a dedicated group of organisations working on the project since 2018.
Grow Well Live Well addressed participation barriers for community members by sponsoring 10 Palmerston locals to attend the event and working with Metro Mini Bus to provide culturally appropriate transport.
The Palmerston community led the creation of new collaborations at the festival that aim to achieve national system change. This included a movement to transform juvenile detention into cultural healing centres.
How can we work together in Palmerston to build on this momentum?
One approach to creating change is Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), where you look at what is strong in the community instead of what is wrong. Using this model, the building blocks to make change happen are:
- Skills of local residents
- Power of local social networks
- Government, businesses and non-government organization resources
- Local community resources
- The stories of our shared lives.
Learn more
Watch Cormac Russell’s TED Talk.
Register for NTCOSS and Jeder Institute’s Introduction to Asset Based Community Development workshop.
Hear from ChangeFest NT21 Participants
People travelled to Palmerston from around Australia to participate in this year’s ChangeFest. But Changefest isn’t just an event, it builds on an energy for change that is already in the community, and ramps it up. Hear how the festival inspired participants to work together to achieve change.
“I think the biggest thing I have learnt at ChangeFest has just been the incredible power of people… and the importance of community-led organisations because they are representing the people who need those services or that change the most and I think that’s the most authentic change you can have.”
“The connections I have made are with peoples hearts and souls. I felt the spirit and the culture within everyone that was there and that attended and I felt that the love was real. That’s what I felt and that’s what I learned.”
“At ChangeFest NT21 I am feeling a sense of system change through people, place and country. The feeling that I am getting is more of a collaborative approach of people from non-Indigenous and Indigenous backgrounds coming together to create a system change for the better and empowerment of Aboriginal people from a place-based approach.”
Stay tuned for Grow Well Live Well’s video story about ChangeFest NT21 and how Palmerston can work together to build on the success of the festival.
