Our Institute is holds three Strategic Priority Areas that guide our projects, programs and research.

These priority areas emerged through engagement with First Nations women, girls and gender-diverse peoples over the life of Wiyi Yani U Thangani. Projects, programs and research often overlap across these priorities, reflecting our broader systems change approach.

Explore our Projects and Programs Explore our Research and Resources

1. Support and amplify systems change

Women, everywhere, in all our diversity, come together to drive socio-economic change for the benefit of our children and families experiencing structural marginalisation, inequalities and all forms of discrimination. We navigate trauma and conflict in our communities, institutions and across broader societal structures by drawing on knowledges, cultural practices and lived experience, with a firm commitment to the wellbeing of our children and families. Within current structures women are using tools of peacebuilding, transforming conflict in communities and broader systems, by creating the conditions conducive to peace for all human and non-human beings to thrive.

The Institute will lead, collaborate and encourage work across the following:

Catalyse change processes on the ground

Support the growth of women’s gatherings and collectiveactions, across states and territories

Develop a model elevating voices and movements from theground to national, and international spaces

Surface women’s peacebuilding knowledges to create the tools,methods and structures to drive lasting change.

Pathways from the ground up

Design a human rights ‘fellowship’ program for women toattend and coordinate priorities for major UN forums

Develop a ‘change makers’ program in collaboration with GIWL supportingcommunity leaders to turn change work into evidence for impact

Collaboration with decision-makers

Deliver training for policymakers

Explore community policymaking

Develop First Nations gender-responsive funding methods/frameworkwith private bodies and philanthropists

Engage with Australian Civic society

Sharing First Nations gender justice stories of life and collectiveactions

Opening up spaces of truth-telling

Exploring approaches for connection, conflict resolution, andhealing with non-indigenous people.

2. Strengthen the social and economic fabric with care and healing

Care is at the heart of our societies andcultural responsibilities—It binds together family, kin, culture, and Country, sustaining the social fabric across generations. Yet within current discriminatory punitive systems, women must provide extensive care work to combat systemic harms and respond to intergenerational trauma. Supporting our care work through fair remuneration, strong civic rights, and supportive rather than interventionist systems, can free us from financial insecurity, while creating conditions for economic empowerment. When our interconnected cycles of care are truly recognised and enabled, they create flourishing ecosystems where all people have dignity, respect, access to caring structures and have the belief to pursue and realise dreams.

The Institute will lead, collaborate and encourage work across the following:

Expand research on care-work

Support research collaborations and First Nations PhD candidates to explore different forms of care-work

Unite researchers and practitioners to develop care resourcesfor communities and carers

Reimagine systems through care

Work with women to co-create models of holistic care withincommunity settings, this may include supports for carers

Collaborate and advocate to shift uncaring policies andpunitive approaches toward caring conditions

Centre care for climate just existences

Define and explore how care practices contribute to socio-economicand environmental sustainability

Create national and international collectives/alliances of womenleading holistic sustainability work

Design process and forums to inform climate policy and globalgoals and settings with a gender sustainability lens

Measure and Value Care-work

Create frameworks and approaches to measure the time taken tocare, and contribution to societal and economic wellbeing

Develop culturally-responsive economic empowerment metricsaligning with care work

Track policies supporting care or diminishing/adding a burdenof care

3. Develop research and data approaches for nourishing and applying generational knowledges

Our women hold inherited knowledge systems carrying cultural practices, and ways of knowing sustaining our communities for millennia. Embedding data sovereignty into new and emerging technologies, designed to beused for us, enhances our capabilities to record, protect and access our knowledges and stories. The creation of ethical data tools that respect our right to control our information, opens new possibilities for how we can analyse, evaluate and self-determine the way ahead. It gives us the ability to track and measure local to global change based on our visions for the future. These technologies can create both digital and physical spaces where our data constructs the spaces and ways in which we interact, teach, share and learn how to be more truthful, engaged and embracing of others in this world.

The Institute will lead, collaborate and encourage work across the following:

Create an interactive data storage resource

Convene a coalition to determine a digital futures agenda andthe scope and nature of the resource

Develop a data management and use framework for First Nationswomen

Establish pilot sites for community data collection, storage,analyses and decision-making

Change Agenda National Dashboard

Develop gender just indicators and measures for change

Design and establish an interactive approach to tracking progressagainst the Change Agenda

Run a national summit to review and inform the nationalgender just agenda.

The Institute's physical space

Design a space that honours and shares wisdom, knowledges andstories

Explore how to blend the digital and physical to forminteractive and embracing learning environments

Assess and enhance the Institute's impact

Create measurement, evaluation and learning tools to monitorand inform the work of the Institute

Deliver workshops on those tools to support the creation of First Nations gender-responsive workplaces, programs and policies.

our Strategic priorities

Our Institute is holds three Strategic Priority Areas that guide our projects, programs and research.

1. Support and amplify systems change

The Institute will lead, collaborate and encourage work across the following:

2. Strengthen the social and economic fabric with care and healing

The Institute will lead, collaborate and encourage work across the following:

3. Develop research and data approaches for nourishing and applying generational knowledges

The Institute will lead, collaborate and encourage work across the following: