Maranguka (‘caring for others’)
Maranguka, which…[means]…‘caring for others’ in Ngemba language, is a model of Indigenous self-governance which empowers community to coordinate the right mix and timing of services through an Aboriginal community owned and led, multi-disciplinary team working in partnership with relevant government and non-government agencies.1
The remote, isolated New South Wales (AUSTRALIA) outback town of Bourke has a population of 2465. Bourke is so remote that there is a saying in Australia—Out back of Bourke!—which signifies that somewhere, someplace, is really remote and isolated. A place that would be really difficult to get to. If that is what you wanted to do. (Why?). Remoteness and isolation in the Australian context also usually signifies heat, desert or arid country, mining and or agricultural (pastoral) economic activity, and, often, a lack of the resources and opportunities that are more usually available in bigger country towns and cities. Remoteness and isolation often, then, also tends to signify a range of social, economic, cultural and political problems that accompany a relative lack of resources and opportunities. And, at the start of the twenty-first century, the historical legacy of more than 200 years as a colonial, settler society means that these social, economic, cultural and political problems that accompany a relative lack of resources and opportunities in remote, isolated communities in Australia are overwhelmingly visited upon and experienced by Aboriginal communities. And in these communities, young people tend to be over-represented in these problem spaces. As problems.
In Bourke, 30% of the current population (762 people) are from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background (the Australian Bureau of Statistics category for identifying and counting Australia’s First Nations/Indigenous populations). The website for the Maranguka Just Reinvest project in Bourke notes that as a consequence of ‘past government Aboriginal specific policies such as forced relocations and removals in the 1920s, today there are 21 different Tribal Groups living in Bourke’ Just Reinvest NSW (2019). The median age of Bourke’s Indigenous population is 25 years. More than one third of this population are children and young people aged up to 14 years old.
The Maranguka Justice Reinvestment project emerged from the ways in which various sections of the Bourke community were ‘concerned about the number of Aboriginal families experiencing high levels of social disadvantage and rising crime’. The Maranguka project claims that: ‘Over $4 million each year is spent locking up children and young people in Bourke’. And that ‘Local community members have had enough’. This historical, and ongoing, legacy of colonialism, isolation, lack of resources and opportunities—made real in the health and well-being challenges faced by young Aboriginal people, their dis-engagement from, and often lack of participation in, compulsory and post compulsory education, and their entanglement in the juvenile justice systems—takes on a particular, though often repeated, character in places such as Bourke. According to Alistair Ferguson, the local manager of the Maranguka project:
Kids were being taken away. Too many of my community were being locked up. Families were being shattered, again and again…And this was happening despite the huge amount of money government was channelling through a large number of service organisations in this town.So we started talking together. We decided that a new way of thinking and doing things needed to be developed that helped our children. We decided it was time for our community to move beyond the existing service delivery model…a model which had clearly failed.…so…together we could look at what’s happening in our town and why Aboriginal disadvantage was not improving, and together we could build a new accountability framework which wouldn’t let our kids slip through.
Our interest at this point is with the approach, the methodology, that the local community adopted as they sought to productively engage the challenges that Aboriginal young people were facing in Bourke. The Maranguka project is framed by a methodology called the collective impact approach.
Collective impact is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a complex social problem. The underlying premise of collective impact is that alone, no single individual or organisation can create large-scale, lasting social change. “Silver bullet” solutions to systemic social problems do not exist; they cannot be solved by simply scaling or replicating one organisation or program. Strong organisations are necessary but not sufficient for large-scale social change.2
This methodology, which is similar in a number of ways to the socio-ecological, action research approach that we will discuss at various points in what follows, meant that:
The first stage of the justice reinvestment project has focused on building trust between community and service providers, identifying community priorities and circuit breakers, and data collection.
These sorts of approaches require developing, as we will discuss later, surprising alliances, and thinking disruptively about seemingly wicked problems:
Regular meetings have been held with Bourke community members and visiting and/or local representatives from most government departments. Government attendance and ongoing commitment towards exploring alternative means of service delivery during this time has gone a long way towards building a better relationship between community members and the government.The local community has spent a lot of time thinking about how to reduce offending and make the community safer. They have identified and are in the process of implementing, in partnership with local service providers, a number of cross-sector initiatives or ‘circuit breakers’ to achieve this, including three justice circuit breakers addressing breaches of bail, outstanding warrants and the need for a learner driver program in Bourke.
Various data sources have been drawn on to identify problems, provide evidence of the outcomes from programs and interventions, and in relation to ‘issues’ that, at first glance, might not seem connected to a particular problem. This data includes information on such things as:
young person’s passage through the criminal justice system in Bourke and how the community is fairing [sic] in terms of offending, diversion, bail, sentencing and punishment, and re-offending rates. Data has also been collected on the community’s outcomes in early life, education, employment, housing, healthcare, child safety, and health outcomes including mental health and drugs and alcohol.
In an article in The Guardian in 2018 Lorena Allam (2018) wrote an account of the Maranguka project in which she provided some context for the ‘need’ for such a program—‘Bourke is one of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia, with high long-term unemployment and family violence, and the highest rate of juvenile convictions in NSW’. Allam spoke with some key people in the community about the challenges faced by Aboriginal young people in Bourke, and the opportunities that a project such as this offered for disentangling some of the threads and trajectories that resulted in so many of the problems that confounded the communities in Bourke. Much of this account, and the account found on the Just Reinvest website point to the apparent success of this sort of disruption to ‘business as usual’. For example, Allam reports that between 2015 and 2017 the rates for various crimes in Bourke fell by:
- 1.18% for major offences
- 2.34% for non-domestic violence-related assaults
- 3.39% for domestic violence-related assaults
- 4.39% for drug offences
- 5.35% for driving offences
In addition, rates of ‘reoffending also dropped significantly’. There was, as one example, ‘a 72% reduction in the number of people under 25 arrested for ...