AHED Client Timothy Dhimala discusses his market garden enterprise with an AHED Facilitator

2. Supporting motivation

Passion and motivation die hard.  We came to Galiwin’ku to support motivated individuals and groups 18 months ago. In that time, more than 18 different people and groups have engaged with us in enterprises they are actively developing, based on their own internal motivation and effort.  This is despite 30-40 years of  crisis, demoralisation and welfare disincentives in their community.  But without support, people give up.  Motivated individuals must be supported to overcome all the barriers involved in participating in the economy and running an enterprise.  They need help to find resources, supplies and the practical things that come with managing money, staff and analysing business decisions etc.  This is not much different to the needs of mainstream entrepreneurs.  However, for many remote Aboriginal people, support must also include learning the “white man’s” rules about how to start and run a corporate structure, eg. understanding the taxation system and the function of a corporation.  They also need help overcoming cultural barriers.  As many remote locals have English as a second language, they cannot communicate well with the mainstream and don’t know where to start to find even basic information about their needs.  Without support in these areas, they find themselves in the dark and isolated, unable to succeed and not knowing why.  This turns motivation into depression and other mental disorders.

Motivation cannot be created by outside influence.  Real, empowering education gives people the ability to find their vision, but passion is birthed within the person by their own soul. No one can insert it.  This makes it a valuable commodity indeed. So when and within whom it blossoms it must be supported.

Surprisingly, in 2008 we found that very few (almost no) services existed to provide such support to economic visionaries in Arnhem Land remote Aboriginal communities.  Programs were designed to help write business plans, and get loans or even small business grants, but mostly there was nothing designed to give no-strings-attached help to the everyday learning, information and resourcing needs of Indigenous people with big ideas.  This support to local visionaries is the second key to successful and sustainable economic development, because it enables those with the passion and internal motivation to overcome barriers to create new productive nodes in the local economy.

Let’s look at an example.  One of our clients many years ago was sucessfully running a lush tropical market garden, using treated effluent from the local sewage farm.  The effluent was being pumped onto his land, but he did not know that he could not use it under Balanda (Australian) law without a special license.  His access was shut off.  At this point no one offered to help him get the right licenses or teach him how to use the water safely.  Even while the local community garden  in town failed time and time again, no one asked how can we provide long term help to allow this visionary to maintain his once  flourishing garden.  He got help here and there, but when he came to us shortly after we started the AHED project in his community, he was successfully growing sugar cane, but his bananas were still failing for lack of nutrients.  He was also an old man now so he needed workers to help in the garden.  Thus supporting his motivation meant finding and importing a sugar cane juicer he could afford, helping him learn to run a market stall for his juice, bringing in expert advice on how to get nutrients with his low income, looking into the law on sewage reuse and working towards a reuse license, helping him find strategies to save for vehicles and equipment, and helping him find and motivate a workforce.  Despite some set backs his garden is gradually improving without the nutrients from the effluent and we are working toward him getting his license.  Despite his age and the barriers he has faced his motivation and activity in his enterprise has increased.

Supporting visionaries in their passion unfortunately is not as simple as diving in and helping everyone with anything they want.  If the support person ends up running around doing everything for the visionary, this is not empowerment, but rather, leads back to an unhealthy dependency and can undermine a person’s drive.  The visionary will likely creep into laziness at the hands of an overzealous program or supporter.  The supporter  can also get into the danger of  managing the client and their vision, which strips their sense of control from the client and also ruins motivation. So, support must focus on keeping the visionary informed, educated, and the principal party in all decisions. We must focus on supporting a person’s motivation by removing the real barriers they face and leaving the barriers that they have the ability to change themselves.  By this process the short term success will not be shown in statistical outcomes, but in the direct effort the local visionary/ies put in, and this effort should well exceed that of the dominant culture supporters. In the example above, our gardener today proves to have as much or more motivation in his enterprise than when he started, even though his workforce failed him many times and his garden was lost to a bush fire on one ocassion.  Still, his motivation is demonstrated by his increasing commitment to put in hours and effort every day to improving his garden.

To support motivation for economic growth in Indigenous communities, we must do so through mechanisms that allow the entrepreneur to do the hard yards – to allow them to fail and get back up. Motivation can only be supported if the models for economic and enterprise development value the person and human process over the economic outcomes their enterprise might achieve.  The result is not rapid economic growth and the sudden rescuing of these Aboriginal economies (a dangerous hope), but it is gradual, sustainable growthm with the potential for the exponential expansion of these economies in the long term as people’s hopes and hearts turn mistakes into learnings – and finally success.

See the AHED project website for more information about the model we are using to provide this support without encouraging dependency.

Every day you find yourself standing at the bottom of a cliff. And every day you find that a car or bus has fallen over the cliff filled with people causing many people to be killed or injured. How should the city respond to this? First of all the people from the city send medics to treat the injured and get them to hospital and the families, priests and labourers come to bury the dead. But every day there is another lot of deaths. The city is so busy caring for the injured and the dead that it is some time before the city does anything to stop the carnage. Finally the city decides to put up a rail on the cliff to stop cars from falling over. This works for some time but soon the rail breaks from the pounding it receives and in addition to this you notice that the day the rail broke several vehicles tumbled over the edge with it. Someone who works in the mayors office came up with a great idea. If all the cars and buses had wings then they could glide safely over the edge. No body told the Mayor however that bus drivers don’t know how to fly a bus and the wings were a real problem for space on the roads. Soon the city has had enough they say well no one shall travel on the mountain any more. So they put up road blocks all along their side of the mountain and they tried to force those on the mountain to live in the city. This slows the carnage but as more people come to live in the city the problems starts to increase again. Still cars and buses fall over the edge. The city has forgotten that people have built their lives on the mountain and they have not looked carefully to see which road is killing people. Soon the people realise that it isn’t right that the citizens can’t travel to relatives or live on the mountain that has been home to people for centuries, because of one road. What can be done, how can this be resolved?

Standing at the bottom of this cliff you realise that the solution to the problem depends on what is happening on top of the cliff. Is it a dangerous corner up there? Do people get lost and the road leads them over the cliff? Are there bandits in bulldozers up there waiting to push people off? What might it be? You head off to get to the top.

Everything that happens from the edge of the cliff till the cars hit the ground are symptoms that there is something happening on top of that cliff which is the cause. The question that needs to be asked is ‘Why?’, but one’s perspective needs to change so that one can look beyond the carnage and the cliff to the causes happening above and out of sight in order to find the real answers.

The story ends like this.

When you search for and find the road that runs near that cliff, when you watch the cars to see who falls, when you talk to the drivers who use the road, ..then you realise that people only crash at particular times of the day. When you drive that road carefully, at those time you see that drivers are blinded by the sun that reflects from the city below at those times as they reach the crest. They cannot see the road as they come to the bend near the cliff.

On top of the cliff, the cause is not the mountain or the people on the mountain, or the cliff, or drivers, these are all just part of that place, the mostly immovable realities. In this story the cause of the carnage is the blinding of the drivers by reflected sun light, which is a result of the conditions created on that road by a combination of factors, the crest in the road, the corner near the cliff, the white roofs and windows of the city, the position of the sun in the sky.

There are a lot of analogies in this story with the history of programs and policies designed to help solve the problems being faced by Indigenous Australians over the years. Consider them if you will, but consider this now. If the fall from the cliff represents the gap in life expectancy, disease rates and the failures in education in Aboriginal communities, how do we look beyond the carnage and the patch up measures needed to treat the wounded to find the cause – that which is happening out of sight beyond the top of the cliff. For the problems found in Aboriginal Communities we must look carefully at what community members experience in common that leads to these problems. Furthermore, do these common experiences have other more foundational real causes which are not part of immovable realities. If there are deeper questions then we must ask again, ” Why are they experiencing this?” We must keep asking this ‘Why?’ until we get to the ultimate causes. Metaphorically, we climb the cliff and get beyond the carnage, by following a trail of ‘Whys?’. The other way to change our perspective from symptoms, to a view from the the top of the cliff, is to enter the world of those who face and experience these problems, not so much the wounded, but in particular we must communicate with the experts among the people themselves, the bus drivers trying guide the people safely along the mountain road. And we must test our answers, not adopt answers based on assumed realities. As you can see its not simple to look for causes and it is often easier to just treat the symptoms in the short term, but if that is all we do the carnage will continue and the ‘Gap’ will remain.

In the next part to this subject I will analyse some specific solutions offered by Government and consider what perspective they are using and why