An evolving model, Cultural governance serves as a bridge between corporate and clinical structures, ensuring that support and services remain safe, compliant and culturally secure. Creating a unified framework that supports quality of service, a cultural umbrella over everything from clinical expertise to corporate responsibilities.
The First Nations Cultural Governance Framework functions as a bridge between Western group frameworks and the collective protocols of First Nations Communities. It moves beyond tokenism, holding space for First Nations ways of knowing and deciding, shifting relationships to sustainable partnerships.
Cultural governance compliments corporate and clinical governance by embedding shared values, psychological safety and ethical behaviours in organisational fabric. It ensures strategic oversight and clinical frameworks are actively lived rather than just compliance exercises.
The CGF was created through a relationship-led and iterative process rather than a fixed sequence of consultations. It drew on trusted new and long-term relationships with First Nations Communities, Elders, Leaders, academics, frontline staff and people with diverse lived experiences. Their guidance was considered, tested and reflected in successive changes to the framework. This approach ensured that cultural authority, local protocols and Community priorities shaped the model from the beginning, rather than being added after organisational decisions had already been made.
Organisations seeking to develop their own cultural governance framework can adapt this process by beginning with relationships rather than predetermined documents.
They should identify the relevant Traditional Custodians, Elders, knowledge holders, First Nations staff and Community-controlled organisations; agree on culturally safe ways to participate; allow time for trust, reflection and repeated revision; compensate cultural expertise appropriately, and establish clear pathways for Community advice to influence executive decisions.
The resulting framework should reflect local Nations, Communities and organisational responsibilities, rather than copy another organisation’s model.
What doesn’t work is a rushed process, expecting decisions and meetings to be quick. Trust takes time to build. Reflecting on advice and making continual changes takes time.
This framework is the product of 18 months consultation and years of trusted collaboration, built with Community, not for Community.
Certain populations face deliberate systemic barriers to participation.
Overcoming barriers that exclude marginalised individuals by conducting meetings in community spaces will enable you to actively engage the expertise of individuals with lived experience. Every voice matters.
Each CGF provides a culturally accountable way to make decisions, design services and maintain relationships with the Communities we serve. It strengthens the flow of advice from Community and First Nations staff to leaders, clarifies expectations for executive accountability, supports locally responsive service delivery, and reduces the risk of cultural governance becoming a stand-alone reconciliation activity.
Its value is realised when cultural governance is embedded across every stream of the organisation, and when progress and decisions are reported back to Community.
Executive approval is essential, but approval alone is not the outcome. We have shifted our focus from permission to action. Having support through Executive, including active sponsorship of cultural governance and reconciliation initiatives, speaks to the high priority of a cultural framework. This endorsement is a critical dependency of our cultural safety initiatives. Without it, we lack the formal authority, accountability structures and resource allocation required to effectively embed and sustain culturally safe practices across operations.
True success will include Each management - at all levels - responsible for acting on the direction provided and embedding cultural governance in business as usual across every facet of the organisation. Leaders will report on progress and share significant decisions arising from the framework with the Communities we serve, collaborating with First Nations Advisors and First Nations Staff Council. This creates an ongoing cycle of advice, action, accountability and reporting back.
The Each First Nations Advisory panel is structured as multi-state because First Nations culture comprises of hundreds of language groups and Nations.
Individual state-based Elders representing Men’s and Women’s business make a Nations advisory panel across Queensland, New South Wales, ACT, Victoria and Tasmania, guiding and making recommendations in line with distinct localised cultural protocols, Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) protection and Community governance. Elders are financially compensated for their time.
The Each First Nations Staff Council is First Nations led and acts as a bridge between Each and First Nations Communities — building trust, improving service delivery and supporting reconciliation deliverables. This council channels concerns and insight from First Nations staff and customers directly to appropriate decision makers.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been protecting and sustaining Communities, Country and culture since time immemorial. Our connection is sacred, passed down to new generations from our Ancestors before us. Our strength, resilience and ways of being, knowing and doing are reflected in Each’s First Nations Cultural Governance Framework and commitment to reconciliation.
Our organisational governing bodies, administration and services across Each nationally are now re-designing with a commitment to delivering services and operations that are based on a foundation that is fair, transparent, equitable and clearly defined. True co-design aligns traditional systems that have been proven in time, are stable and unique to each Nation, and have now become a shared vision of the future in reconciliation.
The Each First Nations Cultural Governance framework will evolve and adapt in partnership for many years to come.
