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A Case Study: First Nations Business Accelerator Program





1. Why bother?

There are people in Central Australia who question the importance of enterprise development, arguing that public resources should be focussed towards health and education outcomes first. Given the housing crisis, the renal epidemic and the general poverty in this region, I understand where this criticism comes from. There are others who argue that enterprise development is just the next phase of the colonial project. Afterall, it’s true that entrepreneurship is a Western construct born from the same colonial systems that continue to extract, oppress and cause immense suffering to First Nations people and their land today.

However, enterprise development also has the potential to equip people with the necessary skills and resources to take control of their futures and create their own pathways to meaningful work. Given our region has the highest unemployment rate for First Nations residents anywhere in Australia it’s fair to question whether our existing education, training and employment pathways are working.

We know the social, cultural and economic barriers that make going to school, or university, or holding a 9-5 job difficult. My hunch is that these barriers are much easier to navigate and overcome when people have the opportunity to run their own business, their way. The same goes for working in a family or community-owned business because it’s flexible, culturally safe and provides meaningful work. If you’re only able to work two days because you are on dialysis the other three days of the week, or you have other commitments, then that’s how you can structure your working life. If someone dies and you’re required to take sudden leave for an extended period of time, you can do what you need to do.

I don’t want to paint an unrealistic picture of what running a sustainable business looks like, because it absolutely requires a big commitment and lots of hard work. But as the owner of the business, the work is likely to be meaningful, and you ultimately decide what your opening hours are and how many days you're open. The picture I do want to paint is that enterprise development is really important because it creates opportunities for people that the mainstream systems cannot.


2. The very unusual opportunity

Desert Knowl­edge Aus­tralia (DKA) received fund­ing from the North­ern Ter­ri­to­ry Government to research, design, pilot and evaluate a First Nations enterprise development pro­gram in Cen­tral Australia. The funding was enough to cover one full-time wage for the length of the two-year project. DKA's CEO at the time, Dan Tyson, knew that I was looking to do something in this space and encouraged me to apply for the job.

The unique and attractive aspect of this funding was that it came with very few strings attached, which meant there would be lots of flexibility in designing the program. That is to say, the design could actually be guided by the research and we could probably afford to be a bit experimental. Usually government funding comes with a long list of requirements and caveats that have you ticking so many arbitrary checkboxes, that it’s hard to actually address the problem you're trying to solve. For instance, one of the checkboxes might require you to support a minimum of 100 businesses in a 2-year period, which completely dictates the type of support you can provide to any business, regardless of what the research may indicate people need. Unbound by these limitations, we were able to respond to what people were telling us.

I spent the first six months sitting down with First Nations businesses and many of the busi­ness sup­port agencies across the region to learn about the major problems these budding enterprises were up against, as well as identifying any gaps in the services provided by the business support network. The research uncovered both the distinct and the nuanced characteristics of First Nations entrepreneurship in Central Australia, such as the underpinning motivations for starting a business, their own metrics of success, and of course the unique socio-cultural and socio-economic chal­lenges that impact all aspects of life here in the desert.

The design challenge was to plug any gaps in the current business support network and create solutions for any problems that weren’t adequately being addressed. It quickly became obvious that we would either need to apply for more funding, or completely re-purpose the funds we already had. To save time and avoid potential disappointment, we decided to go with the latter. Thanks to our extraordinary freedom, we decided to re-allocate a majority chunk of the funding that was to cover my salary over two years into a condensed six-month period, where the program cohort would have access to seed funding and intensive support from multiple experienced professionals other than myself. But more on the design later, first, let’s talk more about the problems identified in the research.


3. It’s overwhelming, disorientating and exhausting…