In 2023, the FCAV worked in collaboration with Bundyi Girri Consulting to develop an Aboriginal Cultural Safety Pillar within the Organsiation’s new Strategic Plan 2023 – 2025.
The purpose of having Aboriginal Cultural Safety as an organisational strategic pillar is to embed aims within the FCAV’s ways of working, developing work practices towards a workplace that is safe for First Nations Peoples.
Embedding cultural safety begins with understanding the obligations for governance to create the systems and structural environments that recognises where unconscious bias, racism, and discrimination can manifest. This empowers staff and our work with stakeholders, to operate with regard to the attitudes and behaviours that are required to perform their role in creating a culturally strong workplace.
Specifically, the FCAV Staff & Board to:
1. Understand the benefits of Aboriginal cultural safety and how it relates to their role.
2. Recognise that deep systemic change is needed to enact ongoing strength-based relations with First Peoples.
3. Localise practices and build capacity to respond to local knowledges, local circumstances and respond with openness and clarity.
4. Continue to change processes, systems and structures so that they are contoured by our relationship to First Peoples.
5. Transform our ways of working by improving our skills to confidently engage with and be in relation to First Peoples and their sovereignties.
6. Value progress in this work, value the time it takes to learn and unlearn. This can be done by understanding their role and responsibility in being actively engaged in sovereign (diplomatic) activity and measuring the progress of non-Indigenous staff engaging in this work.
The Foster Care Association of Victoria’s vision for reconciliation is a nation that acknowledges historic truths and their current impacts and where First Nations’ cultures are recognised, understood and celebrated by all, as part of our community and country’s identity.
FCAV advocates for a Child Protection system which ensures Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people are safe and connected to their family, culture and community. We support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination in all areas of the care of children and young people.
