Intercultural Wellbeing Foundation
Posted 1997.
Last updated Feb 2007
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Enabling wellbeing action among Indigenous and Oppressed Small Minorities in the East Asia Oceania Australasia Region. Actions address relief from trauma, oppression,
poverty, sickness, misfortune, destitution, illness, as well as help for
sufferers of emotional, domestic, physical, social and mental pressures,
distress and trauma.
Key Themes
The Intercultural Wellbeing Foundation has been formed by healers from
the above focus groups and other intercultural healers. The Foundation
is not connected with any political group, faction or religion. It
respects spiritual and cultural diversity. The Total Care Foundation Inc. acts as an auspicing body for receiving donations to the Intercultural Wellbeing Foundation - See the link at the top of the page on donating.
Following over twentyfive years of action, the Foundation has been
formed to enable wellbeing action and to receive funding from the
public. Remoteness means that funding travel and communication are major
issues. To ensure the cultural integrity of wellbeing action and
process, non-government funding is rarely used. The focus of the
Foundation's action is 'wellbeing' in all it's aspects, including:
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mental
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spiritual
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economic
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physical
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communal
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environmental
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cultural
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intercultural
THE CURRENT SITUATION
WELLBEING ACTION
SPREADING HEALING WISDOMS
THE FOUNDATION'S PHILOSOPHY
HOW THE FOUNDATION WORKS
FLAT ORGANISATION STRUCTURE
GLOBAL RELEVANCE
Scattered throughout the East Asia Oceania Australasia Region are people who are acting locally to address wellbeing issues. They draw on their own local healing ways.
As well, they link with others engaged in similar action in other remote places. This dispersed, though linked healing action has been evolving
for over twentyfive years. 'What works' is shared within the network and
adapted to meet local healing ways.
The Foundation sets up the possibilities for culturally appropriate
healing contexts and healing. Examples of current action:
- Stopping petrol sniffing - even children as young as four have been
permanently brain damaged from this practice
- Keeping adolescents and adults from being incarcerated in prisons,
lockups and mental institutions
- Women having the ability to dissipate domestic and community violence
- People having the ability to mediate between dissentors as well as
resolve conflict
- reconciliatory action and the rebuilding of family and community
relationships and links with those in their homelands in remote regions
and on offshore Islands
- the sheer size and remoteness of the Australian bush
- ongoing traumatizing sustained for over 100 years
- having healing ways sensitive to local cultural ways
- cultural ambivalence/dis-interest in 'trauma service delivery' by
'bureaucracy backed experts'
- the high costs involved in using a 'service delivery' option
- concern about 'strings attached' to government funding
The consensus of action is using the local natural and traditional
nurturers as the starting point. Locals already seek these nurturers out
for support. This communal-centred, self-help, and mutual help, is in
keeping with Indigenous and small minority traditional ways.
Our experience is that these nurturers can heal themselves and help
others heal themselves.
The Foundation is providing possibilities of 'healing action' to these
local nurturers who are themselves in need. They may energise the
evolution of more nurturers, who in turn may pass healing ways on to
others. The self-help network!
Founding members, and other enablers linked to the Foundation have been
seeking out the healing wisdoms of indigenous and small minorities in the Region for over thirty years. Extensive links have been made with small localwellbeing action thoughout the SE Asia Oceania Australasia region.
In addition to the local nurturers, the Foundation may be able to access wellbeing
enablers, as resource people, from a diverse array of cultural
backgrounds, including:
- West Papuan
- Vietnamese
- PNG Estuarine
- Philippino
- Mongolian
- Melanesian
- Maori
- East Timores
- Bougainvillean
- Black South African
- Chinese
- Chilean
- Cambodian
- Anglo
- Australian South Sea Islander
- Australian Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander
All have extensive experience in linking with, and enabling self help
among small minority people. They combine understandings from tertiary
education in psychotherapy, with traditional healing ways.
Direct action is empowering - creating opportunities for the local
nurturer's self-healing, and the passing on of the local's micro-experiences to
others - towards communal help in resolving wellbeing issues.
Both people involved in healing action and their focus people are living
in rural and remote bush contexts. Typically, little or no mental health
resources are available. The Foundation energises healing contexts
within remote communities or in nearby campout environments. Action
involves healing as a part of everyday interaction and celebration.
Apart from prearranged or spontaneous healing, small gatherings are
energised, from four to six people through to twentyfive or more.
Healing ways are used and attendees invited to use these micro-experiences with
each other. At times the Foundation enables larger healing gatherings
called HealFests. These combine healing, celebration, gathering and
festivities.
For example, members who helped constitute the Foundation enabled the
'SE Asia Oceania Australasia Small Island Estuarine and Coastal People Gathering' held in the
Atherton Tablelands in 1994. Further, they also energised the United
Nations, the Australian Government, Down to Earth (Vic) and others into
providing funding for this Gathering - a small local follow-on to a UN
Conference in the Carribean held earlier in 1994. Extensive healing was
carried out during this Atherton Gathering. People attending
subsequently reported that they had passed on these healing ways to
others in their remote communities.
The Foundation is an informal flat structure. It neither requires nor uses
bureaucracy. Local people engage in local healing action using local
wisdoms and knowledge. What is not working is modified so it does work
or it is dropped. What works is shared locally and becomes 'the local
way' - 'policy' if you like.
Local healing people link with others in other remote locations and
success is shared. People take the successes they have heard from other
remote areas and try them out by adapting them to local ways and
contexts.
In this way, the Foundation's action is neither top-down or bottom -up.
It is lateral. It is a loose matrix or network with wellbeing as it's
function. Action has never been dependent or reliant on Government
funding. Action can complement Government services. However, the
Foundation's actions have no part in a 'service delivery' model.
The Foundation is modeled on and resonant with Connexion (later
called Nexus Groups) a self help based charity registered in NSW in the
1960's. It is also modelled on and supported by the Total Care Foundation founded by Dr Neville Yeomans and others in NSW Australia in 1968.
There are some professional workers and ex-professionals with the Foundation
who have valuable experience and knowledge to bring to use. However,
they work according to the Foundation's 'enabling' philosophy and reject
the one-sided 'doctor-patient' or 'expert service provider' type of
relationship.
The foundation is building small models of action with the potential
to heal
the trauma and suffering following man-made disasters. For example, the
Foundation has links to the Bougainville Trauma Foundation which is
setting up posssibilities to provide enabling
action supporting large numbers of survivors of torture and trauma following the
Bougainville/PNG Conflict late last Century.
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