Extending the Petford
Training Farm
Indigenous Therapeutic
Community
A Participatory Self-Help Action' Model
Written 1993. Updated Feb 2015
In 1992 at Geoff and Norma Guest’s Petford
Training Farm in Far North Queensland a gathering occurred titled Developing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Drug and Substance Abuse
Therapeutic Communities.
Over 130 Aboriginal Healers throughout the Australia
Top end and others attended.
Major themes:
·
Experiencing Geoff Guest working with the Petford youth
·
Keyline - gravity powered irrigating
·
Permaculture
Sub themes:
·
getting therapeutic communities started:
o
funding
o
program design
o
infrastructure
o
other themes and issues.
·
other healing ways
·
other themes and issues
This gathering was funded by the National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) in Canberra.
This Gathering came to the Attention of Prime
Minister Paul Keating and Health Minister Graham Richardson. They directed the Australian Federal
Government Health Department's Rural
Health Support and Education and Training section (RHSET) to fund the
Collective organising the above gathering to evolve a Program developing Indigenous
Therapeutic Communities modelled on Petford and rolling them out throughout the
Australia Top End.
RHSET were interested
in the following foci:
1. Providing
humane caring alternatives to criminal and psychiatric incarcerating
2. Softening
substance abuse
3. Minimising
consequent harm to heart, lungs, & general wellbeing
4. Reducing
property damage and civil disobedience
5. Reducing
Self-harm and harm to others
6. Reducing
family violence
7. Stopping
Inter-generational dysfunction and strife
8. Evolving
Thriving Communities
When
RHSET approached the Collective, its members formed the opinion that Government
funding would inevitable compromise the Collective’s support for grassroots
mutual-help action for wellbeing (moving towards the wellness end of the
illness wellness continuum).
After
RHSET received no reply, RHSET sent requests for the Collective to submit a
Program. An initial tentative response in general terms was made by the
Collective based upon an open agenda self-help and mutual-help.
This response from the Collective was extremely
appealing to the Department though deemed to be 'poorly written' - translate
this as 'not using service delivery' frameworks.
The Department sent 52 questions to be answered
so that they could ‘evaluate the Collective’s Program’.
All of these questions assumed 'service
delivery' and 'service delivery frameworks, contexts and criteria'.
While all the questions 'made sense' within the
service delivery' model, around 45 of the 52 questions made no sense within the 'participatory self
help' model.
Examples of questions that the Australian
Government's RHSET asked the Collective:
Q1
Specify the services that you will be
delivering?
Response:
None. The focus of action is community self-help and mutual-help not service delivery, as specified in our Response.
Q2
Who will be delivering the services?
Response
No services will be delivered. The Response relates
to self-help and mutual-help healing action through informal networks.
Q3
How will services be delivered?
Response:
There's no service delivery. Action evolves
self-help and mutual-help healing networks - see the Collectives Response.
Q4
What is the roll-out timetable?
Response:
There isn't one. Action is a function of local
inclination and action. Locals have the energy and inclination.
Q5.
What fixed training agenda do you have?
Response:
We are enablers, not trainers. Embodied
experiential co-learning is involved. People transform. Communities transform.
We have no fixed agenda and there is no fixed agenda. There is however an open
agenda with the themes specified in the Collective’s Response.
What happens during our time together may be a function of local operative
concerns and needs. Nothing happens unless the locals want it to happen.
Q6.
What are the qualifications of outside experts
being used to research the current need?
Response:
No outside experts are being used. Actions are
based on local people's knowings and wisdoms about what is missing in the local
people's wellbeing. Self-help and mutual-help is based on action research by
locals supported to be more able. It involves co-learning. Outside enablers,
differ from 'experts', as detailed in the Collective’s Response.
Enablers are very experienced in using
indigenous therapeutic community ways and have academic action research to post
doctoral Level.
The RHSET Program had their own extensive set of criteria that had to be met for proposals to be 'acceptable'.
Their criteria presupposed that certain
pre-specified things must and will happen.
Participatory self-help and mutual-help is not pre-specified
- rather it 'organically unfolds'. With the Collective’s model, nothing has to
happen. Action is inherently tentative and at the same time, with this
tentativeness, local self-help and mutual-help energy may do what
service delivery has had difficulty doing since federation and before!
Within RHSET frameworks, the world is divided
into sectors - for example, youth, the disabled, housing, single mothers,
family, aged care and the like.
Certain aspects of wellbeing are clumped
together; others are excluded.
The Collective’s Response was all about holistic
wellbeing action - everything interlinked) - that is fundamentally different to
the 'what, why, when, where, and how of 'sectorised service delivery'.
An offer was made by RHSET to waive their normal
criteria, though they would use their normal criteria to evaluate progressive
action.
In the Collectives way, grassroots people do the
evaluating from moment to moment. Evaluating is a pervasive aspect of action
together.
The Collective declined funding - understood to
be a large amount - to ensure that
existing Collective momentum was not compromised.
The document Government
and Facilitating Community Grassroots Wellbeing Action was prepared by Collective Enablers and
sent to RHSET as a response to RHSET’s insistence that their funding be
accepted.
The above document was discussed at length along
with questions and responses mentioned above.
While the Collectives Participatory Self-Help Action Model does not meet
either the typical funding criteria or the evaluation criteria of the 'service
delivery' model these heads of department began to appreciate that the
Participatory Self-Help Action' Model has
its own very different funding and evaluation criteria.
Service Delivery and Self-Help models belong in different
worlds. To attempt to place a top down service delivery organisation in a
watchdog role, that uses 'service delivery' criteria to 'ensure the Collective
is doing things properly' according to the government’s very different ways, is
cultural imposition and unacceptable and unworkable in respect of this Action.
It would inevitably compromise the participatory self help process.
The RHSET people recognised that neither they nor
any other Department in Canberra had any
capacity to work easily with facilitating and supporting grassroots mutual-help
action. They recognised that government would
inevitably compromise action – squeezing the Collective’s actions back bit
by bit into a service delivery based model.
The Department head people stated that the Collective was
more than twenty years ahead of the Australian Government. Twenty years on
nothing has changed in Government.
The Collective has accepted
no Government funding and its work is that much slower, though uncompromised.
The
issues raised in this document may be reconsidered in 2015 through
Radical Modernity perspectives.
Refer:
Equipping Politicians and Governments
to Work well in Radical Modernity