Ann Ingamells, Peter Johnson (Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa),Paul Crossley (World Vision), Participant1 KJ (KJ), Participant 2 KJ (KJ), Participant 3 KJ (KJ)

Aboriginal people in desert communities may not aspire to be whitefellas. They do aspire to better navigate through and between Aboriginal and whitefella worlds, to strengthen their communities and their futures. This panel presentation speaks to a program in which remote Aboriginal people are defining and building the skills and capacities to do this.

Much of what we think of as evaluation is challenged in such a space. Important indicators of change and progress for community may be viewed as taken-for-granted advances by funders. The communal focus and collaborative ethos which are critical to community led initiatives and to sustainability, confuse the more conventional evaluation of individual change and progress towards national indicators.Governments often look to evaluation to render the world actionable to them, within their policy frameworks and the political scope available to them. A desire for evidence, best practice models and programming certainty resides in a convincingly ordered view of the world. Evaluation in complex cross cultural contexts dealing with challenging issues gains little purchase in such a policy regime, contributing to the poor policy and evaluation record in remote Aboriginal Australian contexts.

Speaking to these tensions, investors, evaluators, program staff and program participants, will outline a program, its practices, and its evaluation and ways they have wrestled with these issues and are discovering ways through them. A key evaluation challenge is to foster conversations towards a 'both-ways' appreciation of the challenges, the program and evaluation. It is the role of such evaluations to help decision makers 'see' and 'hear' beyond political immediacy and across cultural borders so as to make deeply meaningful cross cultural policy that supports sustainable change, community aspirations and ownership.