A safe space for developing new ways of thinking

Shifting Ground supports organisations and individuals to become empowered to think, talk and act on issues of culture and race in the form of workshops and consultancy.

Developed by Dr Lilly Brown and Genevieve Grieves, we support organisations and individuals from across diverse communities, including First Nations people, to begin difficult conversations as the first step to changing the way they do things.

Our work re-humanises First Nations peoples and compels organisations and individuals to value our knowledge, experience, diversity and ways of doing things.

We work with organisations to develop a critical language, understanding and practice of decolonisation, race, privilege, power and whiteness, cultural safety and collaboration.

Our Services

  • We work with organisations to develop a critical language, understanding and practice of decolonisation, race, privilege, power and whiteness, and cultural safety. Our interest is in critical friendships, long-term relationships where we support you over time to develop your knowledge and practice in this space.

    We invite participants to reflect on their current practices, and open their eyes to the systems of oppression that may have been invisible to them, in order to understand how we are all enmeshed in a system of injustice and inequity.

  • We work with organisations to support them in understanding what best practice collaboration looks like. Beginning with the development of a framework for understanding how colonisation, race and racism shape our interactions and result in extractive relationships, we co-create a new approach centred on First People’s ways of being and knowledge exchange that deeps your understanding of culture and ability to connect across communities.

  • You can’t talk about something, especially something difficult, if you don’t have a shared language and knowledge base.

    We support organisations and individuals to navigate crisis and risk management from the foundation of deep relationships grounded in trust, reciprocity, power sharing and capacity building.

  • We provide tailored policy and strategy consultancy informed by a responsive approach. We acknowledge that the needs of organisations are often nuanced and complex, especially in the early stages of collective self-reflection and development of a practice aimed at valuing First Peoples knowledges and experiences.

    We can help your organisation to do this through advice and guidance, support in your strategic planning and the development of policies. Our critical friendship is founded on open and honest feedback.

  • Our training pathway is designed to foster deep and organisation-wide transformation in your relations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which will inform best practice relations with all people.

    To ensure the change you seek is structural, initially, we propose an inductive five-stage approach to the delivery of this training in parallel to ongoing critical conversations with us at Shifting Ground.

Workshops & Training  

Decolonisation

Provides participants with an understanding of how colonisation has and continues to operate in Australian society, creating injustice and oppression. The workshop invites participants to share their stories and reflect on their place in Australian history and society to help them understand their role in decolonisation, the transformation of systems and how to create a positive future for all.

Racial Literacy

The racial literacy workshop supports individuals and organisations to develop linguistic competency around race by understanding the language of race (and whiteness) and learning how it structures the everyday lived realities of all people on this continent, yet remains invisible to many (particularly white, non-Indigenous) people.

Cultural Safety

Drawing from the decolonisation and racial literacy training, the Cultural Safety workshop begins forging internal and external work practices and cultures that value the knowledge, stories, ways of doing and experiences, or in other words, the humanity of First Peoples.

If a workplace is safe for First Peoples, then it is a safer place for all people.

Relational Work

How can your organisation prepare to work ethically and with integrity with First Peoples and all people? What might this ethical collaboration look like in practice?

This introduction to best practice community collaboration and ways of working with First Peoples explores what ways of working are present, or perhaps absent, in the current practice and broader workplace.