Shifting Systems through community led-engagement

We were lucky enough to have Dr Andrew Brown lead a conversation with us on the 26th July 2025 at ValueLabs Spaces in Melbourne.

Dr Brown began the session by introducing us to a book called 'Long Yarn Short' by Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, a proud Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul Woman. This book examines the historical and ongoing impact of child removals and out-of-home care on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It delves into the question of what it means to lead change when your own story is entangled in the systems you're trying to transform.

This question sat quietly at the centre of our Loops of Learning gathering. The book features the story of Vanessa, a human rights lawyer with lived experience of child removal. Vanessa’s reflections grounded our conversation in a powerful duality: she was once a child removed from her family, now working within the very structures that perpetuate that harm. Her voice challenged us to examine the system not as a fixed entity, but as a set of choices, relationships, and assumptions—often deeply flawed, yet changeable.

The State is Not a Good Parent

There's an assumption we were asked to question. Do child protection systems operate from a false premise, that removing a child guarantees safety?

More often than not, Andrew posited from his reading of Vanessa's book, that removal rarely means a better life. It often leads to placement in bureaucratic care, bouncing between foster homes, under-resourced caseworkers, and a lifetime of navigating trauma within the system.

Vanessa posed a radical yet deeply pragmatic idea. What if the same money spent on child protection removals was invested directly in families? This investment could address root causes of harm, such as poverty, housing insecurity, and social isolation. What if prevention, not removal, became the primary logic of care?

This point led to conversations about engaging with what is often referred to in social services circles as 'hard to reach' cohorts. Working with these communities to design solutions that tackle systemic failures is a focus for many areas of social research. However, barriers to engagement often arise when trying to do the exact opposite.

Barriers to Meaningful Engagement

Participants shared their own experiences of working in and around health and social service systems. Common themes emerged:

• Tokenistic engagement: Organisations often "tick the box" by including community members in committees, only to ignore their input or limit their power to influence decisions.

• Fear and hesitation: People are afraid to take risks in engagement, worried about saying the wrong thing, being perceived as exclusionary, or being "cancelled".

• Power asymmetries: Many participants described how professional or medical authority can silence or intimidate community voices—even when those voices are invited to the table.

• Invisible barriers: From inaccessible meeting locations to insider language, the system often expects the community to come to it, on its terms, rather than meeting people where they are.

  
  

As one participant put it, “People don’t show up because you haven’t built a relationship, not because they don’t care.”

What Makes it Easier?

The flip side of this critique was an exploration of what enables meaningful, community-led engagement:

• Genuine relationships over checklists: Rather than obsessing over accessibility tick-boxes, some called for a focus on presence by showing up at community barbecues, schools, and events where people already are.

• Curiosity and humility: One of the strongest enablers of trust is when people in power admit they don’t have all the answers and are genuinely curious to learn.

• Power-sharing models: Examples were shared of co-design efforts where final decisions rested with community members, not professionals.

• Freedom to act differently: During COVID, when bureaucratic processes were forced aside, communities were employed to lead health messaging—and it worked. Quickly. Effectively. Humanely.

  
  

Maybe the System Is the Barrier

There was discussion about metrics or measures created by a system that often creates more barriers and unsustainability in the solutions chosen. Several voices talked about stories where leaders, driven by funding criteria or a need to show immediate progress, are often forced into situations where engagement just can't succeed. For example, the time required to develop relationships that can then have the needed influence in a system or community is often not factored in when funding or devising measures of success.

“If your KPIs are widgets, how can you justify coffees?”

Others urged us to consider the "non-linearity" of systems change. The graph of trust, collaboration, and impact isn’t a straight line—and too often we lose momentum just before the breakthrough.

Final Reflections

Our loops conversations are spaces created to reflect, discuss, and think about the system variables at play in the chosen areas of concern. They provide a time to consider our own part in the systems we are interested in changing.

We closed the loop with a simple truth: there is no perfect framework.

The work is messy, slow, and personal.

Systems are made of people, and people come with stories, power, trauma, and contradictions.

And yet, this gathering reminded us that something transformative happens when we sit together, ask better questions, and hold space for discomfort.

As one participant said, “My cause has become the exploration itself.”

Let’s stay in it.

Next Steps

Our next Loops of Learning event will take place in September 2025, exploring futures thinking and global systems. Stay tuned for details via the Loops newsletter.