Burndawan (safe)
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Project Leader
Dr Renee Fiolet
Project Details
Using co-design to inform the development of an online Indigenous family violence resource: A project with the Wadawurrung community in Victoria.
What is the project about?
Burndawan is a word from the Wadawurrung language, meaning ‘safe’.
Family violence (FV) is a prevalent issue within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations despite it being unacceptable to their peoples.
In addition, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples face greater barriers to seeking help than non-Indigenous peoples do. FV damages the culture and overall well-being of Australia’s First Nations peoples. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have rarely been consulted regarding family violence interventions designed for them, which can often lead to poor uptake.
Recent evidence suggests that technological interventions for family violence have been accepted by non-Indigenous peoples experiencing family violence, however there had yet to be one that was co-designed and developed with an Aboriginal community for their own endorsement and subsequent use.
This project involved working with the Wadawurrung community (of the Kulin Nations in South-West Victoria) to firstly determine – through interviews and advisory group guidance - whether the use of technology is an acceptable method for family violence interventions within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations. We found that it is!
Following this, focus groups and Aboriginal community advisory group direction were used to determine the content, design and development of an online resource in an effort to ensure that the end-users informed the resource and made it relevant to their own needs.
This project received funding from the Melbourne Social Equity Institute for the design and development phases of the resource. A philanthropic organization based on Wadawurrung Country called “Give Where You Live” has provided funding towards the development costs to ensure that the resource is made into a tangible tool that can be accessed by the Wadawurrung community following all of their work. The Melbourne Research Alliance to end Violence Against women and their children (MAEVe) has also contributing to the publishing costs.
The resource was launched by the community on November 25th, 2019.
What has the project achieved so far?
Interviews were undertaken with 23 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and men from Wadawurrung country to determine the barriers they face when help-seeking, how they feel about online resources and to identify their basic needs for a family violence resource.
Five focus groups were undertaken with Aboriginal community members (three with women and two with men) to discuss the components of the resource, identify needs regarding design features, language and the inclusion of culture as a resource, and to validate ongoing mock-ups of designs.
The community advisory group have been working with the researchers to evaluate the findings from the focus groups and are completing the co-design process of resource development and testing.
Nyatne (Thank You)