Training
Shifting Ground’s 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.
We guide you through five-stages of training and workshops grounded in First Nations leadership, lived experience and frameworks that embed cultural safety and relational accountability across operations. This process is designed to develop the strategic depth and capacity for systems change in you and your organisation, as we support you to move from awareness into transformation and action.
To ensure the change you lead is structural, the training pathway is complemented by ongoing critical conversations and feedback loops with our team that activate your capacity for integration.
The PATHWAY
The Shifting Ground pathway is designed to cultivate an understanding and practice of decolonisation, race, privilege, power and whiteness, cultural safety and collaboration.
The workshop pathway is a series of 4 x 4 hour interactive sessions delivered on Zoom or in-person by an experienced First Nations facilitator, with up to 20 participants. This is followed by a Synthesis workshop which brings together learnings throughout the pathway to move your team towards reflection and action.
Throughout, participants will engage in reflective exercises that enable them to connect these concepts to their own experiences, creating space for personal and professional understanding and laying the groundwork for meaningful action. The workshops are made up of guided discussions, small group activities in breakout rooms and group reflections. Breaks are incorporated throughout and adjusted based on the facilitator’s read of the group’s energy and the pace of the discussion.
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.
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.
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.
Synthesis
In this workshop, as the development of critical literacy and understanding continues, participants are supported to shift from reflection to action. How can you and your organisation transform to do better work on the unceded lands on which you are located?
This workshop will hold space to deeply explore how you can apply the learnings of your professional development in moving forward.
start your journey
Ready to get started? Contact us to begin your learning journey. By educating yourself and building your understanding you will develop that capacity to create spaces where First Nations leadership, knowledge and self-determination are truly respected.
Training Opportunities for Individuals
We also offer workshops and events for individuals to understand their positionality within history and society, develop racial literacy and transform how they engage with people from diverse communities. Visit our Events page to find out more about Shifting Ground’s upcoming offerings.
“I couldn’t recommend this work more highly. Working with Shifting Ground has had a profound impact on my business, my leadership, and on a deeply personal level. The work is ongoing, and I’m so grateful to have an enduring relationship with Shifting Ground, who we continue to engage for cultural safety consulting across many of our storytelling projects.”
— Kate Montague
CEO & Founder, Audiocraft