Capacity Building

Community Development Radio Service

A Partnership to aid Capacity Building

There would be a number of direct and indirect benefits for forming a partnership with ARDS Inc. in the delivery of a community development radio service across north-east Arnhem Land.

Firstly, ARDS would be prepared to make acknowledgment of our partners as sponsors. This may be done through radio announcements and recognition on the ARDS web site; or however else we may be able to acknowledge your sponsorship.

Secondly, but more importantly, partners would be involved in:

An Australian first; where information and education is made available to the Yolngu group of indigenous people in their own language, throughout an entire language region. The Yolngu people continue to speak their traditional languages in everyday usage.
Supporting the people, their culture and their traditional way of life by helping to provide critical services to their homelands and communities right across the region.
Supporting the development and deployment of leading edge community development methodology to build innovation and capacity for true self-reliance and self-management with the clan nations of north-east Arnhem Land.

Your involvement would demonstrate practical support to the sophisticated culture and language of the local Yolngu people just by switching on a radio. Visitors to Arnhem Land could hear traditional song-cycles, education programs and news on air, in language.

The service is also available in Darwin on 1530 AM, catering to approximately 1000 Yolngu peopleliving there and also giving general Darwin residents and visitors and access to traditional music and educational content in language. This radio service can show interested parties your organisation’s or department’s practical commitment to the welfare and development of the Yolngu people. Examples of our programs can also be listened to via our Audio Archive link on the left. These avenues will allow you to create a PR coup for your organisation.

We believe joining with us in partnership would show your organisation or department to be progressive and open, committed to supporting best practice in community development and community education for all the Yolngu people of north–east Arnhem Land.

Aims of the Radio Service

The radio service aims to do the following:

Create unity amongst the people of the region by allowing the elders and all the Yolngu of the region to receive information and knowledge simultaneously, putting paid to manipulation and corruption.
Teach the people about Australian law, plus their rights and responsibilities and many other general subjects in response to the people’s questions - questions that they have continually asked us to teach them about over a couple of decades.
The conservation of traditional knowledge, where elders will have an avenue to teach a whole range of cultural knowledge. This will be done by recorded phone interviews with elders, allowing elders to teach large amounts of material from the safety and comfort of their own homes. We also do much recording in the field. Many elders say they are very worried because the young people are not learning their law and culture anymore. ARDS staff can speak Yolngu Matha and are able to facilitate this process.
Through this service, our partners would be participating in ensuring best practices in regional development by helping to deploy a critical, life saving communication service; a service that would allow access to effective education in a culturally appropriate way. The potential outcomes are enormous.
Provision of new knowledge about disease and sickness that presently ravage the Yolngu people.Both East and West Arnhem Land suffer morbidity and mortality rates that are the highest in the nation.ARDS has extensive knowledge in development of culturally appropriate education material around the whole range of disease and sickness that are now affecting Yolngu.Our experience in this area is extensive with over twenty years of face-to-face interventions with Yolngu patients obtaining high compliance rates
Education about drug abuse and its connections to suicide.Yolngu are now suffering like many other indigenous people around the world. Along with petrol sniffing and kava we now how an extensive marijuana problem and many of the suicides have been connected to the paranoid schizophrenia that marijuana seems to create. When we talk to the elders about it they say, "Please get the radio service going quickly - we have to teach the young people about these things; we are tired of them dying and wasting their lives."ARDS has extensive experience in educating around the whole range of drugs that are being abused in Arnhem Land.
· The teaching of academic English around the cognitive effective of language in commerce, law, health, ecology, human dynamics and many other areas.Firstly the elders will explain their academic language term in Yolngu Matha. Then they will work with an English first language person (Balanda) that can also speak Yolngu Matha and discuss the English term and how it is used. Together they will be able to teach a high level of English while the listeners also learn, or have reinforced, knowledge of their own academic language terms.This is very important because as the old people are saying to us, “The young people are not learning our gurrangay matha (intellectual language, covering all the concept language) or the English gurrangay matha either"
Building clan based business on the people’s own estates by giving them access to business and economic information and education. The one thing that has made developments like this impossible up to now has been the lack of a good communication system, where all the clans can learn; what business is about, how money works, and many other things they will need to know to run a business. ARDS has extensive face-to-face experience in the language and education needed about business and business practice. All this education is based on the people’s own production and trade language that is thousands of years old. This service will allow this education to occur, building the way for the people to run their own businesses.
Give people access to a talkback facility. That means any Yolngu person could call in during a talkback session and seek information on any subject. If we could not answer the question straight away we would do the research and then give out the information at another time.This service will allow Yolngu people access to information and knowledge, therefore allowing true capacity building in self-management and self-reliance.
Save any partners, including government, money, time and resources by creating a cost effective method of regional communication with the Yolngu people.
Providing Yolngu with a self-learning, adult education resource that allows the opportunity for people to make social adjustments to the influences of change that have beset them. This service will allow this to actually happen for the first time in a truly dynamic way.
Keys to human capacity building

When it comes to human capacity building there are two important keys; purpose and communication. Without clear purpose the human endeavour stops. Many Yolngu have lost purpose in life. Their ancient trade and way of life is gone and all that has replaced it is welfare and confusion.

Yolngu people need a sense of purpose to take control of their own lives and develop their own future.

This can not happen without good communication. Good communication can only happen in the people’s own language because that is how they communicate.

This Community Development Radio Service will give purpose through good communication, driving the need for further education and development. And we believe it will become the standard for cross-cultural cross-language development and education with indigenous people across the world.

You can be part of it!

Call 08 8987 3910 or lend your support now. For more info, read our Radio Briefing Paper

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