Wednesday, March 18, 2026

11:10 AM - 11:50 AM

Adelaide Oval - William Magarey room

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Overview

Presented by: Dana Shen - Director of DS Consulting and Rosie Shellen - Snr Advisor - Equity and Culture, National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, Emerging Minds

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Details

It is a painful cliché, but we are overrepresented in many systems including the child protection system. This is fundamentally due to colonisation, the destruction that it caused through cultural suppression, shaming and attack on our ways of life, stealing children from their communities and all the consequences and policies that followed this, - we call the outcomes of this intergenerational trauma, and we need intergenerational healing. Current systems of all types appear to be repeating similar patterns. How do we change this? This workshop seeks to explore this with participants, through Dana’s lived and professional experience over 25 years in the social and health system, Dana will explore this through the lens of decolonisation. Dana will share her small and slow steps towards personal decolonisation and has developed a framework for how individuals, organisations and larger systems could explore this. This will be supported by Ally, Rosie Schellen. It both acknowledges the incredible First Nations leaders, community, organisations, individuals and their work to date and asks, what else can we do? This will be delivered through an interactive workshop with First Nation’s peoples and Allies that will explore: • Systems theories particularly through a First Nations lens • Exploring what decolonisation could look like across multiple levels in system • Providing a framework to explore how decolonisation could be applied to systems change This will include: • Yarning about decolonisation and systems change • Creating ways to challenge current systems • Mindfulness meditation to support the ups and downs of this work; and • Connecting with the natural world, our place of healing