Knowledge and Practice Insights for the Social Enterprise Sector

This resource was produced by Kowa Collaboration in partnership with Social Enterprise Australia as part of the Social Enterprise Development Initiative program. It synthesises reflections from three national online Learning Circles held between September 2025 and February 2026, bringing together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners working across social enterprise, evaluation, research, and community governance. UMEL stands for Understanding, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning, an approach that places relationship-building and cultural context at the centre of how impact is tracked and understood.

The resource is structured in two parts.

Part 1 is directed at First Nations practitioners and sets out a collective mandate drawn from the Learning Circles. It explores four themes: the structural pressure that forces First Nations evaluation businesses to compete against one another for contracts rather than collaborate; the emotional and professional labour of navigating between cultural obligations and institutional frameworks; the need to broaden who counts as an evaluator to include place-based and relational practice, particularly for younger practitioners; and the practical work of decolonising contracts, reporting templates, and data governance rather than just changing language.

Part 2 translates these insights into five specific calls to action for funders, commissioners, and sector leaders. These are presented as a framework for systemic reform, moving from competitive procurement toward collaborative ecosystems, from output-only funding toward investment in cultural grounding and wellbeing, and from narrow professional definitions toward recognition of lived evaluative expertise. Indigenous Data Sovereignty, meaning the right of communities to govern how data about them is collected, used, and shared, is identified as a non-negotiable pillar of any genuine reform.