Transcript: Community Story Holding and Caretaking

Music playing for opening of session: Ya Tal3een by Dana Salah

Bree Clare: Hi everyone. Welcome today. Thank you for joining today's open learning session. It's great to have so many of you interested in the topic of community story holding and caretaking. 

My name is Bree and I'm from Social Enterprise Australia. We host these sessions as part of the Social Enterprise Development Initiative funded by the Federal Department of Social Services. Our aim is to create a space for changemakers and supporters across the social enterprise community to share knowledge and experiences to help strengthen connection and collaboration across the sector. Today's session is convened by Our Race in collaboration with For Purpose Advisory Group and Tatak. It's a pleasure to be joined by Dung and Doug from Our Race, Jen from For Purpose Advisory Group and Juju from Tatak. We are so grateful for your generosity and care in sharing your time and experience. 

Before I hand over to our conveners, I'd like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the unceded lands from which we're all joining today. I'm thankful to be on the beautiful lands of the Thaua people of the Djuin Nation and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I recognise their continuing connection to the waters, skies and lands that we all have the incredible privilege of living and working on. The closest town to me is called Pambula and whose name comes from the Thaua word meaning twin waters. It's believed to refer to the meeting of salt and fresh water, something that occurs at various points in this area. This word tells a story all of its own, of the history, geography and people of the area. 

I also pay respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants joining today and recognise that your presence here holds over 65,000 years of systems thinking and relational care for people, place and planet. The Social Enterprise sector is values-based in all our work. Whether you're a peak body, intermediary, social enterprise, researcher or funder, we all have opportunities and responsibilities to take actions that value Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures, futures and contribute to equity and justice as part of our everyday work. At Social Enterprise Australia, we're learning, making mistakes, unlearning and practising every day. We're grateful for opportunities like this to help us continually build equity-centred ways of doing and being. We love learning from those around us doing such incredible work.

I was fortunate enough to attend the launch of Kathomi Gatwiri's Racial Dignity Framework a few months ago and learn some of her story. If you're not familiar with the Racial Dignity Framework, please find a link in the ‘Explore More’ section for those who are interested in learning more. And this is where I also had the pleasure of meeting one of today's speakers, Dung. It is such a pleasure to hand over to Dung, Doug, Jen and Juju. 

Dung Tran: Hi everyone. Thank you so much Bree for that beautiful acknowledgment and welcome. Wow, this is a really big audience and thank you everyone for being here this afternoon, choosing time to be with us. It's such a privilege and an honour to be speaking with you about something that I'm deeply passionate about. And it's more than just a piece of work for me. It's my life, it's my story, and it starts with a story, which is what we've entitled this session. 

My name is Dung Tran and I'm joining you today from Meanjin in Brisbane on the lands of the Turrbal and the Jagera people. I too pay my deep respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. I also want to extend that respect to all First Nations people joining us today and to all of you who've come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, many carrying your own powerful stories of migration, survival and resistance.

I have the honour of being the CEO and Co-founder of Our Race Community, a social change organisation that I co-founded with Doug close to 10 years ago. And before anything else, I want to say that because it starts with a story, I want to begin with my own. Just a snippet of some of the experiences that I've had over the last 30-odd years of my career. 

Years ago, in a project planning meeting for a training program that I was designing, two senior colleagues sat me down and said to me, lived experience stories should only be told in the second or third person. I was charged with designing an anti-racism training program where I wanted to embed storytelling. I wanted to bring the stories of those that have been marginalised and have faced discrimination and racism in their access to seeking government support services

and I was reprimanded. I was called into a room by two senior colleagues and told that the lived experience had to be shared through a second or third person. I remember sitting there stunned. It was like being told that my voice, my story, the thing that I lived and breathed and survived was too much, too real, too inconvenient for the professionalism the organisation wanted. 

That moment became my point of departure. I refused to let my story be outsourced, watered down or told on my behalf. I knew we needed a new way forward. One that doesn't just feature our stories, but honours them. So I began to build a new model, a whole new framework. With Doug, we co-created something that challenges the default, that flipped the power, that reclaims the dignity, the complexity and the strength in lived experience of the Storyteller. Today I'm not just presenting a framework. I'm reclaiming my story, and I'm reclaiming the years of work that have gone into shaping a practice that is more than just ethical in theory, but transformational in action. 

Over the last nine years of this work, I've witnessed how lived experience can be tokenised, commodified or flattened for agendas. Ethical storytelling has become a buzzword in some sectors, but for us, it's personal, it's cultural, it's political, and it's about survival. When we talk about ethics, we're talking about justice; we're talking about restoring control to the people who've had it taken away from them.

And now I'd like to pass the mic over to Doug. 

Doug Cronin: Thank you Dung. Thank you everybody, for having us. And I'll continue on with that story. 

My name is Doug Cronin and I'm a fourth-generation settler living on stolen Aboriginal land, currently living in Naarm. I acknowledge that I'm living on lands where genocide continues through this colonial experiment which is present from where I was born, Gadigal Land, to what we're seeing across the world through a live stream genocide in Gaza.

We allow this to happen through the power of storytelling, which is perpetuated through white supremacism, the patriarchy and dehumanising tactics. This has only become obvious to me fairly recently. My connection to this story, not just as an individual, but to this collective consciousness which has been reinforced from the day I was born through the concept of terra nullius and Australian stories which followed. Including this unspoken denial of mine, my family's and the majority of people I associated with - our position within this story of Australia.

Living this selective, curated story for the first 30 plus years of my life where I got to meet Dung and we co-created this anti-racism, multicultural storytelling program. I also, for reasons that I found unethical within that [government] program, stepped aside, started up Our Race Community with Dung, and started a PhD.

Within that, I had the moment of departure, which was this point where I was positioned in some way as being this white expert or white saviour and to speak like Dung talked about, to be that second or third voice. The voice for the voiceless. That doesn't really exist, this voice for the voiceless. The voices are there, but we just choose which ones we want to share. If I really want to do anti-racist, ethical storytelling work. I need to reposition within that story and that macro story.

There's been a few realisations that have happened to me. I had these reality checks which came through. Just because this program might be deemed as impactful doesn't mean that it's not harmful or extractive. The other part that became really obvious to me was this idea of who actually owned the stories, and really looking at the power dynamics of the stories. Because there is power in who gets to tell the story, who uses or abuses someone else's story for their own benefit, and which stories we choose to tell or not tell for the fear of how it may impact us financially, socially, and even with our families.

These interactions and learnings have been me being in a position of privilege to be around people who trusted me with their stories. And then I was able to intersect that with trying to understand the law and how these stories sit within the Australian legal system. I can no longer unsee how people's stories are exploited and commodified, even when there is a positive impact or intention. And whether that be in a film, an award ceremony at the largest settlement conference in the world, where I was on a university's dime to go to Canada and hear people sharing other people's stories, or in comms and branding of for-purpose businesses. Through to the silence, erasure and punishment of anyone who speaks up about Palestine or any other genocide that's happening here and across the world.

Storytelling holds power and we all have a role to play. Whether to perpetuate that colonial narrative or we can flip the power of storytelling. As part of the initial stages of my research, I drew these two triangles. Trying to talk about the power dynamics of how the conditions are set by institutions and how we all play a role within that. As we explored this and started developing the framework, with Jen and the Our Race Community, we started looking at, how do we flip the power of storytelling? So, instead of the institution setting the rules, moving to a point where the story holders are in control.

As story caretakers, we have a responsibility to work with the story holders. It's not working beside them, and being in proximity to them, but what does it mean, our role within that storytelling? And so when we flip this power of storytelling, we move to that point where the story holders are on top. This also led to us developing our logo, which is this inverted triangle, because we really believe that we can challenge the power of storytelling. This means us challenging these systems of oppression through which ethical storytelling centres those who have been strategically marginalised or raised.

With that, I'm going to hand it over to Jen, who has been part of this whole journey with us. 

Jennifer Johannesen: Thanks Doug, and hi everyone. It's a real privilege to be here. I'm really honoured to be presenting alongside Dung, Doug and Juju, who are very intelligent people, and have taught me a lot in the years that I've known them. I'm also honoured to be coming to you from Dharawal Land today, a very beautiful Country I feel very privileged to be situated here. I'm really honoured that you all came; it's a massive group today. Thank you so much for coming and being interested in ethical storytelling. 

A bit about my background, if you can't already tell, I'm Canadian. Maybe if I was saying ‘out and about’, you might have heard it, but I am Canadian, and I've been here since 2008. My background, my mum is from the Philippines, and my dad is from Scotland. I have been in Australia since 2008, and it's clearly too long because I'm fully acclimatised and freezing even though I come from a country that's very cold. 

I've always been a student of social justice. I studied political science as my undergrad degree in Canada, and came and did my JD in law here in Australia.

I've been practising for about 15 years now, and the majority of that time has been spent advising charities, not-for-profits and social enterprises. It's very much my passion to help other people who have a passion and are doing good things in the world and assist them on that journey.

I initially spent five years at a top-tier firm, and then I moved to a small boutique firm for about eight years and there I worked with social enterprise clients too. Generally my focus has been on intellectual property and front-end legal work. Front-end is really advising on and helping clients avoid future disputes and liabilities through contract drafting, corporate structuring, governance and regulatory compliance.

I met Our Race seven or eight years ago. I've lost track but it feels like a lifetime that I've known them, in a good way. And one of our initial discussions, Doug and I, was that he asked what rights a story holder had if their story was used in a way that wasn't anticipated at the time. And the answer was very little. From an intellectual property perspective, the ownership attaches to the author of the work. So if you've trusted someone else to tell your story, it's the person that you've trusted generally who will have the copyright ownership over that and therefore the legal rights. In terms of privacy, there may be some limited protection, and maybe defamation, but again, it's very limited. There's no clear-cut legal rights that protect story holders. What it comes down to really is what's negotiated between the parties and that contractual right. 

That initial conversation gave rise to Our Race developing the TEST framework. That was a really collaborative and inclusive process. I must admit, as a lawyer, I'm not used to working in that type of environment. Usually, we're asked to draft something, we go away and do it. We're given a very narrow brief, we have maybe a 10-minute conversation and we go away, write it, give it to the client, maybe get a little bit of feedback, make a few changes, and then off it goes. But with the TEST framework, it was very collaborative and I learned a lot through that process.

After leaving that last firm, I joined For Purpose Advisory, where I am now as a group principal, and we work exclusively with not-for-profits, charities and social enterprises. What I realised through this work and while working at FPA, I've worked with Our Race in developing template consents, and we've also co-presented a number of workshops. What I realised is that this point of departure noted here, a lot of organisations are actually doing the work. There are good practices there, potentially good processes, but the people who are on the ground dealing with the community generally isn't the person that's drafting the consent form or instructing the lawyer around what needs to go in the consent form. In a lot of conversations, we would hear things like, we do that practice, and then I'd ask, is that reflected in your consent form? What I'd hear back is, ‘I haven't actually read the consent form, that's a legal team thing’. 

That's very much how we came to the realisation that you need to think of it holistically and it's a multi-pronged approach. It's not just doing the practice or having the process or alternatively just having the consent form. You need to do everything. What I realised from my perspective is that I was not properly advising clients about alternatives to the status quo. As I said, I do front-end legal work. If someone came to me and said I need a consent form, I would say, sure, let me just think of that from the client's perspective and make sure it's risk-averse and you have all the rights. You don't know what you're going to potentially want to do in the future, so I'll make sure that this consent form gives you all the rights and ensures that you can do whatever you want with that story in the future. Now and in the future.

Through my work with Our Race I've realised that I need to ask the right questions of the client. It may be that the person I'm talking to is not the right person to give me those answers, but just to push a little bit deeper and not just take the off-the-shelf consent form.

My second realisation was that I was actually complicit in disempowering storyholders by drafting those consent forms and not challenging that status quo. The standard consent form is generally that there's little or no payment for lived experience, little or no say in how images or stories are used, and broad rights for the client. Generally, it would be my client that I was drafting the consent form for, so they can modify the story. That's why it's so important to get consent right if you're truly committed to embedding the rights of a story holder, which we're going to discuss further later. 

I'll now hand over to Juju to share her story before I go too far into the consent form. You can tell I love talking about consent. 

Juju Ortiz: Thank you everyone for being here and thank you to SEA and Doug and Dung for inviting me to be part of this workshop. 

Kamusta. My name is Judith Marie Ortiz, but you can call me Juju. I'm a child of Caloocan and Marikina in the Philippines and now creating, parenting and story weaving on Jagera and Turrbal land in Meanjin. I'm a creative, constantly chasing this one question: How do we remember, honour, and foreground our shared dignity and culture? 

My design studio, Tatak, is leading the unbranding revolution through my entity identity framework. So I guide organisations from polished perception to lived identity. Because perception management is a colonial relic, we really need to ditch. The catalyst for this was four years ago. I chose a photo for a campaign, and my boss at the time rejected it, saying “the image of this Asian girl needs to change. It's not Australian enough. I don't want the market's first impression of our brand to be associated with cheap and nasty products made in China”. 

In this statement, I saw two truths. The first truth was that I had suppressed so much of my Filipino self for decades, and I still didn't fit. No matter how much of my culture I had abandoned, or the fact that I was born here or how ocker I spoke. This shattered the internal colonial tower that I had unknowingly built over decades of assimilation. The other truth I realised was that mainstream branding and marketing isn't just selling products. It's selling the colonial story that made that comment normal and acceptable. It shapes how we see race, gender, politics, land, and consumption while muting the voices that it exploits. Brands pour all of these resources into sleek visuals and feel-good values that never leave the slide deck. So then the harmful narrative stays intact under the surface. 

I want you to think about how much marketing and branding you've been exposed to your whole life. Mindsets are shaped as early as three. By three, you're copying cultural cues around you. By five, you start editing yourself to belong. By adolescence, you're fluent in hiding what doesn't match the dominant narrative. Mainstream branding feeds that every day. I fed that narrative throughout my career as a creative and in my daily life.

But why should you care? The same system that labelled my photo cheap and un-Australian and made my harmful creative practices feel normal still shapes every story your organisation tells today. It influences what you build, how you treat your team, who gets a seat at the table, and how your brand shows up in the world.

Two weeks later, I left that employer, and at the age of 32 I needed to face some hard truths and rebuild myself from the ground up. I had to reconcile life as a working mother, a first-generation Filipino Australian, a woman, and a creative who wanted to toss over 10 years of training in the bin. I reclaimed language, land connection, and design practice. From that work the Entity Identity Framework was born. It involves eight elements that align an entity's actions with its values, so then perception becomes the byproduct and not the goal. 

Not long after releasing my framework, I met Dung at a conference. Since then we've been working together on multiple projects. Our Race’s TEST framework became my foundation. We could fill this whole session with just that framework. Doug and Dung have generously invited me to show you how TEST intersects with the work that I do in the branding, marketing and design realms.

I'll pass over to Doug or Dung and they can talk more about the TEST framework. 

Dung Tran: Thanks Juju. Beautiful segue. 

I guess you're all wondering what is TEST? TEST stands for Transformational Ethical Story Telling. We've separated the story and the telling because it can be two separate things. Also, to preface that, in building the framework, Doug and I, when we talk about Our Race Community, it's made up of researchers, practitioners and story holders, story sharers, storytellers. We are deeply informed by First Nations wisdom and their guidance on how we use language. We're also doing a lot of unlearning and relearning ourselves. For us, TEST is at the heart of everything that we do. It is not just a framework. It's more like a philosophy, it's a way of how I live. And it's not difficult to embed these principles into our current practice or policies or processes in a work space, but also in your personal life.

TEST is also a call to action. We developed TEST because we saw time and time again our storytelling spaces, especially in the social impact, government and not-for-profit sectors, can unintentionally replicate power imbalances. Often, stories are extracted from communities, especially those with lived experience, to serve organisational agendas rather than to empower or respect the story holders. TEST is our response to that harm. It's a values-based, anti-oppressive framework designed to flip the power in storytelling. 

It rests on five core values. The first one is:do no harm. Stories carry weight. Our role as story caretakers must begin with the question: Will this process hurt, retraumatise or disempower the person sharing the story? If so, we need to stop, we need to rethink, and we need to redo our processes and our practice. 

Cultural humility. This is a continual process of self-reflection. It requires you to acknowledge that you are not the expert in someone else's experience or culture and being open to learning, being corrected and stepping back is a strength.

Centre the lived experience. I think that goes without much explanation. It's to be able to recognise and should recognise that lived or living experience is the highest form of expertise. 

Continual learning. For us, ethical storytelling isn't just a tick a box exercise. It's ongoing work. You need to keep reassessing what you're doing. It's uncomfortable work. You need to re-adapt, you need to listen, you need to reshape the practice, and you need to walk alongside communities that have welcomed you, been so generous and kind in inviting you to sit with them.

Re-measuring success. Traditional metrics around reach, engagement or brand uplift are not enough. Ethical storytelling redefines success to include dignity, agency, informed consent and long-term relationships with storyholders. It's not transactional, it needs to be relational. That has to be at the core of every interaction that you have with communities. 

TEST reminds us that every story sits within a broader structure of power. That's race, gender, class, language and ability. This is why the framework doesn't just outline what we should do; it calls out what we must stop doing. Tokenism, trauma mining, performative inclusion, and unacknowledged bias.

So I'm going to hand over to Doug and share with you the spaces that TEST operates in. 

Doug Cronin: Building on what Dung said and the definition of TEST, is some of the language we came up with, with the support of others. Because we talk about the storyteller, and as a storyteller, you can be the first person, second person, or third person being that storyteller. So we really want to put the emphasis on the story holder, that person with the lived experience. And that person with the lived experience, their story changes over time, and we need to acknowledge how that changes. 

That story caretaker works relationally with the story and the story holder. And so the story caretaker, rather than what we see, is often taking the ownership of the story; they're taking a position where they're acknowledging who owns that story in its reality. Sometimes it's working with the legal aspects of what that looks like and the negotiation within that space.

We've also got the story extractor and the interpreter. Which we want to shift away from, but they're still the most common that we see. The extractor, as you could imagine, is the one who just takes the story without any care. The interpreter is one who takes it, interprets it through their own lens, but doesn't really go back to the story holder and the story to make sure that the story holder is comfortable with how that story is going to be portrayed now and into the future.

And that takes us into the five principles of the framework, which are all interconnected. The first one is around free, prior and ongoing informed consent, which I'll touch on, but Jen will go into it deeper because that's around the policy aspect of it. But it's not just the policy, it's about how that's practised. We find that sometimes we have a consent form, we might even have the payment of someone within that consent form, but how's it being practised? Is it just in a silo or is it being practised across the organisation? And it's also the acknowledgement that particularly in today's world, once the story's out there, what can happen to it? Can it be taken back?

There's limitations, so the importance of transparency when we start talking about consent as well. We're looking at this from an angle in many different spheres of storytelling. So conferences are a perfect example where we see that you automatically opt-in to that consent. So you have to opt-out if you don't want to be part of it. That sometimes means you're not even able to attend a particular conference because you walk into a space and it's already saying by attending this space you are automatically consenting for your image, which is part of your story, and broader parts of your story, to be used. It is possible to shift that, and we're seeing it happen from large organisations and small groups where they're really asking: What does consent look like? How do we rebalance that power through the consent policies, processes and practises? This means having consent check-in points, not just at this one point. It's got to be relational, not just transactional. 

That leads to the second principle, which I'll hand over shortly, but that question again with a conference. Who's being paid? Who's not being paid? How explicit are we about who's being paid? Do we have a payment policy in place? I know when I go to a lot of conferences, which are large ticket prices, and I hear about people who are being asked to speak and they're not being paid. So what is happening there? There's obviously other people being paid for being there, directly or indirectly, but it doesn't fit for everybody. So this expectation of who's meant to share and who's not meant to share. 

I'll pass it over to Dung to expand on the next couple of principles. 

Dung Tran: Resourcing and sensitivity. Doug talked about who's being paid and who's not being paid in the room. So storytelling is never free, right? There's a cost. There's always a cost. Not a monetary or an economic cost, but still very much a cost. 

For many of us when we share our stories, it means revisiting trauma, identity, and displacement. That comes with emotional, cultural and spiritual costs that no one sees. As an organiser, if you are representing an organisation, you have to look holistically at the harm that you are unintentionally creating on that individual or that community. So resource and sensitivity mean recognising that these costs exist and showing up with care and kindness, not just with curiosity. It includes providing culturally safe spaces for the person to show up. Making sure that there are interpreters if they need language assistance. Is it having the right interpreters? There's nuance around how language is used. 

Support for people, psychological and emotional support. Debriefing, is that required? Is that needed? It's through building the relationship that you then understand what is required emotionally from that person and the legal help that they need. Are there consequences? Speaking out could mean that there are consequences they would meet afterwards. Are you able to provide or is your organisation in a position to provide the legal support they need? Respecting cultural protocols, especially when you're working with First Nations communities, that's fundamental. How often do we forget? It becomes an afterthought paying people fairly. Exposure is not payment. Providing the platform is not payment. That should not be traded. If you're asking for someone's lived experience, you're asking for expertise and that expertise deserves fair, non-exploitative compensation. This principle reminds us that ethical storytelling is not just about how stories are told but how story holders are treated. 

In terms of the treatment, how are you empowering the story holder with the information and the resources and the tools that they need to make a decision of whether to share their story or not? It is often asked of story holders to share their story, but [once shared], they don't own that story. Jen will elaborate a little bit later on. When you share the story and someone records it in that moment, you don't own that version of your story. Do they know that? The story holder who's sharing that, do they know that? Do they want that? So empowerment in our framework is about real control, not symbolic inclusion. The person sharing the story should have the right to choose how and where it's shared. Also, the right to say no. So make sure you have a backup plan, right? Build that in as part of your risk management plan, your contingency plan. Because they can say no, they should be able to say no. And they should have the right to be involved in the editing and the final framing of their story. 

This is about challenging power. It's not enough to give someone a mic. You need to make sure they control the volume, the message and the stage that they're standing on. As someone who has been asked to tell their story countless times, I've had to relive my trauma of forced migration, escaping as a young child on a boat from Vietnam, living in a refugee camp, and having to unpack the trauma that I hadn't dealt with. So I know what empowerment looks like. As an older person, I now know what empowerment looks like. That's being treated as if I am the expert of my story and that I'm not just content for someone else's agenda or someone else's campaign.

Doug Cronin: That leads onto co-design, because empowerment means being at the very beginning. Co-design, just like ethical storytelling, has become a buzzword in many ways, but it's not being practised genuinely. We're seeing it more as being consultation, which is very top-down, rather than it being co-designed from the beginning. 

We see it happen where the organisation makes the choice of when to bring in people with lived experience, and often again going back to the other principles, not remunerating them for their time. The extra load that's put on them in their roles is actually not connected to what they're meant to be doing, but because of their cultural, racial background, they're expected to be an expert in that area. But co-design and collaboration means from the start, not at the end. It means listening and also sometimes listening to hard truths. Just because you think it might be the right model, the right program, the right project to alleviate harm. You might get some feedback that tells you that it's not. It's really important to take all the feedback in and not let the sensitivities of this idea of being an expert stop you from  challenging the way that things have always been done. I think that time when people say it's always been done this way, means we need to question that and look into it a bit deeper. So co-design is looking at who's in the room, who's not in the room, whose voice counts, whose voice doesn't count? 

This also goes through to the point of evaluation. Who's evaluating it and whose voice matters around evaluation? Because quite often we look at evaluation as the receiver of that information. It's often the self-reported attitudes and behaviours rather than the experiences of the people who should be positively, hopefully, impacted by the project or program. Co-design and collaboration need to be there from the beginning. And we're seeing it in large organisations, where instead of them having just the leadership in the room, it's looking at who's the leadership to begin with and then who are the members and whose voices need to be heard at this stage?

The next one goes into the integrity of the story. If there's no integrity then what's the point of the story? And integrity, a big part of that is around the editing of the story. We can so easily lose that integrity by the choices we make with someone's story, how we curate it, erase it, and how we make sure it fits into the story that maybe we choose to tell before we've even spoken to the story holder. We see that happen in the media over and over again, where the story's already been set and the interviewer has chosen the interviewee to exploit that story and reinforce the narrative that they want to tell. 

When we talk about integrity, it's taking a backseat. It's about listening to the story holder and centring that voice from the time of collecting the story to making sure we're transparent, back to consent, but also the editing process as well. How do we make sure we are working with them? Any edits we make and particularly if we decide to repurpose it, we need to go back to them, back to the ongoing consent. So what is our role in maintaining the integrity of the story? That's where that part of the story caretaker really comes in, and it intersects with the practice which Juju will go into now and talk about how we weave these stories together, not in our silos, but collectively with our different skills, experiences and continue that unlearning together.

Juju Ortiz: Thanks Doug. So to explain how Our Race, Tatak and For Purpose Advisory work together and why our combined powers matter, I came up with this analogy. It's only because of my reconnection with my Filipino roots that I was able to come up with this analogy, and so I honour my ancestors in sharing this with you today.

The significance of weaving in pre-colonial Philippines is shared among other indigenous communities across the globe. They didn't have tech, and it was fabric that was their living archive. So the fibres that they collected from the land, they turned into pattern with telling stories of their clans, star maps and even moral codes.

To weave is to keep knowledge circulating through hands, seasons and generations. Because a cloth is never worked alone, it invites every person to contribute and hold the story in common. The weaving process also teaches relational strengths and perfectly maps the collaborative work of Our Race, Tatak and For Purpose Advisory.

I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with the process of weaving but how you begin your weave is with your warp threads. These are the threads that run from top to bottom, and they're secured with tension. This is the process, this is TEST, and it gives the ethics, the non-negotiable principles. If you don't have your warp, you don't have cloth. 

The next step is where you weave in the weft threads. These are the threads that go side to side, moving over and under the warp threads. This is practice, and Tatak turns TEST into daily actions interlacing the ethics through every element of an entity. That's your values, community, and visual language. The pattern is what becomes your lived identity.

Then the last part of the weaving is the selvage stitching. That's what locks the edging in so that your cloth doesn't unravel, and this is the policy work. For Purpose Advisory's legal work adds the consent clauses, the IP licensing, and pay equity terms that keeps the fabric from fraying.

The takeaway is that the cloth is only as strong as the threads we choose to weave. If you leave a strand out or you miss a stitch or weave it loosely, the fabric won't hold. But every thread can still be added, tightened or even repaired when we decide to work holistically.

Before TEST. I'm going to share with you my unethical storytelling practices that I did in my career:

• I wrote feel-good brand stories and product descriptions that ignored First Nations voices while profiting from their culture.
• I retouched children's faces and bodies to fit a narrow beauty standard. 
• I picked images and quotes to serve the brief, not the story holder's dignity.
• I staged diverse photo shoots, then kept the diversity only in the photos. 
• I erased whole groups from campaigns because they weren't on brand and
• I reduced people to their dollar value and sorted them into marketing boxes.

Every one of these creative choices felt normal, but normal was harmful. After learning TEST, I could no longer unsee the harm my normal practice had been causing, and now I see it everywhere. I read it in the LinkedIn posts that celebrate impact, centring the white founder and burying the community partner in the footnote. I watch it in the multicultural showcases where the global majority talent is on stage but never on the board. I hear it when an accent is corrected so that leadership will take an idea seriously. I feel it in grant guidelines that reward rapid scale while ignoring the slower-paced community's need for genuine co-design.

I touch it in the conference tote bags, branded ethical, but they're sewn offshore for $2 an hour. And I taste it at an Asian food festival whose ads show no Asian faces, whose stalls are not run by Asian vendors, and where the only Asian presence is the menu itself. That's the landscape we're here to reweave. 

My most recent work has been with CareerSeekers. They're a social enterprise that connects humanitarian entrants with professional work in Australia and their messaging used to centre the labels refugee and asylum seeker. I shifted the language to people with refugee backgrounds or simply humanitarian entrants. Small words but big dignity. We stopped defining participants by the trauma that pushed them here and started describing them by the expertise, skills and fresh perspectives that they bring. That doesn't erase the very real barriers that they face. And through our work we help tackle these barriers through targeted support and advocacy. We started speaking to participants rather than about them. We stopped presenting them as charity favours, instead highlighting the mutual benefit employment partners receive when they open the door to diverse talent. 

What I have on screen is the post that we published, sharing the language shift. I might just read that to you quickly:

“Since 2015 we've used the terms "refugee" and "asylum seeker" to describe our participants. We now realise this hasn't fully respected who they are or the value they bring. In using these terms, we didn't always put our participants at the centre; instead we risked defining them by their refugee status.

Moving forward, we are committed to using language that celebrates each person's identity, resilience and talent, while also educating and collaborating with our employment partners. To all of our participants and our broader community, we see you, we hear you and we are dedicated to honouring the unique journeys each of you bring.

CareerSeekers is determined to learn and grow. Our mission continues, with respect and inclusion at the heart of it all.” 

The key lesson here is, when language lifts the story holder, the whole story rises. 

Another example of TEST. TEST also reminded me that I can shape the rules, not just the work. Alongside a pro-bono program and fresh terms of engagement, I also wrote an accountability policy. Jen's going to help me stitch this one tight. My accountability policy operationalises the TEST principle, integrity of story. Once we co-create a brand identity, the client and I share custodianship of that story. I consider my work to be part of my story, and I co-create that story with the client. If their actions wander from the values that we co-design, they realign, or persistent misalignment means that I can withdraw my work.

In practice, it also honours the TEST principle of ongoing consent and the principle of empowerment. Because communities, not just creatives, retain real control over how their stories live in the world. For consumers words like sustainable, honest, and inclusive actually carry real weight. For organisations, this policy is a compass. It's not a threat. It's a guidance that keeps your purpose, process and practice in sync. Good design deserves more than cosmetic virtue, and this is my way of making sure it gets it. 

With that, it's the perfect moment to pass on to Jen to talk about her legal work. 

Jennifer Johannesen: Thanks Juju. You're right, that does lead perfectly into what I'll be discussing in terms of what I can do to assist clients effectively put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. And alternatively, to ensure that you hold others to account when engaging with them. Which is why I love the accountability policy that Juju developed. It's brilliant. And I also love the weaving analogy. Thanks, Juju. 

As I mentioned earlier, I have worked with organisations in the past where they have the practice, but just haven't updated the legal terms to reflect what the practice is. On the other hand, there have been a lot of organisations that think that updating their template consent form is going to do all the work for them. I think the purpose of today is really to show that it has to be undertaken at every stage of the organisation to fully embody the TEST principles. In the sense that you need to update the processes, the practices, and the legal terms come last. 

That's why that weaving analogy is so perfect, because it's the last step. Now in real life, I'm not really known for my sewing skills. In fact, this weekend I had to hem some pants for my 3-year-old son, and I ended up just safety pinning them because I couldn't get the string off the spool. But in this analogy, another reason why it's so perfect is, as I understand it, the last step is hemming, selvage or the binding, which is an apt term to compare to what the legal terms actually do for embedding your practices and your policies. You're making it binding in the organisation. You're giving the story holders or alternatively holding the story caretakers to account. There's actually bite. There's now contractual obligations that you are setting out by undertaking this last step and making it binding.

I think there's this understanding that you update your consent form and that's the end of the process. I wanted to outline that if you properly want to undertake this process, there's a few different other things that you might need to take into account.

On consent forms first. I'll show you a standard consent clause that's used in the next slide. This is a template, a standard one which Doug actually received from a university. This is a real-life clause in a real-life contract at the moment. I'm going to read it out to you:

“The participant grants X (the organisation) & its agents and assigns, (so it's not just that organisation but its agents, which is a very broad term as in it's not defined. Who are its agents and its assigns?) the irrevocable, (you can never change your mind, never take it back) exclusive, (please don't tell anyone else this story because you've told it to us, it's exclusively ours) royalty free (you're not going to receive any money from it) & unconditional right (don't think about trying to add any rights or conditions on this because it's completely unconditional) to use, publish, display, distribute or alter the Content, (so they can effectively do whatever they want) for any purpose, including, but not limited to, (there could be other things) commercial use or the advertising, promotion or publicity of the organisation and its products and services, in any media, now or hereafter known, worldwide, in perpetuity, without remuneration. (again just in case you thought you're getting paid, you're not going to get paid).”

This is a fairly standard clause. As I said, I've been guilty, not this drafting, this drafting is pretty bad, but I've been guilty of drafting similar clauses where you're trying to think from your client's perspective, what's the least risk-averse possible clause I can draft? Particularly if you're not given clear instructions. You want to try and draft something that's going to be used for whatever purpose. So the safest option is just to make sure the client has all the rights. This isn't really what a lot of purpose-driven businesses want or not-for-profit organisations or charities necessarily. It's just been the status quo.

So what could happen if you sign one of these clauses? I'm not saying that any of the organisations that are on this call would ever do this, but this little child, her mom signed a consent form on her behalf. She participated in a modelling contest at a mall. Then 10 years later, the mom's walking down the street and sees her daughter up on a billboard. “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Now she had signed a consent just like that last one, and that was the outcome of it. So even though I hear from organisations we would never do that. At the end of the day, put your money where your mouth is and actually prepare a consent form or a clause that reflects what you're doing because you're doing great work. So why shouldn't your terms reflect that? 

Now there is an alternative to doing a consent form in that way. I want to raise an example. Our Race - a couple of years ago now - had a panel of speakers at a screening of a film called Subject. Ahead of that screening, we met with the group of speakers together and listened to the joint feedback. Now, typically in a contract negotiation, it's a one-on-one process. It's very transactional. This was a very different approach, where everyone was able to hear the feedback from everyone else. That way, when we updated the consent form, we took on everybody's feedback and it was all open and it was discussed and everyone understood what they were signing up for. I think that's ultimately what the key point from my perspective is. It's ensuring that the story holder understands what they're signing up for. 

So talent agreements can also be called participation agreements or speaker agreements. These are often used when you're engaging someone to share a part of their story. It could be a consent form or a talent agreement, and the considerations are similar. A photography or video consent. That's the type of terms that Doug referred to earlier. Those are often used in attendance terms, so if you attend an event the standard practice is that by attending the event you're consenting to that organisation taking your image or video while you're sitting in the audience. The only way that you can disagree with that is by not entering or attending the event. An alternative way that could be addressed is by providing options to people. There might be a sectioned off area where there's no video or photos taken, for example. So it's just about thinking through options and providing, ensuring people are empowered to make a choice.

Employee and contractor agreements. Consider whether anything needs to change in those agreements. We've provided a lot of workshops and we always get feedback from people at the workshop. We've heard before, employees ending up on the front cover of an annual report or external marketing without any additional consent being sought just because they're an employee of that company. Even privacy policies, for example, consider what personal information you absolutely need to hang on to and for how long and what rights do you give people to delete that personal information that you hold? Generally, well, under the Privacy Act you need to give people a right to correct information, but there's no obligation to delete personal information, at least at this stage. 

Last on the list there, trademark and copyright laws. This is alternatively, from the perspective of a story holder, and we're all story holders really. Think about how you can protect your own story. In the digital age if you put your story out there, there's a real risk of copycat springing up. I'm using the word story here very broadly; even when you're talking about your company or your company's story, there's a risk there. I'm thinking about ownership in terms of IP. So as I mentioned, the standard position with copyright is that the owner of the IP is the author. That can be changed through contract. So just ensuring that you're thinking through all of these questions. The accountability policy, which I really love, it's just about ensuring that you're holding, for Juju, holding her clients to account.

So we had a look at the bad example. I'm going to show you another example. There's another way to do it. So this was the Welcoming Australia Symposium. The terms that were prepared. How long will Welcoming Australia use my story and can I ask for it to be taken down? Some of the differences, I won't actually read through it because it's a lot of content, but some of the things that were embedded in here was that there was a time limit. This was effectively a speaker agreement. The people that came to participate and share their story on stage, there's a time limit. They were recorded and they would retain the recording for a maximum of two years. There was an ability for that person to change their mind. So even if it was within that two-year period, if for some reason there came a point in time where they changed their mind around it being shared, they could revoke consent. 

There was a requirement to approve any edits to the recording, and it was limited in purpose. Compared to that last example that we looked at where the purpose was extremely broad, in fact, there were no conditions on it. Here there's a limited purpose that they can only share the recordings with the community through social media pages. If there's any other purpose that might be relevant an additional consent would be required.

There was also an obligation to make payment in this example. I don't think that if you copy and paste this and drop it into your organisation, that is not necessarily going to embed the TEST principles as I mentioned. It's really about the process and practices that underpin what you end up putting in your consent form. So the binding, the hemming, the part that I do is really only reflecting the good practices and processes that have been developed in the organisation.

We also want to share another example of where this was done really well. SongMakers. This is a program that is run by APRA AMCOS. APRA AMCOS is a music rights management organisation that represents over a hundred thousand songwriters, composers and music publishers in Australia and New Zealand.

They effectively license out music and collect royalties and then distribute that to their members. SongMakers is a program run within APRA AMCOS. They have a group of mentors who are successful songwriters and producers and they mentor young people. They go into schools and run intensive songwriting workshops. 

SongMakers was very passionate about ensuring that their students, their participants, understood the consent form and understood what they were agreeing to when they were participating in this program. It was a very collaborative process in developing those terms, which involved not only the people that ran SongMakers but also the mentors. We drafted the consent form. We engaged in a process with SongMakers to ensure that the consent form reflected the practices.

SongMakers also developed a video that explained what was in the consent form. Funnily enough, Doug's daughter actually participated in the SongMakers program prior to the video being rolled out. Doug, I think maybe you can share that story just before we have a look at this video.

Doug Cronin: Yeah, I think it goes to the point of, do you actually read a consent form? Do we read the terms and conditions? My daughter attended one of these with the consent form, where she had to tick the boxes and sign it. She signed it without ticking the boxes, which obviously meant she hadn't read it.

We've been talking about it for a while, about the importance of having a video because consent is not just the form, but it's also about the education. When we worked with them and developed the script in collaboration with Vuli, who's in our team, who's also a musician and a member of APRA AMCOS, helping develop it so that we could have it as an educational tool as well as consent, to collect the consent of people.

So we'll show this now, it's a few minutes.

APRA SongMakers - Participation & Talent Request Video [5 mins 30secs]

Starts at 63:58 of the webinar recording

Questions & Answer (Q&A):

Doug Cronin: I've got a few questions here. So I'll ask them and then whoever wants to jump in. How do we not end up in the exploitative churning wheel of racial capital? How do we share the profits with storytellers, we have made through stories we have shared?

Jen touched on it before around the film Subject and one of the things that they did was, and I think sometimes they do this in documentaries, they back-end it. When we've done that ourselves, we've run an event not knowing how much money we'd raise, but we wanted to make sure that the money would then go to those story holders. We're very transparent about how much money we thought we'd make. We were conservative with the amount and said that we'd share that after the case with the story holders so that they were actually paid through that system. So that was one way we're doing it as a back-end.

I know through the Subject film, they did it similarly because they had to raise the revenue, pay that off, before they could pay the story holders. They also ensured that those story holders who were in the documentary, had other avenues of making money through speaking on panels. They made sure on all the panels they were speaking on, they were paid for that time. 

Dung Tran: Could I also add that we've recently launched a storyholder fund. To ensure that story holders who are being asked to share their story or perform a piece of original music or creative work, we've started our own story holder fund. Also as an example for organisations out there that Our Race, we're a small, not-for-profit, charity organisation. If we can do this, centre people who've been racialised, with lived experience, then other organisations do have the resources and the means to do something similar. So the story holder fund is a way for us to ask for donations from people who support our work. From the public who support story holders as well and want them to succeed. It's to donate to the story holder fund. We use the story holder fund as a pool of resource money to then be able to share and pay those that have been asked to perform, create music, and create works for the public. So that's an initiative that we've been able to start as a small organisation and we centre the experiences and we bring them in. 

The way in which we've done this is there will be an advisory committee that will determine the governance structure and the terms and the conditions of that.

Our Race will act as an organisation that sets it up, provides the resources to set it up, but we won't determine the terms and conditions on how the funds will be used and who gets access to that. That will be determined by and led by people with lived experience.

Doug Cronin: Okay, I'll move on to another question. For companies doing this particularly poorly and therefore needing to do the most work. I imagine it'd be tempting to put this in the too hard basket. Is this what you find in your conversations? If not, why? If so, how do you get them to take this seriously and take genuine actions?

Juju Ortiz: I can speak a little bit on that one. It's very common for the work that we do to get placed in the too hard basket. And it can feel very overwhelming as well when you have to take a step back and look at your whole operations, how you do your marketing, your brand language, brand narrative. It is a big job. I guess where my entity identity framework gives it a little bit of structure, so it can give you the elements to your entity. Then the TEST principles, you take that and then you work in how those principles flow throughout all of the elements within your organisation.

You only have to start small because once you start making one change, you just continually build on top of what you've done. And CareerSeekers is a good example of just making that terminology switch. We'll just keep on building on top of that.

Doug Cronin: Jen, do you have anything to add there? 

Jennifer Johannesen: Yeah, I think one of the ways that we generally recommend undertaking the process is starting with a project or a distinct piece of work. With APRA AMCOS for example, SongMakers is a program run by APRA AMCOS. Seeing how it's implemented in one area then allows the organisation to have a blueprint effectively. Once you develop the processes, it's just a matter of following them. I think while it does seem daunting, if you start taking the steps, you see that it's not that much work once you have done the thinking behind it.

Doug Cronin: Great. I'm going to get to another question. Has anybody explored each person's story having a digital footprint, where any use of that digital content provides a royalty? Much like a book or a record. 

Jen, that might be more for you. Have you seen anything like that? No? 

Jennifer Johannesen: I mean, no, not to date. Who knows what's going to happen with AI and being able to track things. But no, I haven't seen anything like that. 

Doug Cronin: I know that Mikey Leung from Digital Storytellers has been talking about that for a while and trying to have a Creative Commons and holding that consent there. 

I think somebody asked a question around consent earlier and storing consent. Trying to maintain that and also having a way to distribute income to the story holder. I'm not sure how far that's progressed and I think it's more of a project that he might be hoping to do and has the idea for it but haven't seen it in practice as of yet. 

As far as storing of consent. I know it was Doctors Without Borders when we were running some work with them. They were talking about how they were storing the consent. They were doing it from a point in time of now because they acknowledged that in the past it was pretty much they weren't doing that. They were actually going through the archives to look at them now. But they were trying to then put into a system where they were collecting the consent in that way. So they could always check that and do it in a way there. You can develop systems for it. 

I've got a question about adherence to the TEST principles with PhD journey.

That's something I have struggled with for eight years, that thing of how do university ethics meet with community ethics? And I think they don't meet a lot of the time. University ethics, kind of like when we see consent forms that Jen talked about before, are drafted to protect the organisation rather than the community.

I know that there are people who are doing some incredible research where they're taking into consideration the university ethics but they're applying their own community ethics to it, to be able to uphold those stories in the most respectful way. It is a challenge for a lot and I think it's something that's needed within, particularly, I think, high degree research students to think about the community ethics they're using not just the university ethics.

Tim has asked how can this be introduced to government agencies who fall back on the legislative rights to copyright and request the transfer of all ownership of IP? 

Great question. Jen, do you want to start with that one? 

Jennifer Johannesen: I think from my perspective there's not going to be one way that the TEST principles are going to be implemented across organisations.

I think the government, for example, any government agencies are going to have their own way of doing things. It's really more around the processes of communicating that to whoever's engaging with a government agency so that they understand what they're agreeing to or otherwise. Because I don't see that changing anytime soon to be frank, Tim.

Dung Tran: I don't have a scenario that is with government but close enough and that's with a very large university and a not-for-profit organisation that provided access to the story holders that they were working with, to this university organisation who wanted the participants of the program, the not-for-profit organisations program, to share their lived experience.

Through negotiations and I guess the standard consent form that Jen talks about is that IP is owned by, well, the university was paying for the products. Because they paid for the product, they wanted to own all the IP, and the ability to also edit and repurpose it for other means and other campaigns. I felt really uncomfortable with that. We said let's go in and negotiate on the terms. Let's just ask the question, why do you need it? Why do you need it for that long? We've got the social trust, we've got the organisation on social trust and community trust with the participants who are sharing their stories. We don't want to be handing that over to a large entity to do whatever they want with it, even though you've paid for it.

Three negotiations and it took a few months, they came back, the university came back and said, we agree, we understand that there are ethical dilemmas here, there are ethical challenges. We looked at what we needed to do with that, and we won't have complete copyright. The owner of the copyright and the story still belong to those participants who were part of the collection of their stories. 

I think sometimes it's really starting the conversation, asking the questions and demonstrating that there's a lot of harm here that you do realise that you're creating, and is it really necessary? I think that's where the process of changing that thinking and shifting thinking, the mindset. Some people might be, not all, but I know I've worked in federal government for close to two decades. I know that sometimes you get institutionalised into the role and the work that you do. And you think that that's the only way, until you're questioned. Until someone outside the community questions your practice. It allows you to step back and sit back and think, what am I doing? Am I centring people with the lived experience? Am I causing the harm? Am I applying that cultural humility that I need? 

We've all come into this work with the purpose of changing the world. We can still do this. We can still do this because there's so many wonderful frameworks and guiding principles. And I think TEST is adaptable. It is so easily adaptable and flexible that it can fit into any system. I call it an operating system. You can embed that, you can install it into your organisation. So that prompts you at every step of the work that you do to go and ask the questions that you need to ask. We do advocacy, advocate for the story holder. 

And we might end it on that and thank you all. I'm going to pass it back over for Bree to close the session. She might have some key takeaways or things for you to do. Thank you so much.

Bree Clare: Thank you to Dung, Doug, Jen and Juju for sharing your story with such openness and grace. As well as sharing such mind-shifting and valuable insights with us all. Thank you also to everyone who took the time to join us online today. 

There are some highlights that I'd love to share that really resonated with me. Every story sits within a broader structure of power. It's not just what we should do, call out what we must stop doing as well, such as performative inclusion and extraction. Challenging power is not enough to just give someone a microphone.

There is also a need to give them control of the message, the microphone and the stage they're on. I love Juju's weaving analogy and I also saw a comment from someone else saying the same. As someone studying law, reflecting on the fact that there are no legal rights for storytellers. Normal can be harmful. But small changes can mean big dignity. And how can we as an organisation at Social Enterprise Australia, embed the rights of story holders and storytellers holistically across our practice processes, policies and agreements?

Huge thank you to the team at the Department of Social Services, who are supporting the development of these learning communities as part of the Federal Government Social Enterprise Development Initiative. 

Thank you to the Social Enterprise Australia crew behind the scenes who make this all happen and run so smoothly. Caragh, Megan, Sherryl, Athanasia, Liz, Raylee and Christina. 

Please check out Understorey for all upcoming open learning sessions. We look forward to seeing you there. Thank you again, everyone.