It is crucial to continue to seek feedback and maintain an open dialogue with Aboriginal communities. By building and maintaining strong relationships, you will be well placed to gather useful feedback which will help you to adapt or modify programs as required, and to make positive changes within your sport's culture and environment to ensure Aboriginal people are welcome and included.
Feedback is important if you want to understand why something isn’t working. New programs often take a while to build, and if you’re not getting the uptake you want, the best thing you can do is gather direct feedback from participants, or Aboriginal leaders, and use the conversation to adapt your sport activities.
Sport organisations who have worked successfully with Aboriginal people have found the follow methods useful to gather program feedback:
- Consider taking 5 minutes at the end of your session to speak to the participants about what they liked, or didn’t like, about the session.
- Speak to the leaders from the Aboriginal community you are working with. This could include Elders, leaders from local organisations such as co-operatives, or other leaders and mentors within the community. They may be able to provide collective feedback on behalf of the group.
Remember, listening to the group feedback is very important and might provide invaluable information to help you tailor your program to fit the interests of the local community.
Many organisations already produce useful information about Victorian communities, and your sport organisation can tap into this information. For example, you can seek information from your local council, other community groups, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and VicHealth.
- The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey provides data around health, education and employment.