Culturally-safe, trauma-informed resources for navigating the National Redress Scheme.

Background

Relationships Australia Queensland’s (RAQ) required culturally-safe, trauma-informed digital resources to assist in-house community, survivors and clients of the Redress Support Service in applying to the scheme. RAQ offer a support service to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people accessing the Redress scheme. Due to the sensitive nature of this scheme and lack of culturally appropriate communication, take-up by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is low.

Opportunity for futures

We saw an important opportunity to listen deeply to RAQ employees and Aunty Debra Bennet, RAQ’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Engagement and Cultural Advisor, about their experiences assisting clients. In the past, barriers including complicated language, risks for re-traumatisation, misinformation and lack of clarity around National Redress Scheme have made it difficult to build trust for clients. Providing culturally-safe support to people undertaking the redress process ensures they can better access the benefits of the scheme and begin a healing process.

Our approach

In an initial workshop with Triple A, key members of the RAQ team, including Aunty Debra Bennett, we arrived at a list of key resources that would be used to open and support in-person engagements with RAQ: an infographic summarising steps in the process, a journey information pack with map and start sheet, and an animation. The visual communication and messaging required a sense of calmness and clarity, where RAQ employees could ‘walk with’ clients on their journey through redress.

After additional yarning and collaboration with Aunty Deb and the RAQ team, we captured the many redress journey steps in four stages, gradually adjusting the language to be simple and clear.

Two key devices were developed to use across all collateral. The ‘Gathering Pieces’ device was crafted to represent many ways people might make meaning from the redress experience. Victims of abuse have described their spirit being empty, thus the device might speak to the spirit coming back into shape as one ‘picks up the pieces’, the tools and support, along the way. The mental spaces people may encounter (both RAQ employees and clients), the different obstacles and stages they will traverse over time. Very simple lines and dots were used, to ensure clients could make meaning out of the forms for themselves. The ‘Gradient Growth’ devices were designed as colourway options for the journey packs, gently conveying feelings of Country, spanning coastal, desert, forest and ocean, prompting conversations and relations to Country for clients and RAQ.