Aboriginal-owned · Narrative therapy · Mentoring · Movement · Community
Healing throughstory.Strength throughconnection.
Every family needs an extra Aunty for a yarn.
Aboriginal-owned narrative therapy, mentoring, movement and community support walking alongside children, young people, families and carers when life and systems become overwhelming.
"Someone who can yarn.
Someone who can listen."
The Ngawilyi model
One relationship.
Multiple ways of responding.
Too often, a child experiencing overlapping challenges ends up with an education worker, a mentor, a placement worker, a contact worker, a substance-use service, a behaviour program — another appointment, another assessment, another person asking them to tell their story again.
Ngawilyi asks: what if we didn't need ten workers? What if one trusted Aunty could walk beside the child and family, drawing from a range of program models depending on what was happening in their life?
One relationship. Multiple life domains. Less system overwhelm.
When behaviour starts affecting everything
One difficulty can cascade across a child's whole life.
Ngawilyi works within these intersections — before one difficulty is allowed to dominate every other area of a child's life.
Instead of asking "What is wrong with this child?" we ask —
- 01What is happening around this child?
- 02What knowledge does this child already hold?
- 03What has the problem convinced other people to believe about them?
- 04What relationships and community can we strengthen around them?
- 05How can we stop this problem from taking over other parts of their life?
Difficulty at school
Suspension
Kinship carer repeatedly leaves employment
Employment and financial pressure
Stress within the home
Placement pressure
Child experiences further rejection & disconnection
Behaviour escalates
More services and workers become involved
Children as knowledge holders
"You are not just someone receiving help. You have knowledge that could help someone else."
Young people experiencing difficult circumstances develop significant knowledge about survival, relationships, systems, identity and what actually helps. A young person's experience should never only become another case note — their knowledge may become something capable of helping another young person.
Finding the ThreadsPractical Aunty support
When school falls apart, support happens where life happens.
A young person has been suspended. Their kinship carer receives another call asking them to leave work and collect the child. Repeated suspensions begin threatening the carer's employment — and the resulting stress can affect the entire household and placement.
Where appropriate, safe, authorised and within the service model, a Ngawilyi Aunty — a narrative therapist — may step in to support the young person following suspension. But this is not simply transport or babysitting.
That afternoon can become
The immediate pressure on the carer is reduced while the young person remains meaningfully supported. That is the Ngawilyi difference.
Programs
Proposed programs, shaped with community.
Ngawilyi isn't another worker in a child's life. It's an Aunty beside them when they need one.
We are seeking partners, referrers, community voices and pilot funders to help shape what comes next.