Building a sustainable First Nations workforce in urban, regional, and remote communities is a key focus for ICAN over the next three years. In an exciting new project, ICAN will work with four community services organisations across Australia to provide training and development support for their First Nations financial counselling and capability staff. The project will focus on providing professional and personal mentorship together with quality training and education through ICAN Learn, to four community partners across Australia.
In this project, we will apply our learnings over the many years that ICAN has been developing its financial counselling and capability workforce direct from community. For our organisation, we work in a community development approach, to build an organisation and workforce that reflects the communities we serve.
“We know from our own experience that recruiting and retaining skilled financial counselling and capability workers in regional and remote areas is an ongoing challenge,” said Aaron Davis, ICAN CEO.
“So back in 2008, we created the Indigenous Financial Counselling Mentorship Program, a Diploma of Financial Counselling program that focused on building the capabilities and skills of people to become financial counsellors and financial capability workers within their own communities,” he said.
One of ICAN’s key learnings in its many years of delivering workforce development training through the Diploma of Financial Counselling CHC51122, the Certificate IV Community Services CHC42021 (Financial Capability) and a wide range of accredited skill sets, is that there is a need to develop both professional and soft skills to build better workforces.
“The Mentorship Program had a focus on both the professional and personal development for First Nations students studying to become qualified financial counsellors,” Tracey McCurdy, ICAN Learn Executive Officer said.
“That’s why in our new partnership program; we will be providing pathways through ICAN Learn to develop a wide range of skills and abilities for our partners.”
Four organisations with a long history of working with ICAN, including Winun Ngari (Derby, WA), HKTC (Darwin, NT), Anglicare NT (servicing regional & remote NT) and South-East Community Links (Southeastern Melbourne, VIC) are joining the program.
One partner, South-East Community Links (SECL) CEO, Peter McNamara highlighted why the partnership is important for South-East Melbourne.
“Through this partnership, we’ll be able to expand this opportunity for First Nations people located in South East Melbourne,” said Peter.
“We have a lot of employment opportunities coming up in 2025 and we’d love to see them filled by people from the community.”
SECL’s CEO also reflected on previous partnerships with ICAN to develop its multicultural workforce. “We know from the success of the Multi-Cultural Scholarship Program with ICAN Learn in 2023-2024, that it’s possible to bring newly arrived migrants into our workforce, and we’re excited about expanding the scope of the partnership to include First Nations people,” he said.
For more information on this initiative, see: Partner with ICAN to Build a Stronger, Sustainable Financial Wellbeing Workforce in our October 2024 Edition of The Yarn.