Aboriginal community engagement & partnerships

Moondani Balluk provides avenues and support for Aboriginal people to come together to advocate and inform on a range of topics important to the Aboriginal community. This is in line with our research mandate to empower self-determining and decolonial practices from a community-controlled and anchored standpoint.

Blak women’s healing program

The Blak women’s healing program is rooted in the lived knowledge of Aboriginal women, emerging from and in response to the aspirations and concerns of the Aboriginal community in Melbourne's West.

Centred on self-determination, desire and memory, the program creates spaces, conditions and possibilities where women (re)claim their agency and potential and make sense of the stories they have lived. It supports the collective naming and challenging of contemporary and historical unjust systemic practices rooted in ongoing colonial violence through embodied and creative practices. At its forefront is the creation of collective resources through journeys into healing and liberation, with each iteration driven by the requests of Aboriginal women. 

The program has had three iterations, one supported by Yumi Sabe at AIATSIS, focusing on the experiences of Aboriginal women who had encountered the child protection system. The co-created knowledge and learnings from the program are translated to inform activities to enact change in policy, education, and practice. These include training workshops with child protection workers to identify and prevent the violence experienced by Aboriginal women through the processes and policies of the system. 

The Blak Women’s Healing exhibition

The program was a driver of The Blak Women’s Healing exhibition, a whole-building takeover of Arts House, where several women in the program co-created the exhibition with Dr Paola Balla (Wemba-Wemba, Gunditjmara). Women amplified their voices and lived experiences, transforming the venue into a site of power, resistance and cultural sovereignty. 

Sessions were open to the public to engage in roundtable conversations on community research projects with the Moondani Balluk Creative Research Collective, plus mob-only sessions that created spaces for yarning and cultural practice led by the artists. 

Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) gatherings

Moondani Balluk & the Community, Identity, and Displacement Research Network (CIDRN) co-host an annual Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) three-day gathering. Researchers, creatives, HDR students and community members immerse themselves in theories, methods, practices and ethics on community-based and Indigenous methodologies.

The annual gathering honours, explores and grows the work that is happening in and by communities, build a local and transnational community on skills, commitments, ethics and ways of doing the work, and explore the ways community-based inquiry can happen at VU. To reshape and reclaim research centred on communities' desires, with the idea that shared skills, practices, and knowledge can be integrated into community organising, community-based work and scholarship. 

In 2025, we were joined by the Public Science Project (PSP) of The City University of New York. In 2026, a team from Meso and South America gathered to foster a transnational South-to-South exchange of knowledge and practices from Abya Yala. Each year, over 40 people and 15 community-based and driven projects have gathered to share knowledge across countries on common and distinct challenges affecting Indigenous and marginalised communities, plus the ways in which communities resist, survive, and promote cultural vitality.

Aboriginal History Archive internship

The Aboriginal History Archive (AHA) is a community-focused archive. The AHA internship program is built to ensure the continuity of the archive, through paid internship opportunities. Internships are available to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples to ensure that safe keeping the past and protecting the future continues in the hands of the community. Read more about the AHA and the internship program.