At ChangeFest we hear and learn from people about what good health and justice look like in their own lives.
Fresh from ChangeFest 2021, Tessa Boyd-Caine reflects on the importance of maintaining connections to the communities we’re here to serve while working for systemic change.

I’ve recently returned to my desk after a month away. For three blissful weeks of that, I was on holiday: a much-needed break made much easier by my great colleagues who continued to work hard, together, towards important outcomes in health and justice.
The fourth week saw me join Health Justice Australia colleagues Suzie Forell and Kate Finch at ChangeFest 2021, a national celebration of place-based change. This was the third coming together of ChangeFest and it was held in Palmerston, 20kms from Darwin in the Northern Territory. Health Justice Australia has been participating in ChangeFest since it was first held in Logan in 2018, which I was lucky enough to attend; and two Health Justice Australia colleagues attended it in Mt Druitt in 2019. This year we joined as a National Convenor.
ChangeFest: a space of possibilities
We participate in ChangeFest because we value and draw insight from community leadership towards social change and connecting around a shared place can be a key catalyst for this leadership. We also participate because we want to support health, legal assistance and other services to connect more directly with the communities they serve. At ChangeFest we learn about approaches and possibilities to support and deepen these connections through our own work. For myself, ChangeFest is a space where I hear and learn from people about what good health and justice look like in their own lives, balancing the views that I hear otherwise through my contact with health and legal practitioners, service leaders, policy-makers and funders.
Hearing communities talk about how they experience justice in the Northern Territory is hard. The continuing travesty of juvenile justice was a focal point. We heard a lot about Don Dale, the youth detention centre that was the subject of a 2016 ABC Four Corners program which ultimately catalysed a Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. Despite the Royal Commission’s recommendation that Don Dale be closed, it is being renovated instead, to cater for an anticipated increase in the population of young people detained in the NT’s juvenile justice system. ChangeFest heard that kids currently in detention are now housed in what was formerly the adult prison – a facility which has also been deemed unfit for human habitation. And as the number of kids in juvenile detention has almost doubled in the past year, local community members participating in ChangeFest reported that 100% of those detained are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids.
As devastating as this situation is, I feel even more devastated remembering that I first started learning about this situation around 10 years ago, while I was working with community services in the NT. How can we be letting this situation get worse, not better?
The future of community control
One glimmer of hope is the role that the local Aboriginal community control health service is playing, providing healthcare to kids while they are detained. Community members emphasised the importance of this community controlled service that understands the communities and reflects the cultures these kids come from.
It was an important reminder, again, of why it matters that our health, legal and other services are connected to and informed by the communities they support; the whole reason Health Justice Australia has stepped up our support of ChangeFest. But we also need to tackle the systemic policy drivers that see kids locked up; and that disproportionately effect Aboriginal kids particularly. One way to do this is by supporting the ‘raise the age’ campaign, which calls for Federal, state and territory governments to change the laws to raise the age of criminal responsibility, so children aged 10 to 13 years are not sent to prison.
Meanwhile, stay tuned as we continue to share our reflections from ChangeFest 2021 over the coming months, including how we can support deeper engagement between the practitioners and services we work with and the communities they serve.