For our third Gender Equity Community of Practice session in 2025, Chloe Wegener joined us to present on “Working Our Way: The Wiyi Yani U Thangani Institute for First Nations Gender Justice”.  

Chloe Wegener (she/her) is a proud Garrwa woman who grew up on Kaurna Country and now lives on Wadawurrung Country and is the Project Coordinator – Knowledge Translation & Design at the Wiyi Yani U Thangani Institute. Her diverse background includes physiotherapy, research, workshop facilitation, community engagement, and project management, with experience across AFL, healthcare, and youth development. As an Aboriginal woman who is autistic, Chloe brings intersectional perspectives to her work in systems change. She’s also a visual scribe, using illustrations to capture concepts and facilitate meaningful conversations. 

The session started off with an overview of the journey and history of how the institute came to be. Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices) was a landmark initiative led by Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar AO which strove to amplify the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls. It began with national engagements with over 2000 people across Australia in 2018 which led to the “Wiyi Yani U Thangani: Securing our Rights, Securing our Future Report 2020”, outlining a vision for systemic change. This report was followed by an Implementation Framework (2022), a National Summit (2023) and ultimately the creation of the Wiyi Yani U Thangani Institute for First Nations Gender Justice. 

Chloe then spoke about the institutes Change Agenda, which she referred to as a collective ‘blackprint’ that puts forward a vision beyond deficit narratives for a future where First Nations women’s rights and lives are fully recognised and respected. The Change Agenda is visualised through an epic illustration of a sacred grandmother tree – representing an interconnected system of change that weaves together all the layers of transformation required. Here, Chloe explained that the roots symbolise hearts and minds and that we need to be thinking about how we’re changing these things with storytelling and relationships and not just purely focusing on structural, policy reform. 

The session moved on to hearing about how a First Nations gender just system can be developed though their ways of working – embodied practices that are informed by ancestral knowledges and cultural practices and protocols. Chloe explained that anyone can take these on board, encouraging us to do so. These ways of working included things like: 

• Respect and relationality  

• Deep listening  

• Self-reflective and aware  

• Sense-making  

After taking us through the Institute’s strategic priorities, Chloe spoke to some of their projects.  

Including: 

• Inaugural co-design camp – a 5-day gathering which Chloe had only just returned home from at the time of the session. The camp brought together First Nations women’s movements from across the continent and non-indigenous collaborators to co-create systems we can thrive in. It marked the beginning of the staged approach to create a national network/infrastructure that supports women’s leadership, knowledge exchange knowledge and evidence building. At the camp, attendees were asked how their inner knowing and centuries of wisdom had given them practices/processes and techniques that can shape liveable and thriving systems.  

• At the time of the CoP session, the Institute were looking forward to an upcoming Indigenous women’s sustainability knowledge exchange program, where they would be connecting with indigenous Indonesian women and communities to strengthen indigenous women’s voices and decision-making surrounding climate change and sustainability. 

Chloe also went through other projects, including: 

• Human rights pathways which is about actively creating a pathway for first nations women to connect with international human rights mechanisms.  

• Caring about Care report which look how care looks different for first nations women and how care work is undervalued. 

• Measurement, evaluation and learning framework, which recognises how often the way things are measured and evaluated doesn’t always fit the way we see the world and what has value.  

After this we headed into breakout rooms, where we were asked to map the current health system by considering some of the key system actors (First Nations women and their families, health services and workers, government departments and the general public), reflecting on questions like: 

• What does this system actor value most? 

• What power do they have? 

• What influences them? 

• What and who do they influence? 

After discussing our reflections as a whole group, we went back into small groups to discuss what the system might look like through a First Nations gender just lens. We imagined the things that Chloe had been talking about throughout the session – the ways of working, the principles of care and peace building and reciprocity and imagined what the same systems would look like through this transformed lens, connecting with how it would feel to operate within this system. 

The group came back together and shared a desire for a more holistic health care system that centres care and lived experience. One that gives people the time of day and moves away from rigid structures, time frames and deliverables. A system that values different cultural perspectives on medicine, health and wellbeing. When reflecting on how we would feel in this health system, people listed words like ‘respected’, ‘safe;’ and ‘cared for’. An emotional realisation was that this is not how people are feeling in the current system. 

First Nations gender just approaches are beneficial for everyone because they’re holistic, sustainable, care centred practices which connect us with our body, heart, mind and gut instincts to help reweave that social fabric. It has a long term vision which focuses on generational wellbeing, where we think of how our decisions now impact 7 generations down the track. 

Find out more about the Gender Equity Community of Practice