We believe in wellbeing for all people
“Our vision is that all people are empowered to experience optimal wellbeing from the safety and strength of their own culture. We work towards this by collaboratively building science around different ways of knowing and being.”
Our Vision
Understanding culture
What Indigenous Australian knowledge can teach us.
Interplay Project’s CEO, Sheree Cairney at TEDx St Kida
How do we define success?
What makes us happy?
Our research in remote Aboriginal communities highlighted that values such as knowledge of the land, the strength of family connections, language, and resilience are key in understanding these questions.
This is what grounds our work and inspires us to ensure that evaluations are culturally responsive and scientifically validated.
We evaluate for impact with the aim of creating positive change in policies, programs and services so these too can be culturally responsive and driven by evidence on what works.
Our values drive our work. We work in a shared space, bringing all groups together through these core values.
These values describe how we work, who we are and what drives everything we do.
Respect
Collaboration
Two-way learning
Grass-roots
Passion
Impact
Fun
At Interplay we like to do things differently to really make an impact for lasting change.
We go beyond just writing a report or simply sharing evaluation findings. Instead we strive to 'socialise' our research and evaluation findings, in ways that best suit both community and partners needs.
We do this by showcasing and launching findings with special community events in collaboration with communities (no matter how far or remote).
We work to get evidence off the bookshelf and into practice.
This is how we put our values into action.
How The Interplay Project began
The Interplay Project came from a campaign by Aboriginal leaders in central Australian communities to empower desert knowledge.
The funding for this research was secured from the Australian Government to develop a wellbeing framework to quantify Aboriginal knowledge and ways of being.
The Interplay Wellbeing Framework was designed from the ground-up, over 6 years in Aboriginal communities in remote Australia.
The idea was to measure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander values and bring these values into policy.
We spent several years asking people from different remote communities around Australia what they cared about and what they wanted out of life.
Even with much cultural diversity, all groups voiced the same priorities – culture, empowerment and community.
We worked with communities to translate their stories into numbers, to show how these values were important to peoples’ wellbeing. We employed and trained 42 Aboriginal community researchers who co-designed and administered surveys to over 900 Aboriginal adults in their communities.
We published this research in over 20 academic publications and shared the knowledge across communities through data visualisations of Interplay Maps.
We've also pitched, shared and socialised findings that are fit-for-purpose for other partners through a number of conference presentations and targeted policy debriefings.
We now use the same approach to evaluate program impacts based on community values and holistic concepts of wellbeing.
The Interplay Project began to empower communities in the design of programs that directly affect them.
It is this belief that we still work towards today.
Culture, empowerment and community.
Our Wellbeing Framework
We translate meaningful stories into meaningful numbers.
We represent stories in numerical data to quantify holistic wellbeing.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ values and knowledge are held in stories, and governments and other partners value evidence in numbers to measure impact.
By bringing together stories and numbers in one shared space, we are able to create a bridge between cultures.
Our aim is to use this data to understand wellbeing needs across different cultures. This is our Wellbeing Framework.
A portal into understanding how stories weave through communities and how data scientifically maps these stories.
We have created a visual tool to measure community wellbeing. We call this Interplay Mapping.
To understand wellbeing in Indigenous culture is to understand culture. And part of that culture is people, community and country.
We bring community into our design, to evaluate programs based on shared values, vision, and measures of success.
From this, we create an Interplay Map.
The Interplay Map is a 'shared space' visual and statistical map of wellbeing. It helps communities and partners understand how different parts of a system interrelate and how to strengthen causal pathways for change.
Interplay Maps bridge cultures, knowledge systems and world-views.
Importantly, the Interplay model can evaluate programs while they’re ‘live’. This means that feedback and data is used to inform the design and improve the program while it is running.
Interplay maps work to build knowledge and strengthen practice for sustainable impact in communities.
We can work with you to design an Interplay Map for your needs.
Shared space collaboration
We have a unique model of co-design and collaboration. We call this Shared Space Collaboration.
For a project to be impactful, we believe all groups must be part of the design. This shared understanding is nurtured through yarning circles, focus groups, and other conversations.
Our approach is personal, adapted for all key groups. Everyone collaborates in every stage, at every level.
The outcome is to develop shared knowledge and create new ways of working together.
Having communities involved in the design and implementation creates the strongest foundations for impact.