Changing Outcomes... Changing Lives

I help run a not-for-profit organisation called The Centre For Human Development. Our branch is based in Australia, so it's called the CFHD (Australia).

We run alot of charitable development programs, particularly for the Australian Indigenous community. That's a bit weird for some people because "Indigenous" in Australia has become so politicised. Everyone's got an opinion sometimes. Or people have pity for the poor aboriginal people. Some other people have alot of good arguments about why "helping" can be a pretty bad thing - bad for them, bad for us. Alot of people just dont have a reality on the situation. Alot of people know they should feel bad, because after all, the situation is pretty bad, but theyre not really exactly sure how.

I dont really care. At the end of the day, to me, people are just people. It's hard for me to see anything else, because my life has always been this kaleidoscope of people and cultures.

I grew up the son of refugees. They caught a boat to get here to Australia. They landed on a beach with their thongs and the clothes on their back.  I always had so many different friends from different backgrounds. I had many immigrant and ethnic friends, friends whose family had been around Ozland for generations, old friends and young ones, and I always could find a way to relate to any and most of them. And when you live in Melbourne there are so many different cultures and ethnicities living here, it's hard to see anything but human.

As a teenager, often we'd go to weekend Vietnamese school, the only place any of us were allowed see our friends because of the rules of our strict Immigrant parents. Then the next week it'd be hanging out with the private school people in some massive mansions..
 
On the weekend I might go play lacrosse down at the club...and on the other weekend it would be crazy when you'd all of the sudden just get pulled along in fleets of cars of other friends as they piled machetes and knives into the boot in their gangland struggles to survive. One of my best friends - I reckon he's a legend - did everything he ever wanted - he achieved all his dreams of playing rugby for Australia, becoming the president of his college, winning military scholarships just as I watched and admired my other best friend struggle day by day for 5 years just to stay in school and get to college, any college, as he struggled to live with and support his elderly mother and grandmother.

And a couple of years ago, I was awed and so proud of an old high school friend who I used to compete with for our academic prizes who, at the age of 25, became Australia's 99th Rhodes Scholar, winning the scholarship to Oxford University. And in that same year, my heart was broken as I sat and bore witness to the execution by hanging of a fellow refugee and teenage hooligan, at the age of 25, for attempting to smuggle heroin to pay off a twin brother's drug debt. This guy was always so full of life and he lived all the months up to his death in total open surrender to a higher form of Being and Purpose. Ill always be in awe of him and only ask that if I ever had to face death like that I could do it with similar courage and compassion for myself and the world around me.

It's been a... deep yet wonderful life. The point is living such an almost contradictory, contrasting life, brings to a person (apart from a sense of near cultural schizophrenia) just such a perspective on how different things and people can be yet at the end of the day, how much the same we really all are.

That's why when I look out now and see people, people are just people, and at the bottom of it all, theyre just like me. That's why right now alot of my energy is going into a new development project we're starting is a youth development and leadership program the community of Kempsey, New South Wales, Australia. It's one of the largest single populations Indigenous people living in one place outside of Sydney. It's also the official 2nd lowest socioeconomic demographics in all of australia, plagued by discrimination and frank outright racism. There are about 7000 Indigenous Australians living there. According to medical service records, 50-60% of these people are under the age of 21. That means there are at least 3000 children there who could only be described as at risk. A community elder who also is a teacher told me he can only count 12 young people who will finish year 12 and be eligible for university this year. 12 young people? Things are sometimes screwed up but this is just off the scale for me. Thse people struggle everyday to a unbalanced proportion with drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, sexual abuse, discrimination, incarceration, chronic preventable diseases, generational poverty..and at the end of the day, its the children who really suffer.

In this world as thinking, intelligent, resourceful creative beings we have achieved so much. These life situations which I have just mentioned produces real, measurable outcomes and we see these outcomes in the children. It becomes a revolving door. The stolen generation has become the Lost Generation, as my elder friend has told me.

 Well these stories, these realities make me angry, sad, upset, annoyed and at times incredulous, but then after all that, it resonates within me the truth that we all should know and remember: that as a being in this world, when we can tap that deep will of our intention, we can draw on resource beyond our idea of what's even possible. When we enter into this creative space I know that we all have the power to change any outcomes.

And it's so important here. I look out and I see that these outcomes can be changed. And when you change these outcomes, youre changing the whole course of lives.