Funding the backbone: Driving sustainable change in Northern Australia

A conversation with Renee de Jong, SVA Director, Consulting (NT)

Operating in Northern Australia requires more than just technical expertise. It requires a deep understanding of place, an appreciation for cultural nuance, and the ability to navigate a complex government landscape. This is the context in which Renee de Jong, SVA’s Director, Consulting (NT), works alongside communities and government partners.

Growing up in Alice Springs and with a career working in and with government and Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) – including roles at KPMG and Aboriginal Investment NT – Renee has learnt many lessons about why funding often fails to make the impact hoped for. We spoke with Renee about the unique challenges of Northern Australia, the benefits of local lived experience, and why SVA’s focus on supporting ACCOs to build strong organisational foundations is the way to support self-determination and a sustainable path forward for Northern Australia.

Q: Renee, you’ve spent a lot of your life in the NT and worked across multiple sectors. What drew you to SVA, and what does your role look like day-to-day?

Having worked across so many different sides of the system – from the NT government and the Australian Government in Canberra, to the private sector and management consulting – I’ve seen first-hand how things operate. There are so many actors up here in Northern Australia, but so little collaboration. SVA takes a systems-based approach, working right at the intersection of these complicated systems, which felt like a perfect fit. 

Day-to-day, my role involves a huge breadth of work across different sectors and organisation sizes. Fundamentally, it is about meeting clients exactly where they’re at and figuring out how we can best support them with the resources they currently have. Up here, the networks and links are much tighter than they are down south, so you need to understand what’s really going on. The approach always has to be: build the relationship and trust, build the relationship and trust, and then do the work. 

Q: You often talk about SVA playing a coordinating role up north. Is that where you add the most value? 

That’s how I see it. We often see a system operating with a complex mix of services provided by different players who may not actually be communicating with each other. We are adept at operating at the intersection of community groups, private enterprise, and multiple layers of government. Because of that position, we can help coordinate and hold system players to account – often acting as a pragmatic ‘critical friend’ to help influence and improve government systems from within. We take the technical insights, the learnings, and the bureaucratic requirements, and we help translate them into practical solutions that make sense and actually work on the ground with communities. 

Q: Why is having staff based in, and with lived experience of, Northern Australia so important? 

It really comes down to relationships and context. There are no six degrees of separation in Northern Australia. One thing we hear constantly from communities and organisations is how exhausting it is to have to keep educating people from ‘down south’ about the realities of working here. Trust takes time to build, and you have to establish those relationships before you can even begin the work. 

Because we have a dedicated team living here – with Michaela Nutt and Robbie Harper in Darwin, and Joel Steller in Alice Springs – we aren’t constantly starting from scratch or needing clients to explain their context over and over. We understand that every single community is different. We can take SVA’s national expertise and apply it in a way that makes sense locally, because we live it every day. 

Q: You mentioned the unique landscape up here. What does that look like on the ground for communities trying to navigate the system? 

It’s easy to look at our small population and assume we have a small, unsophisticated government. But the NT has a higher density of public servants per capita – across all three levels of government – than Canberra. That makes government a central system player; if you want to make an impact, government absolutely needs to be part of the work. 

However, the high density of government actors also creates complexity on the ground. Our current work with the Warnumamalya Health Services Aboriginal Corporation on Groote Eylandt is an illustrative example. In a remote community of just a few thousand people, you have the NT Department of Health running four clinics with little coordination between them. At the same time, the NT Departments of Health and Education are funded to act as the backbone for Connected Beginnings (a federally funded program), running separate health programs as part of this. Alongside that, you have federal actors like the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) and the local government also running health programs. 

The challenge is that coordination between these groups is highly fragmented. If you don’t understand that level of fragmentation – and the fatigue communities experience trying to navigate all those different players – you can’t effectively support them in addressing the underlying challenges. 

Q: There’s a common perception outside the NT that there are ‘rivers of gold’ flowing into the Territory to close the gap. Is that accurate? 

That narrative is not just untrue; it’s corrosive. It unfairly shifts the blame onto Aboriginal people, implying they aren’t properly using or taking advantage of this supposed wealth. The reality is that there isn’t enough money in the system to begin with. And the money that is there often gets wasted – not through malice or incompetence, but because of poor coordination and a failure to listen to and centre Aboriginal people when figuring out what is needed and how it should be delivered. 

Because the system is underfunded, what does exist often functions like a band-aid on heart surgery. There is enough money to make it look like action is being taken, but it rarely addresses the root causes. Ultimately, the biggest disconnect is that funding is still largely being spent to do things to or for Aboriginal people, rather than with them. 

Q: There is a strong policy push for ACCOs to deliver more local services, but there are structural barriers in how this happens. What isn’t working? 

To understand the current barriers, you have to look at the history. The Aboriginal community-controlled sector has been severely corroded by decades of poor policy settings. Initiatives like the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention displaced local leadership, and the 2008 local government reforms moved decision-making power and assets away from local communities into regional centres. 

Now, as the tide turns and governments scramble to meet Closing the Gap targets, they are rapidly transitioning – or frankly, dumping – services back onto ACCOs. The fundamental flaw is that governments fund the service delivery, but provide little to no funding for the organisational ‘backbone’ required to run them, like governance, HR, finance systems, and strategic planning. We are seeing organisations handed multi-million-dollar contracts without the operational scaffolding to support that scale. 

Because so many organisations are systemically under-resourced in this way, government departments seeking administrative ease fall into the ‘pick a winner’ trap. They find a single, successful ACCO and overload them with multiple contracts. This risks burnout. Worse still, to meet these contract demands, organisations are often forced to deliver services outside of their specific cultural or geographic footprint, which completely breaks the principle of place-based, community-led care. 

Q: What does this mean for philanthropists and private funders who want to make a positive impact up north? 

To do impactful work up here, you need to build relationships, understand the complexity of culture, understand the complexity of government, and accept that it takes time for communities to develop truly self-determined priorities and projects. If you arrive with timelines that demand immediate results, or if you try to work entirely outside the government system, you’re not going to make a lasting impact. 

The real opportunity for philanthropic and private funders is to step into the gap that government leaves behind. Governments are notoriously reluctant to fund capacity building. Philanthropy can provide that vital catalytic funding to underwrite the operational backbone of these organisations. Also, philanthropy plays a crucial role in funding projects that empower Aboriginal people to establish a ‘proof of concept’. By proving how things can be done better on the ground, communities can then leverage that success to influence government and secure sustained support. 

Q: Finally, what does success look like for you and your team? 

Short-term, success looks like working in genuine partnership with Aboriginal people, often over the course of many projects, to support them on their journey to self-determination. 

Longer-term, it looks like us doing a lot less work at the centre of the system. Success means we have worked with Aboriginal people and system players to establish a respectful environment and a common language, to the point where our coordination and brokerage simply aren’t needed anymore. 

Thanks Renee 

Thank you