Your Aboriginal impact statements
If you employ or engage with Aboriginal clients, all your workplace policies, programs, strategies and initiatives need to be created, communicated, and assessed with the impacts on your Aboriginal workers, and any Aboriginal communities you engage with, clearly addressed.
This means that consideration needs to be given across the development, communication and implementation stages of all your workplace policies and procedures to how they will affect Aboriginal people in your workplace.
Also, your existing policies and programs need to be reviewed to determine any impacts on Aboriginal workers directly.
You also need to consider the impacts of any of your policies on the wider Aboriginal community your business operates in.
Checklist
Use these questions and steps to draft an impact statement when assessing and preparing any workplace policies, programs or strategies, and before you take any actions.
Development: Preparing for community engagement
- Which Aboriginal workers and/or stakeholders were consulted in the development of the policy?
- How did you decide which workers/stakeholders to consult?
- What processes did you use to engage Aboriginal workers in the development of the policy?
- Were they culturally safe and appropriate?
- How did you develop these engagement processes and what are the measured outcomes?
- Demonstrate how these processes have incorporated previous or existing knowledge.
- Did you make any connections to current non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal specific policies, programs or strategies? Which ones and how did they inform the policy?
- Clearly identify the current situation and why a new policy, program or strategy is required.
- Clearly identify the effects the new policy, program or strategy will have on Aboriginal people.
- State how the effects of the policy will be reported and addressed.
- Explain how the identified effects on Aboriginal outcomes and services are different (when compared to the general population) to warrant the development of a separate policy, program or strategy.
- How will implementation of the policy be supported by allocation of culturally safe resources specific to its Aboriginal outcomes?
- How will the policy be implemented in partnership with Aboriginal stakeholders?
- Develop the evaluation of the policy in consultation with Aboriginal stakeholders.
- Describe the process of evaluation and how you developed the evaluation mechanism, and include the resources you will use.
- Determine a sunset clause for the policy to be reviewed and addressed.
Contents: Communicating the outcomes and impacts
- Clearly identify the current situation and why a new policy, program or strategy is required.
- Clearly identify the effects the new policy, program or strategy will have on Aboriginal people.
- State how the effects of the policy will be reported and addressed.
- Explain how the identified effects on Aboriginal outcomes and services are different (when compared to the general population) to warrant the development of a separate policy, program or strategy.
Implementation: Demonstrate that the policy will work
- How will implementation of the policy be supported by allocation of culturally safe resources specific to its Aboriginal outcomes?
- How will the policy be implemented in partnership with Aboriginal stakeholders?
- Develop the evaluation of the policy in consultation with Aboriginal stakeholders.
- Describe the process of evaluation and how you developed the evaluation mechanism, and include the resources you will use.
- Determine a sunset clause for the policy to be reviewed and addressed.