The project is a co-designed research partnership between the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre (KALACC) and the Centre for Indigenous Policy Research (CIPR) at the Australian National University (ANU) working with participating Aboriginal groups and communities in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. This project aimed to co-design and co-produce a series of culture and wellbeing frameworks, drawing on the lived experience and perspectives of Aboriginal people and communities in the Kimberley.

This report details the co-design research methodology and project findings across four research phases between 2022 to 2025. The first phase involved explorations of culture and wellbeing and the relationship between them through semi-structured one-on-one interviews carried out by Community Research Practitioners (CRPs) with Kimberley Aboriginal men and women. This led to the production of an initial pool of indicators of strong culture and wellbeing. In the second phase, these indicators which were tested and validated in focus group settings with community members, resulting in 

Phase 2. These activities resulted in the co-creation of six localised strong culture and wellbeing frameworks comprised of around 81 indicators across 11 themes. 

The third phase involved the co-design of evaluation tools for three cultural initiatives to test the application of developed frameworks, and the conduct of two evaluations to see how, and to what extent, evaluated cultural initiatives are supporting strong wellbeing for participants and the community. Across the two initiatives, evaluation results suggest that cultural activities and programs have a positive association with strengthening culture and wellbeing as defined by the participants themselves. Using measures developed in Phase 1 and 2, the findings of pilot evaluations suggest that aspects of cultural learning and practice are strengthened for individuals and communities alongside other positive dimensions of sense of self, such as feeling more confident or more purposeful. 

The fourth phase of the project involved case studies with local service providers based around fictional community members (‘avatars’) designed with input from community members. These explored different support pathways available in communities, the role that culture plays in these pathways and how organisations are working together to provide holistic support pathways in community. 

The findings detailed in this report present co-designed and research-based tools and methods for understanding and measuring links between culture and wellbeing for Kimberley Aboriginal people, and reinforce existing evidence that culture both matters for, and frames, the wellbeing of Kimberley Aboriginal people. This project also provides important learnings about method and process, with implications for the future conduct of co-designed research and evaluation relating to wellbeing in the Kimberley.