Coral Lever is a proud Wiradjuri woman from Nanima Mission in Central-West NSW, now living in so-called Sydney for the past twenty years. With her sister, Kimberly Peckham, also from Nanima Mission, she runs mutual aid organisation First Nations Response (FNR) in Marrickville.
Rand: Can you tell us a bit about the First Nations Response space, and the kind of services that it provides?
Coral: I think our name represents us really well, because we’ve changed a lot. The focus is always food, but it’s how we deliver that changes. Essentially, we run our service based on the feedback we get from the community.
Our day to day work is food relief, but we’re also looking to build conversations around why families are in that position – doing research about it, getting some tangible evidence around it. We’re actively working to not only provide mob with food but talking about the solutions to how mutual aid can be sustainable.
We also do a lot of referral services for everything from domestic violence to emergency medical care and helping people with housing. We say that food is the “soft entry point”, and that from there we’re able to really connect with the community and start to talk about the issues that are impacting people on the day to day.
Kim: I think decolonising the food security and food relief space is important, because there’s not many First Nations services in that space – it’s all predominantly run by churches or corporations. There’s no work being done for community, by community.
Coral: Which is why we thrived – because nothing like what we do exists. It’s been received so well by the community because we’ve ensured we stay true to the community. We’ve used Blak knowledge, Blak culture, and Blak ways of doing things.
Rand: Can you tell us a little bit about how the organisation is run. You say it’s Blak-led, so what does that mean and look like? Also, you mentioned there’s a feedback loop from the community – could you tell us a bit more about that?
Coral: Our constitution says that all of our staff members and all of our external work is provided by mob. We’re run by four Blak women, with an elder-in-residence also.
Kim: Which is so important for that cultural accountability. We always go back to our uncles and aunties to make sure we’re doing the right thing.
Coral: I think it stays true to the essence of how we began. We started out two Blak mothers responding to an urgent need in the community, and we’ve just built on that.
We wanted to keep it Blak-owned, and we;ve done that by bringing in the right people. It will always be 100% Blak-owned – that’s the foundation of what we’ve built.
Kim: When you go to other services, you’re always given a non-First Nations person to talk to, and it’s about getting rid of that shame factor. We have lived experience utilising services like this – we’ve lived through having no dignity, dredging through our trauma, having to explain our circumstances over and over again.
We don’t do that. You come in, you get what you need, you can stay if you want, we’ll provide.
Coral: And having grown up using these services, growing up being poor and disadvantaged, we understood how dangerous and unsafe these spaces were.
Lived experience is key. The people hold the answers to what they need. We’re only three months now into our official organisation, but we’re setting up subcommittees that will be run by the community so that they will have a say on what this looks like.
Kim: Especially the space in Redfern, all the aunties and uncles would give us feedback – “you shouldn’t do it like this,” and “we don’t like that food,” and “we won’t eat this.”
Coral: It’s part of our culture, and that feedback isn’t insulting. When you’re corrected, it’s from a place of love and care. It’s an honour to have one of the Elders come up and tell you “you’re doing this wrong,” because they’re helping you.
Rand: Decolonisation is actually about embracing these ways of being and ways of organising and caring for community. What do you think about this?
Coral: That’s always the case in our community. Especially after TJ Hickey died in Redfern, the way the local government treated our community was reactive – it’s always reactive care. They try to fix things after the fact, instead of listening and recognising what the issues are before they happen. Had someone listened to our Elders screaming out about the police brutality in our community before that day, that could have been prevented.
Kim: And we know this first-hand. Our mum was constantly in jail for stealing. Constantly. At one point left her kids at home with no parents for the first few months of moving to Sydney, for six months because she stole food and got locked up.
She couldn’t tell anyone that she left her kids at home unsupervised because the dangers of us having been removed. So for six months it was our brother’s job to go out there and steal and rob and break into houses and cars, simply because he needed to bring food home to his siblings – that’s how desperate it can get. And that’s why we’re not mandatory reporters.
Rand: What does that mean?
Coral: When you work in community spaces around vulnerable people, the majority of charities and nonprofits have to be mandatory reporters, meaning they have a responsibility to report either to welfare or services, that there is a family that needs intervention.
Kim: That’s why a lot of our community doesn’t utilise food services, because they’re scared that they’re going to be noted for neglect. And it happens all the time.
Coral: It happened every time our mum ever went to services for help. We’ve been picked up from school by social workers, we’ve had social workers lock us in their office to try and keep us from our mum. And it still happens today. Families who just need food are being surveilled and are being put at risk of their kids being removed.
Rand: And so when activists say things like “stop the war on Blak kids” and “no forced removals,” is this what they’re referring to?
Coral: Yep this is essentially how it starts. That’s how kids start to get surveilled at their school, while accessing doctors.
Kim: Well to be fair, it starts when our kids are born. These are structural issues.
Rand: It’s so important that there is someone like you leading this organisation who has food poverty literacy and knows what it’s like and has seen others in the community going through it, rather than someone who has no idea about any of this.
Coral: That’s a huge part of what we want to do. We want to start to build research around this. It’s easy for us to do this work, but where’s the evidence? We need to have tangible data for anyone to listen to our message.
We’re operating the Blak way in a white system. We have to document all of this stuff, and turn up with strong evidence and data. We’ve got the solutions, but we need to prove the problem.
Coral: We received $1.2 million in funding over three years. We got so much support from all the Blak organisations in Redfern – we had thirty-two support letters from Blak organisations to the City of Sydney saying it’d be great to have an organisation like us doing this full time.
When we got that funding from the City of Sydney, we all cried. It was huge. It meant that it’s a huge risk, but it meant that we can do this.
Kim: Well, we know it’s not a risk because we know Blak women are deadly.