Chief Investigator Tony Dreise will lead the continuing conversations. He will be part of the initial visits to each of the Local Decision Making communities, particularly during co-design stages.

Tony is a proud descendent of the Guumilaroi and Euahlayi peoples of north-west New South Wales and south-west Queensland. Tony is the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) and Professor of Indigenous Policy at the Australian National University. Tony undertook his PhD at CAEPR where he explored the relationship between Australian philanthropy and Indigenous education.

Over the past twenty-five years, Tony has served in a number of professional capacities including as a senior executive in government, a regional director in Indigenous education, and a national executive in Indigenous adult education and youth training connected to the then Australian National Training Authority. In more recent years, he served as the former Hub Leader and Principal Research Fellow for Indigenous Education at the Australian Council for Educational Research. Tony has also worked with the OECD in identifying promising practices in Indigenous education internationally.

Tony is a passionate advocate of both lifelong learning and regional development. At a national level, he is a former Board Member of Adult Learning Australia and a former Member of the National Vocational Training Equity Advisory Council. At a regional level, Tony has volunteered in a number of regional capacities including as both President of the Northern Rivers Social Development Council NSW and Deputy Chair of the Northern Rivers Board of Regional Development Australia.

Strategic Advisor and Reviewer Heidi Norman will work closely with Tony, particularly on innovative co-design processes and with the personal and professional development of community based researchers.

Heidi is a Gomeroi woman based in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, and is the Convenor of the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Hub.

Heidi is a leading researcher in the field of Australian Aboriginal political history. Her research sits in the field of history and draws on the cognate disciplines anthropology, political-economy, cultural studies and political theory. She has made significant contributions to understanding of Aboriginal social, cultural, economic and political history where she addresses questions of power in relation to Aboriginal citizens, the state and settler society and Aboriginal land justice.

In 2015, Heidi published a political history of Aboriginal land rights in NSW titled 'What Do We Want? A Political History of Aboriginal Land Rights in NSW'. In this first-ever study of land rights in NSW she documents the movement for land rights, how the laws changed relationships between Aboriginal people, the state and one another. She is currently undertaking a large ARC-funded study of the social, economic and cultural benefits of Aboriginal land repossession in NSW.

She is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and was the inaugural Gough Whitlam Research Fellow in 2017-18. In 2018 she was selected as a 'Top 5' humanities researcher by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Project Research Coordinator Francis Markham will work closely with Tony across all facets of the conversations. He will be in charge of day to day management of the project. Francis will be involved in all the initial visits and will be responsible for coordination.

Francis is a geographer and Research Fellow in the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at the Australian National University. He has worked on policy research for several years, completing his PhD at the Australian National University in 2017 on improving methods to assess the local impacts of poker machines.

He is currently working on several research projects examining public policies that affect First Nations peoples. Most recently, he has contributed research using statistical methods to examine the linkages between cultural, social and economic outcomes and the use of Indigenous languages. He also works on the Indigenous Population Project, an on-going research project at CAEPR that involves detailed regional analysis of relative and absolute change in Indigenous social indicators. Francis maintains a database of land that has been returned to First Nations peoples through land rights schemes and native title determinations.

Field Researcher & Data Analyst Mandy Yap will play roving roles across sites, continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to written reports. With Yonatan Dinku, she will be responsible for the quantitative data aspects of the project, including analysing program administrative data and collating and analysing quantitative data from other sources.

Mandy is a Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at the ANU. Prior to joining the ANU, Mandy worked the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling.

Since 2013, Mandy has worked in partnership with the Yawuru community in Broome to co-develop culturally-relevant indicators of Indigenous wellbeing. Her wellbeing research has involved Yawuru decision-making throughout the entire process of the research, including developing a long-term research partnership with community researcher Eunice Yu. The Yawuru community have co-designed and co-produced the research throughout the process, from research content to survey design and data collection.

Mandy is co-authoring a forthcoming book, Indigenous peoples and the capability approach, to be published by Routledge. She has an interest in measures of quality of life, with a particular focus on methodologies surrounding selection and weighting of composite measures of wellbeing which reflect the lived experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities.

Field Researcher & Reviewer Janet Hunt will be involved in continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to and reviewing written reports.

Janet is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at the ANU. She joined CAEPR in 2004 to manage the Indigenous Community Governance Project. Her research focuses on governance, community development, successful Indigenous organisations and government engagement with Indigenous people. She is currently a Chief Investigator on two ARC Projects, the first, researching Aboriginal organisations in the Kimberley and the creation of public value, and the second, urban Aboriginal organisations in NSW and new public management. She is Indigenous Engagement Project Convenor for the ANU Grand Challenge on Zero Carbon Energy for Asia Pacific. She undertakes many consultancies for Aboriginal Affairs NSW, most recently in relation to self-determination.

Janet’s background is in international development. She is also a Research Associate at the Development Policy Centre at the Crawford School, where she is working on the development of an individual, gender-sensitive and multidimensional poverty measure.

Field Researcher Deirdre Howard-Wagner will be involved in continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to and reviewing written reports.

Deirdre is a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR). She is a sociologist and socio-legal scholar, who is making an important contribution to knowledge about race relations, Indigenous disadvantage, Indigenous justice, Indigenous policy practices, community development, and neoliberalism in urban contexts. This work which began with her PhD continued in her ARC DECRA, which took her work in innovative and new directions. It did so through a collaborative in-depth place-based study of Indigenous ‘success’ in addressing disadvantage and promoting wellbeing in Newcastle.

She currently holds an ARCDP18 examining the effects of New Public Management on urban First Nations organisations in NSW and is partnering with six First Nations organisations in conducting this research.

She has ANU Futures funding to establish urban Indigenous development as a new sub-field of Indigenous development and governance research in CAEPR and at the ANU. She has broad and internationally recognised experience carrying out critical and analytical Indigenous policy relevant research with a social focus.

Field Researcher Kath Butler will be involved in continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to and reviewing written reports.

Kath is an Aboriginal woman, belonging to the Bundjalung and Worimi peoples of coastal New South Wales. She is the Head of the Wollotuka Institute of Indigenous Research and Education at the University of Newcastle.

Kath has been an active member of Aboriginal organisations, holding executive positions on the Regional Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG), Local Aboriginal Land Council and Aboriginal Corporation. She is the past President of Itji Maru AECG and delegate to the Hunter Regional AECG. Her contribution to the community has been recognised with several awards, including the Hunter Region Equity Champion.

Kath was the first Australian and first woman to be awarded a Toihuarewa Visiting International Fellowship from the University of Victoria, New Zealand. She is an OLT National Teaching Fellow whose research has had particular focus on Indigenisation in Teaching and Learning.

Field Researcher Kirrily Jordan will be involved in continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to written reports.

Kirrily is a political economist, visual artist and Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR). She is committed to research methodologies that emphasise collaboration with First Nations peoples, including Participatory Action Research and Art as Social Practice. Her research interests lie at the intersections of politics, community development and art, including in the potential of visual, participatory and community arts to draw attention to policy problems and point the way to a more just future.

Her research at CAEPR over 10 years has included policy analysis and evaluation focussed on the Australian Government’s approach to ‘work,’ ‘welfare’ and 'community development' for Australia’s First Nations, including the CDEP and CDP schemes and new forms of welfare conditionality. Informed by this research, Kirrily is also interested in the ways in which First Nations peoples are working towards social, political and economic change on their own terms, including through self-determined development and the use of visual and performing arts to raise awareness and advocate for improved policy-making.

Field Researcher Seán Kerins will be involved in continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to written reports.

Seán is a Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR). He has a background in applied anthropology and Indigenous policy. Seán has worked with Indigenous peoples and local communities for over 25 years on cultural and natural resource management issues. He previously undertook research on community-based management of whales in the Faroe Islands. Seán’s research interests include community-based management of natural resources, common property rights, common property resource institutions, subsistence, political ecology, and community-based development.

Prior to joining the Australian National University, Seán managed the Northern Land Council’s Caring for Country Unit in Darwin. He has also worked as a policy advisor with Te Ohu Kai Moana (The Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission) in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Field Researcher & Data Analyst Yonatan Dinku will play roving roles across sites, particularly where gender balance is important, continuing the conversations with communities and contributing to written reports. With Mandy Yap, he will be responsible for the quantitative data aspects of the project, including analysing program administrative data and collating and analysing quantitative data from other sources.

Yonatan has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) since obtaining a PhD in Economics from the University of Otago in 2018. Prior to that, he completed a Masters in International and Development Economics at the Australian National University. Yonatan worked as a teaching fellow for seven years at the Department of Economics, Bahir Dar University, serving as the head of the department from 2009 to 2011. During his tenure, Yonatan oversaw all aspects of academic and administrative activities in the department, including research and teaching strategy, curriculum development, budgeting and recruitment. At the University of Otago, Yonatan taught Introductory Econometrics among other economics courses. Yonatan's research interests lie in the areas of human development, development economics and applied microeconomics.

Field Researcher Annie Vanderwyk will be involved in one of the sites (potentially Tribal Wave Assembly) in conjunction with undertaking fieldwork and contributing to and reviewing written reports.
Annie is a Ngarrindjeri woman and level B Lecturer in Indigenous Enterprise Development at the Wollotuka Institute of Indigenous Research and Education, University of Newcastle. She has a Bachelor of Arts with honours 1 (Sociology/Law) from the University of Newcastle, and is currently a PhD candidate in Wollotuka Institute of Indigenous Research and Education, University of Newcastle on Ethnobotanical Metaphor – The role of traditional weaving practices in healing and business development.
As a result of her research, Annie has spoken at United Nations and international conferences on Indigenous governance. She has previously worked as Coordinator of Stanford University’s Centre on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development in Washington DC.

Project Administration Manager Tracy Deasey will be responsible for the management of project administration, planning, budgeting, and reporting.

Tracy is the Centre Manager of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR). She has extensive experience in university administration, finance and human resources.