Coaching and supervision for wellbeing

One of our core offerings is ICCL Supervision. It's short for Intersectional Cultural and Colonial Load Supervision. It's cultural supervision and coaching for Mob, and for the non-Indigenous people who work and walk alongside us. Organisations take it up to support their staff, and to give managers and decision makers practice at reflective and difficult conversations. The framework is our own.

What the name means

• Cultural load. The extra formal and informal work that comes with identity, cultural knowledge and responsibilities to community, along with being expected to educate and represent others at work.
• Colonial load. The burden of navigating, challenging or repairing institutions, assumptions and practices produced by colonisation. It includes more than the interpersonal expectations usually captured by cultural load.
• Intersectional. A person can face more than one kind of discrimination at once, such as racism together with sexism or homophobia. These overlap and compound, so we work with the whole person.
• Supervision. Reflective practice with a practitioner: regular, structured time to think about the work, the systems around it and the person doing it. It is not line management and it is not clinical supervision.

We did not coin cultural load or colonial load. First Nations researchers use and study both terms, including the Gari Yala studies and Dr Vicki Pascoe's research at CQUniversity. The framework that brings them together is our own.

More of our words are explained in Definitions and glossary.

Who it is for

There are two streams.

• First Nations Stream. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff.
• Allies Stream. For non-Indigenous staff.

Both streams are open at foundational level, for people earlier in their role, and at leadership level, for people who manage others or whose decisions shape the work. The streams run separately, so First Nations staff are not put in the position of teaching their colleagues.

Cultural supervision is not for Mob only. First Nations staff may use it to balance cultural load in community, or colonial load in the workplace. Allies may use it to reflect on how they manage and lead, and to see how they add to colonial load.

We recommend that people opt in. People get more from supervision and coaching when they have chosen to be there, and it fits the aim of self-determination.