Mickey Kovari leads in fellowship and community-ship with the custodians of our most regenerative ways of knowing, doing and being.
Every once in a while you connect deeply, completely and with absolute alignment with someone whose lived experience has been what you aspire to be. To find someone with whom I align so cohesively with living only a few kilometres across the mountains from my home and to have the opportunity to spend time with them and begin to get to know them is both an honour and a revelation.
Welcome to the conversation co-created with Mickey Kovari, which we recorded side-by-side in ‘the Shoalhaven studio’ in the workspace of my homeplace.
Mickey is someone who describes himself as being uncomfortable with leading – despite having held role commonly associated with leadership, most recently as Deputy CEO of the National Aboriginal Sporting Chance Academy and currently co-Founder of Native Foodways. Mickey prefers to think of his work as fellowship or community-ship, working in collaboration with First Nations peoples and enterprises. He has worked for a number of Indigenous-led social enterprises over the past 15 years.
Our conversation focuses on Mickey’s contribution through his work and his experience and insights into the essential need to, and benefits of centring First Nations ways of knowing, doing, and being. We discuss caring for Country and healing Country including regenerative or agroecological farming and land management as well as regenerative resource-use including clean energy and a focus on degrowth, and thus a rethink of capitalism. Caring for Culture, valuing, enriching, and practicing culture as a way to deepen meaning, expression, connection, and belonging and bringing more of a focus on language, art, dance, story and how they lead to wellbeing. Caring for Community, the rise of social enterprise and impact investment as a way to connect large amounts of powerful capital with meaningful and regenerative work and employment that employ community and serve community. Also the ongoing investment in community wellbeing programs, which are always best when linked to regenerative business model or framework so it can be linked in with the production of necessary goods and services
We look forward to hearing from you via our socials and emails is there’s anything you would like to discuss or share in response to this conversation. You can reach out to either of us via the link below.
I’ve also been compiling my thoughts and reflections on this, and each of the conversations I co-create with Better World Leaders, in our Medium publication as well as on the 4i website, which you can find links to below.
Here’s a review of the key messages from this episode;
Systems thinking
- What’s the best contribution we can make to the system to address the major systemic issues?
- When you talk about anything, you talk about everything
- It’s our job as privileged white people to work on white people to dismantle the problematic systems
- We live every day in systems of white supremacy
First Nations ways of knowing, doing & being
- Many people don’t appreciate the significance of food & food sovereignty
- Less than 1% of First Nations peoples benefit economically from the native food system
- It’s being recognised that First Nations knowledge is the most regenerative type of knowledge
- Ethical investment associations are prioritising investments which centre First Nations ways of knowing, being & doing
- Coming into new cultural relationships with respect and without assumptions, appreciating how hard it is to do this.
- We should take as much responsibility as individuals and as a collective as is inline with our wellbeing
Leading
- Leaders are people who adapt a form of leading for a specific period of time
- Leading is something that is not given, therefore cannot be taken away. It is distributed and highly contextual.
- When you think about leadership, you think about followers. When you think about fellowship, you think about fellows.
- It’s always about community endorsed leadership without any source of cohesion
Here’s the list of books we referred to, and the link to the video we created directly after recording this episode in which Mickey introduces each of these works;
- Treading Lightly, Tex Skuthorpe & Karl-Erik Sveiby
- Fire Country, Victor Stefanson
- Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe
- Wandu Mai, Damian Culthard
- Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
- The Call of the Reed Warbler
- Here’s the link to the YouTube ‘Knowledge Quest’ live stream in which Mickey adds a little more info about each of the resources we’ve shared – plus 1 more he snuck in!! – https://youtu.be/t0FaIV2qvkU
Follow Mickey via the links below, and also grab a copy of her book (if you haven’t done so already!):
https://www.chuffed.org/project/support-wamindas-blakcede
Follow Tim and join the Better World Leaders community via the links below:
linkedin.com/company/better-world-leaders
instagram.com/timcollingslifedownsouth
timcollings-betterworldleaders.medium.com
Link to article reflecting on this episode on Medium here –
youtube @timcollings – click here for channel
Episode Pages for this episode and all previous Better World Leaders conversations available here;
4ileadership.com/category/better-world-leaders
As always, great thanks and appreciation to the team who contributed to bringing Better World Leaders to you;
To Brendan Ward for mastering, final production, composition and performance of original music throughout each episode.
To Cooper, Pat and the team at RadioHub studios for audio editing, technical support and creative guidance during the episodes that are recorded face-to-face. You can find out about Radio Hub’s services here – https://www.radiohub.com.au/
To NokNok Studios for website design, hosting and advice. Find out about NokNok’s awesome services here – https://www.facebook.com/NOKNOKstudios/
To Cirasa Design for logo and site graphics – Find our about Cirasa’s inspiring work here
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