Meet KEN ZULUMOVSKI - Founder of Gamarada Universal Indigenous Resources, GUIR

KEN ZULUMOVSKI

Founder Gamarada Universal Indigenous Resources GUIR

Interview by Jasmina Siderovski In 2019 Ken Zulumovski Hon DHSc (USyd) received the honorary award of ‘Doctor of Health Science’, by The University of Sydney for his outstanding contribution to Australian society. He is the founder and managing director of the consultancy, Gamarada Universal Indigenous Resources (GUIR) Pty Ltd and the Not for Profit, Gamarada Indigenous Healing and Life Training Pty Ltd.

GUIR provides specialised and tailored services to individuals and organisations across the private, government and community sectors. GUIR’s spheres of influence include health, education, justice, and employment. Community engagement across the social & emotional wellbeing and healing fields is GUIR’s forte. GUIR specialises in program co-design and delivery, coaching, mentoring, cultural supervision and organisational capacity building with the GUIR COURAGE Coaching Model. The model combines Wisdom Traditions with Western behavioural science and elements of military leadership and is used extensively for staff training, program development, and community engagement. GUIR works to promote community cohesion with a focus on marginalised groups who may be at risk of radicalisation.

UNSW independently validated this work. Gamarada was recognised by the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet with an Excellence Award for Building Leadership in Indigenous Communities.

Ken is a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve and has experience as an Artillery Crew Commander. He will soon be elevated to the rank of Captain and take an advisory role with the Directorate of Recruitment and Retention assisting with the Army’s Reconciliation Action Plan Targets.

Tell us about your background.

I want to start by acknowledging Gadigal and Eora, upon whose ancestral lands I live on and where most of my career was built. The eYs Magazine Founder, CEO, Editor-in-Chief, and Publisher, Jasmina Siderovski. My community, friends and family and most importantly, all of you readers.

In 2019 I found myself the recipient of the honorary award ‘Doctor of Health Sciences’, by The University of Sydney for outstanding contribution to Australian society. I am a descendent of the KabiKabi & Gooreng Gooreng Nations of South East Queensland, Australia. I am also proud of my Macedonian lineage. I am a graduate of the Djurawang Health Sciences (Mental Health) program at Charles Sturt University and a former lecturer and researcher at Muru Marri, the Indigenous Health Unit of the University of New South Wales, School of Public Health and Community Medicine.

My career spans about 25 years in program development and delivery working with Australian first nations and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. But I think the seeds where planted around age 14, when mum Aunty Sandra Johnson, encouraged me to look into becoming a St John Ambulance Cadet. In doing so, I graduated as a Corporal and took on the task of training a lively group of younger cadets in; volunteering, administering first aid, drill to build discipline, fundraising, and protocol including; reciting the St John Ambulance Code of Chivalry.

Building on this, at age 17, I enlisted into the Australian Army Reserve and was posted to the combat unit, 113 Field Battery, Royal Australian Artillery Corp. There I trained as an artillery gunner and crew commander. I served eight years, including three years with the Australian Defence Force Recruitment Unit implementing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Defence Career development strategy. As a tribute to my military career, I earned the prestigious Australian Defence Medal. I left the army at age 23 to take up formal education and begin my career in Aboriginal health.

In 2006, I led the establishment of Gamarada Indigenous Healing and Life Training Pty Ltd. This organisation responds to the therapeutic and educational need for culturally safe community mental health, healing and life skills programs targeting, family violence, addiction and suicide prevention and access to justice.

In 2010 Gamarada was recognised by the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet with an Excellence Award for Building Leadership in Indigenous Communities. In 2018 our First Nations-led mental health programs for youth and adults in Western Sydney earned us a Youth Action, Youth Work with Young Aboriginal People and in 2019 a Zest Award for Outstanding Voluntary Group, Gamarada Leadership Group, Western Sydney.

This month my team and I will deliver our 601st continuous week of the autonomous community led, Gamarada community healing and cultural leadership program. A train-the-trainer model that has demonstrated sustainability for 13 years, by not depending on funding of any kind and avoiding the program disruption caused by the high worker turnover in the not-forprofit sector. It is the longest continual program of its type in Australia and possibly the world.

My frustration with the constraints and pace of the not-for-profit sector led to the founding of Gamarada Universal Indigenous Resources (GUIR). One hundred per cent Indigenousowned private company. GUIR’s spheres of influence include Education, Justice, Health Care and Employment. I co-designed the Gamarada COURAGE Coaching Model. This model incorporates Third Wave Psychology with Indigenous wisdom traditions. It provides a therapeutic and culturally safe framework for cultural supervision and program co-design and delivery. It is currently being used in restorative justice, education and training for teachers, students, allied health professionals as well as community engagement initiatives across the Social and Emotional Well Being and Healing spectrums.

I felt it important to ensure Indigenous ways of social and emotional wellbeing and healing were being recognised in

the mental health services, so we facilitated the first NSW Aboriginal Healing Forum at the State Parliament House. I was also advocating for systemic change as a member of the NSW Mental Health Commission’s Indigenous Leaders forum.

‘Ken has transformed healing practices for Indigenous peoples and has pioneered ground-breaking principles well before they were established examples of best practice.’

My team and I are committed to systemic advocacy by holding regular community forums and national and international conference presentations across the: Health and Justice spectrum. In June 2019, we presented at the Australian Society for Psychological Medicine and Royal Australia College General Practitioners Biennial conference and at the Lowitja Institute, International Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Conference. In 2020 my team and I will present at the Bangamalanha Conference Tertiary Education conference and hold webinars for the Australian Association of Social Workers and the Association of Contextual Behavioural Therapists.

When and why did you decide to advocate for the Indigenous community?

So, In the course of my life’s work, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with and learn from a very diverse range of masters in their fields. This has taken place in several different contexts including my work with: The Aboriginal medical service at Redfern, our program profiling in the 2008 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioners report, Chapter 4, Defining healing and the mental health legal services project at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. And further abroad, I’ve taken the opportunity to learn from Cultural Leaders through our presentations at global professional therapeutic communities and our training therein.

So, around 2005, I began to see gaps in our health system. Ideas started stirring in my mind. I began to feel quite frustrated at the slow pace of progress happening across the sectors. For the previous ten years to 2005, or what was essentially my 20’s, I had been working in the fields of HIV prevention and mental health, while holding a part-time career with the Army Reserve.

Working in these roles exposed me to many intense and confronting learning opportunities. I worked very closely with people who were incarcerated. I worked with the injecting drug-using communities, the GLBTI Intersex and Queer communities. I got to know and understand these communities very intimately. Though my studies and career in mental health I was exposed to another cluster of complicated and serious challenges and I gained experiences working with: suicide, addiction, family violence and substance abuse and I reluctantly got to know and understand these issues intimately as well, what struck me was I learned to understand how so much of this human suffering is so easily preventable and how so much of our health care, education and justice systems can be improved.

So, as you can see, my 20’s were an intense apprenticeship. In one of my jobs, I earned the nickname’ conference kid.’ It was given to me by my CEO who tagged me ‘conference kid’ for my relentless enthusiasm and willingness to register for every conference, represent on every committee, attend every seminar and workforce development workshop that my budget could afford. In my mind, this enthusiasm toward professional development seemed necessary to gain a broad view of the challenges we faced and to enable me to approach them from different angles. Being the ‘conference kid’ also gave way for an opportunity to escape my hometown of Newcastle and to broaden my networks, increase my access to knowledge and innovation.

During this process, I developed an acute awareness of the many barriers to solving our most challenging human problems. I became aware that there were a lot of injured and unconscious people in our communities and in the mainstream communities too, some of those people where in high-level decision-making positions, who was steering the ship I thought?

I began looking for answers, immersing myself in the stories of the greatest cultural leaders who have ever lived, activists, artists, change-makers, people with purpose, those working for the greater good. I begin to notice certain patterns and common traits about these people.

After years of experience and study in their field, the minds of these people had reached a superior level of intelligence. They could see things about the ways of the world that were simply invisible to most other people. They had a sixth sense for trends and opportunities. They could see threats and recognise dangerous people, and they could make the most surprising connection between ideas. They could most certainly read between the lines of power plays by colonial authorities. They learned to resist oppression and build incredible movements with little conventional education resources. In Robert Greens Book, the 48 laws of power he calls these people master's because they had essentially mastered the field.

How do you motivate and inspire others to face any challenges?

Show them the consequences of doing nothing about it, that usually works. There is a sigh on the wall at the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence, it reads, ‘Leaders do what needs to be done, even when they don’t want too’.

What are valuable lessons and biggest disappointments you have been presented in your progress as an Ambassador and advocate?

The most valuable lesson I have learned is, change takes time; humans prefer the comfort of familiarity. If the change is too sudden, even if it is for the greater good, it may be rejected.

The biggest disappointments I have experienced. Perpetuated failures of parts of our health system, the miss management of our tax paying dollars, the dismissal of libraries full of evidence on improving outcomes in health, education, employment. The lost opportunity to innovate that ultimately leads to much human suffering.

Is there anything we can do as a society to support your mission?

Yes, there is, write to your local MP and ask them the question, what are they doing to help Close the Gap?

What motivates you to be a change-maker – especially during these challenging times?

If I can do something and I don’t, well that’s a conscience that I just can’t sit with.

Who is your inspiration, and why?

Tell us a feel-good success story?

I was told to celebrate the small victories.

My inspiration is the brave face that turns up at a program meeting for the first time and genuinely seeks change.

What is your favourite pastime when you aren’t working?

I never stop working, just kidding! I am a fisherman and a mountain biker. I love nature. In the warmer months, you will find me with my Four-wheel drive on a remote beach some place digging for pipes and fishing all night.