Creating Safe Spaces for Truth: Walking With Bunurong

In early 2025, Buneen was engaged by the Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation (BLCAC) to support a bold and necessary step in their journey: a community-led Truth-Telling and Healing process. Following years of disruption and division, the Bunurong community took this opportunity to restore trust, strengthen relationships, and reassert cultural authority through structured and culturally safe truth-telling.

Why Truth-Telling Matters

Healing cannot happen without truth. And truth can’t emerge without safety.

For BLCAC, this process was not about blame — it was about creating the right conditions for listening, reflection, and cultural restoration. Buneen’s role was to walk alongside the community, offering a structured, trauma-informed, and culturally grounded process where voices could be heard, harm could be acknowledged, and trust could begin to rebuild.

Over 240 hours were dedicated to:

  • Listening to lived experiences

  • Reviewing key historical and organisational records

  • Facilitating trauma-informed conversations across the community

  • Holding confidential, culturally safe engagements without judgement

The message was clear: healing must begin with truth — and that requires courage, cultural leadership, and a safe structure in which to speak.

A Framework Grounded in Cultural Safety

Buneen’s facilitation was shaped by our SAFE Method, which creates cultural safety across Self, Community, and Organisation — and by decades of experience working with First Peoples communities in spaces of healing and governance.

Key elements of our process included:

  • Voluntary and confidential community engagements

  • Non-disclosure agreements to protect participant voice

  • Structured documentation and archiving for community ownership

  • Findings presented with neutrality, cultural care, and clarity

The process proved what we know to be true: even in spaces of deep division, it is possible to rebuild when safety is intentionally created — and held.

From Crisis to Capability

This was not just mediation.
It was a community reclaiming its narrative and future.

Truth-telling has since informed a broader systems-change roadmap for BLCAC, including:

  • The establishment of an Elders Circle

  • Trauma-informed practice training for leadership

  • Reconciliation strategies designed by and for community

  • Strategic planning to become a national leader in First Peoples governance

Buneen didn’t lead the story — we supported the process. And we ensured that the outcomes remained community-owned, culturally accountable, and designed for long-term transformation.

Our Commitment to Safe Spaces

At Buneen, we don’t use “safe space” as a slogan.
It’s a cultural skillset. A practice. A responsibility.

Our work creates the structures where truth-telling, healing, leadership and governance reform can take place — respectfully, sustainably, and powerfully.

We’re proud to have walked with the Bunurong community on this journey — and we continue to support organisations, boards, and communities seeking healing and systems change with cultural integrity.

Written By Shawn Andrews Buneen Director

📩 Looking to begin a truth-telling or healing process?
Reach out to us at info@buneen.au
🌐 www.buneen.au

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Leading with Truth: Safe Spaces Begin Within

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We Are the Campfire