Changemakers

In what ways are public servants ChangeMakers, and how can advocacy groups build more powerful relationships with them? This chat is with one of Australia’s most senior former public servants - Peter Shergold - who was a senior official in both the Hawke Labor Government and the Howard conservative Liberal Government. He shares stories about what it is like to work in the public service, and the c...

Nick Haines - ChangeMaker Chats - Independents and Elections The 2022 Australian Election is all about the Independent ‘Teal’ Candidates - but where did this Independent movement come from? Today we talk with Nick Haines, Voices for Indi activist, and son of Helen Haines, Member for Indi, about how it all began. He shares his family’s story and how he helped support Cathy McGowan, the first of the...

This is the first of two episodes about people power in election campaigns. Today we feature a campaign by the Australian digital campaign group GetUp. This independent community movement worked to change the electoral outcome in the Tasmanian seat of Bass in 2016. The story shares lessons about how people can work in elections to have their needs and issues heard, and the role that local relation...

Across the world statues and symbols dedicated to slave owners and colonialists are being removed. But before that movement started in the United States and the United Kingdom, it began in Cape Town. The is the story of #RhodesMust Fall and the South African #FeesMustFall movement that sought to not only remove the symbols of colonialism but demanded that the education system be changed in substan...

What would it take for the goodies of the world to have a growing, exponential set of resources to finance how we make change? Josh Ross explores the idea of venture philanthropy and his not-for-profit ticketing organisation Humanitix. His company is disrupting event ticketing while also raising an exponential sum for charitable causes. Seed funding created a different kind of charity, where the b...

Resistance to the war in Ukraine is strong, in Ukraine and also in Russia. This episode is about a housing campaign by Russian dissidents recorded in 2017. These families came together to defend urban forests - large parklands that serve as backyards for tens of thousands of Mosovites. This story documents the political pressure they faced as they sought to defend their homes from the over-develop...

The Disability Movement famously argues ‘nothing about us without us.’ Wenn Lawson lives this creed as a world leading autistic advocate and researcher who has helped change how we understand autism and neurodivergence. He shares his journey, including how he shook the house of academia so it would listen to the lives of autistic people. He reflects on the power of co-produced research, identity a...

Australia locks up asylum seekers if they attempt to get here by boat. But the refugees that have been subject to indefinite detention on Manus Island and in Australian hotels have resisted. Mostafa Azimitabar, Moz, has led refugee resistance from the inside using the change making skills that he developed as a Kurdish freedom fighter. Here he shares his story and his approach to change making, le...

Logline - Examining the tough relationships between mainstream progressive parties and movements in Australia, host Amanda Tattersall looks back at her own experience. She tells the story of the 2001-2004 refugee movement’s attempt to shift the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and examines what worked, and what was learnt. Lessons are drawn for the climate movement today. This piece was also published...

Four years ago on Invasion Day 2018 Tarneen Onus-Williams was relentlessly and violently trolled on Twitter for a speech she gave at a protest. Social media abuse tries to shut people down. It is frighteningly common for women, for Indigenous women and women of colour. This is the story of how Amnesty crowdsourced thousands of volunteers to patrol twitter and see if they could stop it For more on...

The Hong Kong 2019 protests were some of the largest protests ever seen in the world, and they didn’t come from nowhere. This episode explains some of the history behind the social movements in Hong Kong - from Tiananmen Square to local democracy struggles - Hong Kongers have long used and developed powerful protest strategies. For more on ChangeMakers check us out: Via our Website - https://chang...

The war on drugs has been a failed battle for decades. But what could we be doing differently? And what is a church doing running a facility where illegal drugs can be used openly? And why? For more on the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre go here. For more on the Fair Treatment campaign go here. For more on ChangeMakers check us out: Via our Website - https://changemakerspodcast.org On Facebo...

No matter what your beliefs, the moral of the Bethlehem story is that when people are in need they need compassion. While Australia’s refugee policies have infrequently followed this, Australian people have. This is the story of Baby Asha - an injured baby who was medivaced to a hospital in Brisbane and the community of people who rose up to keep that child in a space of safety away from a desert...

How can we hold together big ambition for social change on issues like climate alongside the small work required to build powerful connections across our diversity and difference? This piece explores the tensions of scale between big and small, fast and slow through stories and reflections across a life of organising. Our host Amanda Tattersall reads a memoir that she wrote for the Griffith Review...

Could there be a single lever in the global marketplace that could transform the stakes for climate change? Yes - the insurance industry. Over the past 5 years insurance has been turned upside down by a nimble network of climate campaigners that have set new rules to end insurance for fossil fuel projects. This is the story of the Sunrise Project, the Insure our Future coalition, and the global an...

If Glasgow tells us anything - the people of the world will need to keep coming together if the politicians of the world are to ever stop climate change. But that begs the question - what does it take for people to come together powerfully? Especially people who are really different. Building unusual alliances is both an art and a science and those who have succeeded and failed before have a lot t...

Across her career Meena has led large-scale technological changemaking networks in the Global South. She has developed the resources that have allowed communities to work with each other to respond to crisis and disaster - from floods to Covid. In this episode we learn from how she has created scaled change, focused on listening, valuing people, working with communities and providing spaces for ne...

Covid has changed the world - not just the pandemic - but equally the challenges and changes to our human systems - how we relate and work together. We recorded this episode back in May 2020 at the beginning of the crisis. It explores three stories where change and hope were making a difference. We looked at healthcare, mutual aid and the Green New Deal - and saw how people were seeking (and are c...

Jane McAlevey is a fierce advocate for winning social change through organising. Her organising method, grounded in decades of experience, mentorship and the battles of many movements across US history, is that workers and people need to lead their own change. She specialises in teaching how you can support people to do this. For unionists, her work is well known - and this episode is a joyous jou...

This week we explore what it would take to build a movement for nature. Sam Rye is a manager at the Conservation Volunteers Australia. He has been involved in a lifetime of work around regeneration and in networks involving decentralised leadership. He is bringing those two passions together to imagine how people can reimagine their relationship with the earth. For more on ChangeMakers check us ou...

We talk to one of the biggest names in US community organising, Ernie Cortes. We chat about the history of organising, exploring how it has changed and how it has created a powerful network of organisers that spans the globe. Ernie reflects on the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) under Saul Alinksy, his work building the IAF after Alinsky’s death, and some of the practices the IAF uses to develop...

As Afghanistan falls again to the rule of the Taiban, we want to share a lesser known story of hope - the work of Insaan and the Kabul Peace House. During the 2000s in the mountains of central Afghanistan, soon after the US invasion, a remarkable but unlikely peace movement began. Led by a man called Insaan, they committed to a process of building peace between people. Over decades they created un...

In 2018 we interviewed Hahrie Han one of the United State’s prominent researchers on community organising, community leadership and social change. This episode explores her research on civic engagement and some of the cut through theorising she has done contrasting ‘mobilising’ and ‘organising strategies. For anyone interested in how people can work together to make powerful change to advance thei...

When can political parties be real change makers and produce big change? Ed Miliband, former Opposition Leader for the UK Labour Party shares some of the lesser known stories that have shaped his political identity and his ambitions for a politics that can go big. We discuss the role of labour and social democratic parties in the change making space. We reconsider the idea that ‘politics is the ar...

On 14 February 2018 a lone gunman entered Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida and killed 17 people. In the days following, a group of students from the school built a campaign to change gun laws in America. Everyday students like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg became household names as a social movement called March for Our Lives staged a national conversation around gun violence...