Nous acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and the traditional custodians of the states and territories of Australia. We pay our respects to the elders past, present and future in maintaining the culture, country and their spiritual connection to the land.

We believe that reconciliation is critically important to our organisation, our society and our country’s future. In April 2014, we launched our first Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) (a Reflect RAP) as a commitment to support and promote reconciliation.

Over the past two years we have successfully implemented our first Nous RAP. We completed all planned initiatives as well as several others.

Our RAP achievements

• Developed our first indigenous employment strategy to support the recruitment of more Indigenous staff and bring greater diversity to our workforce.
• Built relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through our project work – such as program evaluations and strategic planning activities.
• Built a network of Indigenous associates to engage with on relevant projects, to ensure that we are respectful and impactful in the way we work with Indigenous people.
• Had Bill Nicholson, Wurundjeri Elder, Welcome us to his Country at Nous Days to help us appreciate the true significance of the country on which we meet.
• Provided Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country protocols to all staff to support greater understanding of this important practice and encourage greater use of it.
• Ran training for all existing and new Nous staff to build cultural awareness, respect and understanding of the history of Indigenous Australians; and to identify new ways to work with Indigenous Australians to benefit all parties.
• Built on our cultural competency through a speaker series and Talks@Nous covering topics like Constitutional Recognition and Indigenous employment.
• Promoted reconciliation externally through our support of and attendance at the Recognise campaign dinner for constitutional recognition.
• Shared research and reports on reconciliation on our Salesforce Chatter feed to raise awareness across all staff.
• Tracked our progress over 2 years to understand where we were successful in executing upon our RAP and how we can improve our approach.

We recognise that long term change for organisations and societies takes time, and accordingly there is still more work to do. Our first Reflect RAP has positioned us well to continue our reconciliation journey.

Nous’ internal RAP Working Group has also recently launched our next Innovate RAP which commits us to a range of further actions aligned to Respect, Relationships and Opportunity. We are looking forward to continuing to be a part of Australia’s reconciliation journey and encourage other organisations to do the same.