Earlier this year, a group of six South Australian leaders from the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF) program were assigned a Community Action Project based on the work of The Wyatt Trust.
The aim of the 10-month program is to develop leaders who can ‘think more broadly, gain new perspectives and develop new and practical approaches to problem-solving’.
Interrogating ethical storytelling challenges and the unhelpful narratives that surround poverty, the talented group grappled with nuance and complexity, ultimately coming away with deeply personal insights.
Wyatt CEO, Stacey Thomas, who participated in the GLF program in 2021, praised the group’s tenacity and willingness to sit in discomfort.
“This was not an easy project,” Stacey says. “The level of humanity, careful consideration and respect for lived experience that the group brought to this project is commendable.
“These leaders will take the insights and understanding they gleaned from this work and carry it with them, each helping in their own small way, to challenge and dismantle the harmful narratives about poverty.”
The group shared their reflections in this recent Q&A.
Can you give a quick outline of the project and what the group set out to achieve?
Our Community Action Project (CAP) explored three deeply interconnected challenges the Wyatt Trust is grappling with:
- What ethical storytelling looks like in practice when working with people who have lived and living experience of poverty.
- How to influence public and media narratives about poverty when control ultimately sits with journalists and editors.
- How to understand and measure change when shifting public attitudes is slow, complex, and often intangible.
Our group, Craig Jones, Jo McCarthy, Simon Richardson, Memory Rugube, Christine Schloithe, and Ortal Vaalani Yifrach, set out to better understand these challenges and offer insights, frameworks, and provocations that could support Wyatt’s ongoing work.
We weren’t trying to “solve” poverty or redesign Wyatt’s strategy. Instead, our aim was to illuminate the tensions, opportunities, and ethical considerations that Wyatt is already navigating and to contribute ideas that might help strengthen storytelling, advocacy, and measurement efforts going forward.
What was the most challenging part of the project?
The hardest part was working inside a challenge that had no clear edges, no single owner, and no technical solution.
Ethical storytelling, media influence, and narrative change are all adaptive problems, meaning they sit in deeply held beliefs, culture, power dynamics, and systems.
Very quickly, we realised:
- There was no single “right” answer.
- The challenges were far bigger than our project window.
- The more we learned, the more complexity we uncovered.
At times we felt unsure if we were focusing in the right place. We often found ourselves circling big questions about agency, safety, timing, and influence.
Working out where we could meaningfully add value, given Wyatt already does such great work, required constant reflection and recalibration.
We had to constantly check our assumptions, hold uncertainty together, and resist the urge to oversimplify. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was one of the most valuable parts of the experience.
How would you describe the experience of being part of this project?
In a word: stretching, in all the best ways.
We moved from being a polite, slightly tentative group to a genuinely collaborative team with strong trust, humour, and honesty. The work
pushed us to:
- sit in ambiguity
- use adaptive leadership tools in real time
- balance competing tensions (control vs empowerment, vision vs operations)
- reflect on our own growth as leaders.
There were moments of confusion, discomfort, and feeling stuck but there were also moments of deep insight, shared learning, and creative breakthroughs.
Attending the ethical storytelling workshops, engaging with experts, mapping systems, and polarities, and even embodying the system through a social presencing exercise helped us understand the work in a much more holistic way.
The experience pulled us into deeper conversations about leadership, power, and responsibility. By the end, we weren’t just producing a report; we had shifted as individuals and as a group.
What’s one thing you wish more people knew about poverty?
That poverty is a systemic issue, not a personal failure.
One of the most powerful things that emerged through our work was just how much shame, invisibility, and stigma surround poverty and how often public narratives reinforce the false idea that people “end up there” because of poor choices.
We realised that poverty is shaped by structural forces: housing costs, insecure work, policy settings, education, health, unexpected crises, and generational disadvantage. It can happen to anyone, and it can happen quickly.
If more people understood that poverty is about systems, not character, we would see greater empathy, stronger policy reform, and far less judgment.
As part of their reflections, the group also composed a poem which captures their project learnings:
'The Space Between Stories'
We began with a question
that had no edges,
a problem too wide
to fit inside our hands.
We walked in circles,
trying to find the centre of something
that refused to stay still.
We were asked about stories -
how to lift a voice
without taking it,
how to tell truth
without turning it into someone else’s headline.
We met people who reminded us
that stories are living things -
they breathe,
they bruise,
they belong to the teller.
So we stopped asking “what’s the answer?”
and started asking
“what does it mean to listen?”
We learned that leadership
is not the light at the end of clarity -
it’s the candle we pass
when the room goes dark.
We learned that poverty
is not a line on a graph,
but a silence that stretches
between one life and another.
And in that silence,
we found ourselves -
six people holding questions
too heavy for one,
but lighter together.
Now we know:
change begins
in the space between stories -
where humility lives,
and hope still whispers,
try again.
Pictured: the Community Action Project group members
