Natasha Short:
I was born and raised in the East Kimberley and have spent 25 years in community development. A lot of Aboriginal people naturally gravitate towards community service work because we see the social injustice. In 2017, a friend of mine suggested I start my own business, and I thought it was a great way for me to give back to my community. I wanted to create a platform to gather all the capable, strong, high-calibre Aboriginal women around me and start a movement to raise our voices and tell Australia what we really need – to promote our culture in a positive way from our own stories and to start more businesses.

I established Kimberley Jiyigas, which means ‘birds’, as a play on a collective of women. People still don't get it – sometimes I have to explain to them that I am not working with the feathered variety of birds, I work with women!  

Quite naively I thought that gathering everyone would be enough- who wouldn’t see our value and just engage us immediately? But it didn't happen like that. I’d never run a business together and it was really hard work. But I found that once you create a bit of a momentum, it leads to more momentum and alliances with people who come to the party because they want to do what you want to do. It's quite miraculous really.

After only two years, I was approached by Liz Gillies, the CEO at Menzies Foundation who had been at an international conference and where she heard about the positive impact of engaging Indigenous women in the economy and that when you do, they give back to their community.

Natasha Short:
After meeting Liz, we partnered with the Menzies Foundation and the non-profit Good Returns to cofound the Maganda Makers Business Club. In my language ‘Maganda’ means ‘tomorrow’ and it’s about helping Kimberley Indigenous women build wealth through business. We’re going into our fifth year and now have 130 Kimberly women who are part of the movement in our region alone. 

They're doing everything from art, catering, bush medicines and bush foods to cleaning services, candle and jewellery making, consultancy businesses, photography and graphic design. We’ve also expanded it into a broader initiative called Future Weavers, because we want to build an Australia-wide movement that helps Indigenous entrepreneurs get into self-determination through business enterprise. Right now, we’re focusing on Northern Australia which has an Indigenous population of almost 20%. We have to create new paths for people to get out of disadvantage. We don't want to be charity seekers; we want to be empowered to live life on our own terms.

Natasha Short:
It feels good to give, I think it releases endorphins. Me and my three siblings have all adopted mum's giving because we've seen it modelled our entire lives. One characteristic I dislike strongly is stinginess. There's no need for it. I believe that the pie is big enough for everybody if only we'd all be willing to share a little piece of what we have with others who aren't as fortunate. One thing I’ve found in my work and in my community is that the people who have the least, give the most.

Sometimes the more people have, the more they want to keep for themselves. Of course, there are extraordinary people like philanthropists who think differently, but there are also people who've got enough money to last 10 lifetimes, but they still want to hoard it.

I really believe that we are here to give to other people, to serve and support others, and to be a blessing.  Every person on planet Earth has purpose and once you find what you're supposed to be doing, which I was fortunate to find from a very early age, it becomes as easy as breathing.

When I go about community and I'm supporting women in their natural environment and I see them encouraged and uplifted, it encourages me, because I’m a reflection of my mum, my grandmother and every woman that I have come from.

Natasha Short:
I give hope. I give inspiration. I give people time.

Natasha Short:
I learned that we can't outgive God. It’s because God has been very generous to me, that I can be very generous to others. When we show generosity to others, it unlocks their generosity. The more you do it, the more it becomes a normal way to live life.

Even though I'm a small consultancy business, two or three times a year I give out $500 and $1,000 grants to empower Aboriginal women. I do this to help normalise giving, but also because there are about 2,400 businesses across the Kimberley and less than 10% of them are Indigenous, even though we make up 40% of the population.

Every single Aboriginal business that I know in the Kimberley is giving back in extraordinary levels compared to what they're earning. And yet I have not seen our non-Indigenous businesses give back in the same way. I have no doubt there are a handful that do, but I wonder how the other businesses are not giving back when they have generated much of their wealth from the Indigenous community?

Where's the generosity of spirit? How do we help people learn the importance of giving back to a more disadvantaged party, because we have to get Aboriginal people involved in the economy. In our culture, money as an entity wasn’t a thing and so our people are on this steep learning curve. I think it’s important for Australians to understand the relatively new entry of money into Aboriginal society, and that many are really grappling with this concept of exchanging something for dollars.

It's going to take time. But at the same time, the stats and the data tell the story of what happens when we do have funding. When we are supported to make bigger things happen on the ground, when we have flexible dollars that allow us to do things in a way that we know makes sense, rather than imposing targets and metrics, the impact is great.

Natasha Short:
To help people who are highly motivated to help themselves.  To help Indigenous people change the deficit narrative that is constantly promoted and enabled through endless service. My ambition is to support more people to be self-empowered, so they don't need charity anymore.