Background:

More Than Talk (MTT) is a collaborative health promotion project between the Western Australia Centre for Rural Health (WACRH) and the Midwest Aboriginal Organisations Alliance (MAOA).  The project aims to research and develop a variety of partnerships involving Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal organisations to better inform and strengthen policies, practices and strategies to address the social determinants of Aboriginal health

Methods:

Following literature reviews examining cross-cultural partnership theory and partnership assessment methods, the research team worked closely with local Aboriginal organisations, community members, government and non-government agencies on priorities identified by MAOA using a formative evaluation process within a participatory action research framework

Results/Discussions:

 Partnership evaluation indicated several challenges including competing demands from many pressing issues and changing factors, which brought new crises or mitigations. Competing partnerships mean that working with WACRH is only one of many potentially useful alliances that MAOA partners are attending to. These issues demonstrate the long-term nature of this work.  As well as this, MTT staff need to be seen as reliable and effective before MAOA partners fully engage. Achievements in research collaboration and community building continue to strengthen the partnership. 

Conclusions/implications:

Effective Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal partnerships have a significant impact on individual, familial, community and societal attempts to address the social determinants of Aboriginal health. The preliminary investment in time to build trust, establish relationships and communicate deeply is the greatest challenge for non-Aboriginal people working within an Aboriginal context.  Most important, is the capacity for non-Aboriginal partners to step back to enable an Aboriginal critique of existing practices to take place and to learn from and adjust future practices to enable more effective partnerships to develop within Aboriginal communities, particularly given that the current political and funding environment is a time of risk for many Aboriginal organisations.