OUR STORY

We started with one aim: that First Nations people who get in, stay in.

For years our founders watched the same thing happen: workplaces built in ways that quietly limit how far a First Nations employee can go. So we looked closely, and we built a better model. One that grows the skills, the environment, and the systems together, using Be BRAVE Feel SAFE: the brave spaces, held by curious leaders, where cultural and psychological safety can hold.

THE BEGINNING

Built from lived experience.

It takes brave workplaces, not braver employees.

This began with young people in care. For more than ten years, Shawn Andrews ran Indigicate camps and on-Country programs alongside them, and kept seeing the same thing. These young people were doing everything right. The workplace was foreign to them, and no one had made it ready.

The systems let them down. The managers let them down. No one was listening, and there was no brave space for the honest conversations that would have changed it.

Something else was missing too. No one was building the life skills alongside the work skills, or looking at the whole person. A job offer on its own is not enough. People need pathways and programs that coach and back them into a role, and they need life skills support too, so no one is left out. That is the model we built.

THE PEOPLE BEHIND IT

Meet our founder.

We are building, we are launching, and we say so plainly. This is a new concept, and it is already underway.

Shawn Andrews

Mununjali and Migunberri. Our founder, with more than twenty years across education, strategy, and First Nations employment. An executive coach, and the creator of the Be BRAVE Feel SAFE methodology Buneen is built on.

More to come

We have several highly experienced people, and new staff, starting over the next two months. Because of their current employment commitments, we are not acknowledging them here yet. Stay tuned, we will update as we go.

PART OF THE BUNEEN GROUP

First Nations workforce is one part of what we solve.

Recruitment and retention is our part. Buneen Employment is one of three businesses under the Buneen Group, working together so workforce, advisory, and personal practice reinforce each other.

Buneen Consulting

Cultural safety audits, psychosocial risk, and board capability work.

buneen.au →

Buneen Employment

First Nations-led recruitment and workplace readiness.

YOU ARE HERE

Dreaming Futures

A charity walking alongside First Nations children in out-of-home care. In care, not forgotten.

dreamingfutures.org →

All three are built on the Be BRAVE Feel SAFE methodology.

OUR METHOD

Be BRAVE Feel SAFE

Be BRAVE Feel SAFE is a First Nations-led methodology in Australia that builds the brave spaces where cultural and psychological safety actually emerge, held by curious leaders practicing Dhungai, the deep listening grounded in Aboriginal connection to Country and kinship.

Dhungai is a Yugambeh word, taught to Shawn by an uncle.

In a workplace, that looks like this. We train managers to lead as curious leaders. We coach the employee and the manager together through the first year. We build the brave space where the honest conversations can happen, so cultural and psychological safety hold, and people stay.

It is the same method that earns our founder a seat coaching executives across the Victorian Public Service. We bring it to a brand new entry-level employee and the manager receiving them.

Need it on its own?

Standalone cultural safety or psychological safety work, board capability, and whole-of-team training sit with our sister business, Buneen Consulting.

Visit Buneen Consulting →

READY WHEN YOU ARE

Let's see if we should work together.

Whether you're an employer, a jobseeker, or a sector partner, if any of this sounds like what you've been looking for, we'd like to hear from you.

Get in touch →