Community Projects

As an Aboriginal community-led organisation, our core intention is to work collaboratively with Community, finding influential ways to engage Indigenous people across Australia and create value through projects that inspire, connect, and share culture.

To maximise Tranby’s community impact, our projects team creates exciting projects and seeks grant funding to deliver them.

These grants assist Tranby to create value for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people all around Australia, sharing culture and Indigenous ways of learning. We are ever grateful for the positive community connections and contributions that have been made possible thanks to the support of various funding bodies.

Explore some of our current projects below.

outLOUD podcast

Tranby has always been a safe, inclusive and supportive space for Queer Blak Mob. Today, we want to expand that safe cultural space by sharing yarns about Aboriginality, Queerness, creativity, and well-being by speaking outLOUD.

In Tranby’s first podcast, run by BLACKBOOKS, outLOUD provides a platform for our First Nations LGBTQIA+SB community members, storytellers, poets, song writers, writers and creatives to step up and share what is important and gives meaning in their lives and their practice. Since its launch in 2022 the podcast has featured some deadly community voices including emerging artists like Elijah Manis, the 2022 Young NAIDOC Person of the Year, and established artists like Melissa Lucashenko, an award winning writer of Goorie and European heritage.

We are committed to inviting and engaging across the diversity of First Nations LGBTQIA+SB Peoples and Communities. Listen to the podcast here.

The next phase of the project is working with the Redfern based BlaQ Aboriginal Corporation to produce a podcast series with First Nations LGBTQIA+ Elders scheduled for release in December 2022. To follow the outLOUD journey check out our social media podcast page.

Yanalangami Lutruwita

We know that our communities thrive when our women have the opportunity to pursue their dreams and their goals, and to connect, create and inspire others. When we can create systems of support for this to happen, we contribute to community wellbeing, cultural strength and sustainability.

In partnership with Walantanalinany Palingina (WAPA) and local Tasmanian Aboriginal women, Tranby is bringing the Yanalangami: Strong Women, Strong Communities program to Lutruwita (Tasmania). We are grateful for the support of the Tasmanian Community Fund for enabling us to pilot this program.

In September 2022 the Yanalangami team will be flying down to Lutruwita to run a bespoke, in-person program with the local community.

“The opportunity to create a culturally safe space, to share, to yarn about our business, our concerns, our challenges, our hopes for the future, is critical. Most, importantly, by bringing women together to support each other in our efforts, to celebrate who we are and what we do, and how this affects change, we empower each other, our voices and our futures and embrace our cultural ways of knowing, being, valuing and doing.” Tarni Matson

Learn more about the program at WAPA and Yanalangami’s social media.

Glebe Stories Festival

Tranby has long-been an important place for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to connect, learn and share in Glebe. The 2022 Glebe Stories Festival is an opportunity to connect our diverse Glebe community and celebrate the rich culture and diversity within our beloved 2037.

Since late 2021 Tranby has led community-consultation and support for a weeklong festival that will celebrate the diversity of peoples, cultures and stories of Glebe. From Saturday 15th until Saturday the 22nd October, Glebe will transform with many different events, including music, theatre and cultural yarning circle discussions, as a way to break down barriers and ignite conversations between peoples of Glebe.

The festival has a First Nations focus and stories will be shared both at live events and through an interactive self-guided walking tour that will promote Elder’s stories in place. One of these locations will be Tranby which will also feature a semi-permanent street walk exhibition, sharing iconic photos from Tranby’s 65 years history. This Street Walk exhibition will demonstrate the important place Tranby has been for the Aboriginal community, empowering our mob through culturally meaningful education for 65 years, of 65, 000.

The Glebe Stories Festival will be an important event for our local community, not only economically but also by improving community cohesion and enhancing residents social and emotional wellbeing. Sharing Glebe stories is particularly important because of the dynamic diversity that exists within our community, including across cultural, socio-economic and heritage areas.

For more information, follow Tranby on Instagram. If you wou would like to be involved as a volunteer or supporting organisation, please contact us.

This project is proudly funded by the City of Sydney.

Library & Archives digitisation

Tranby has an extensive archive full of inspiring stories, photos, and posters that have been collected for over sixty-five years. The archive has kept the collection safe, however, due to years of insufficient funding, many of these important community materials have not been publicly accessible.

Tranby has an extensive archive full of inspiring stories, photos, and posters that have been collected for over sixty-five years. The archive has kept the collection safe, however, due to years of insufficient funding, many of these important community materials have not been publicly accessible.

Recognising Tranby’s Significance as a Living Place of History

Around Australia, there are thousands of Indigenous graduates who know the deep value of Tranby as a place of learning and connection. For our local and national Indigenous community, Tranby remains a significant place of cultural learning and community activism, as it has for sixty-five years.

In 2022 we have been working with the team at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research to formally recognise and promote Tranby’s archival significance of the past and present. This is a vital step in our journey of digitisation and cultural heritage maintenance.

Thanks to funding by the Community Heritage Grants Program (CHG) by the National Library of Australia, our team employed Indigenous heritage specialists Dr Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi) and Lauren Booker (Garigal clan) from the Jumbunna Team to produce an extensive review of Tranby’s significance.

Learn more by downloading the full report here.

Digitising & Celebrating our Deep History

Tranby is working with the Jumbunna team Institute for Indigenous Education and Research to implement the Mukurtu digital archives system. Mukurtu and Jumbunna will assist us to digitise our important collection of documents and materials, safeguarding some of Australia’s most significant Aboriginal political history. This is an extensive and ongoing project, that we know will prove valuable for our Indigenous community nationally.
Mukurtu is a Warumungu word meaning ‘dilly bag’ and is used in this context to represent a safe keeping place for sacred materials. Created in 2007, as a grassroots project, Mukurtu’s platform supports Indigenous communities around the world to safeguard their important cultural knowledge and publish it, while also respecting traditional protocols. To read more about Mukurtu visit the website

Respecting Indigenous Protocols

Unlike other online archives, Mukurtu emphasises Indigenous community empowerment and control, with the conservation and protection of sacred information being directed by the communities themselves. Mukurtu collaborates with Indigenous communities to assist in the management, sharing, narration, and exchange of digital heritage in culturally relevant, sustainable, and ethically minded ways. This process is significantly different to colonial archival approaches that have for many years ignored Indigenous community concerns and controls around traditional knowledge and its conservation.

Mukurtu has ignited a new era of Indigenous knowledge protection which, at its core, lies on a foundation of respect for cultural heritage maintenance and Indigenous community authority.

The Jumbunna team and Mukurtu platform will bring immense value to Tranby by enabling us to digitise and share our history. With Mukurtu’s unique tools, Tranby will capture alumni stories, and link them to photos, courses, and memories displayed on our Tranby Mukurtu archives page. Photos, student projects, course histories, and student artworks will also be publicly accessible.

Tranby’s Mukurtu project is ongoing, and we hope to share it with our community very soon. Once launched, our archival collection will be searchable via an independent webpage, where everyone will be able to explore the significant archival materials that reflect Tranby’s role in the social and political movements of the 1960s-80s.

Get Involved

We are always looking for passionate community volunteers to help with this important digitisation project. If you would like to learn more about Mukurtu and assist Tranby with this historic project, visit our volunteer information page.

Our place for keeping, making and sharing Stories

Tranby: our place for keeping, making and sharing our Aboriginal stories will provide opportunity for NSW Aboriginal people to control and manage how our stories are told, represented and made available to the broader Australian community.

In our 65th year of operation, Tranby is creating, at our Glebe premises, a culturally significant place for keeping, making and sharing our Aboriginal stories.

The new works will incorporate:

  • The Tranby Library and Reading Room hosting archival and contemporary books and educational resources produced by, for and about First Nations Australia
  • BLACKBOOKS® display and retail outlet complementing the www.BLACKBOOKS.online platform
  • Tranby Oral History Centre with production facilities for the recording and storage of Aboriginal oral histories, podcasts and audiobooks
  • Operational facilities for BLACKBOOKS publishing and literary sector development services including storage and distribution of local community and self-published works
  • The Writers Room for First Nations Australia Writers to come to work on a dedicated project
  • The Our Words Our Way videoconferencing community story sharing studio.

This project is made possible through the CREATE NSW Infrastructure Grants which Tranby proudly received. In July 2022, the honourable Ben Franklin, NSW Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, joined the Tranby team on campus to announce the $1.7 million CREATE NSW Infrastructure grant. This project will fit-out existing facilities and upgrade the technology to enable a state-of-the-art repository and production facility for the keeping, making and sharing of our stories and oral histories. Stories and the traditions and practices associated with their keeping, making and sharing are foundational to our Culture and identity.

Tranby Aboriginal Co-operative Limited has worked to meet the social, cultural and educational needs and aspirations of Aboriginal communities across NSW and nationally since 1957 (this year we celebrate 65 years). Australia, as a nation, is moving along the journey of Reconciliation and Truth Telling – it is important that there is a means and a mechanism for our very local and regional NSW stories to be told, shared, and held. Our project is future facing and timely addressing need, gap and opportunity.

Our program will prioritise Aboriginal employment, work experience and skills development through informal and formal training programs. There will be scope for Aboriginal people to actively participate as content providers, content producers, presenters, performers, technicians, audiences and readers.

Tranby: our place for keeping, making and sharing our Aboriginal stories will welcome and host non-Aboriginal people to listen and engage with the authentic voices and stories from Aboriginal people and communities across NSW with an opportunity to meet in person and share and celebrate our Aboriginal culture and stories.

“The Story is the Land, and the Land is the Story. The Story holds the people, and the people live inside the Story. The Story lives inside the people, and the Land lives inside the people also. It goes all ways to hold the Land.”

Iwenhe Tyerrtye – what it means to be an Aboriginal person. Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM (IAD Press 2017).

Seeds of Change Podcast

Seeds of Change: Sharing stories of Aboriginal-controlled education from Tranby and beyond .

As Tranby celebrates 65 strong years of making change happen, we want to recognize our iconic Indigenous campus as an important community meeting place, that has inspired conversations which have rippled throughout Australia, creating meaningful change.

Seeds of Change is an Aboriginal-led podcast series bringing Mob together to share stories of leaders, ideas and organisations that are leading change through Aboriginal-controlled education, from Tranby and beyond. This new podcast series invites Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ to sit, listen, learn and reflect on how the seeds our mob planted at Tranby 65 years ago have sprouted new pathways for our Indigenous Community today and tomorrow.

We can’t wait to share these inspiring conversations with you mob! Recording is currently in process and the expected launch date is November 2022.

This project is proudly supported by The City of Sydney.

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