ACHO Sector Strengthening Project – Kuditj Pty Ltd

Clint Uink and Ellie Morrissey of the Aboriginal Community Housing Organisation (ACHO) Sector Strengthening team sat down recently with Ken Jennings, General Manager at Kuditj.

At the meeting, the team learned all about Kuditj, and in particular their plans to support Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) to achieve ISO 27001:2013 accreditation, strengthening their cyber security capacity.

Kuditj

Coming from the Noongar word meaning think and reflect, Kuditj is an Indigenous owned and operated not for profit organisation providing a range of services which offer easily accessible training, work experience and employment opportunities to their clients.

People may know of Kuditj from their award-winning radio station Noongar Radio, or their catering arm Kuditj Kitchen. Noongar Radio is committed to transmitting positive, informed, empowering Indigenous programming to the Noongar community and those interested in Indigenous culture. Kuditj Kitchen operates as the only Aboriginal owned and operated catering facility in Perth. They pride themselves on providing opportunity and training to the Indigenous community who are interested in hospitality and have achieved huge success for their popular bush tucker infused delicacies.

Lotterywest Funding

Earlier this year Kuditj were one of the 16 ACCOs to receive a share of $3.4 million in Closing the Gap grants from Lotterywest to support community services to Aboriginal people across Western Australia across the housing, health, disability, and early childhood care and development sectors.

Kuditj received $349,554 which they intend to use to support three ACCOs to achieve ISO 27001:2013 accreditation. Having achieved this accreditation themselves, Kuditj believes that the process of accreditation has significant capacity building potential for ACCOs.

ISO 27001:2013 is an internationally acknowledged information security standard developed by a global team of information security experts International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

The three ACCOs partnering with Kuditj to pursue ISO 27001:2013 accreditation will benefit from Kuditj’s experience in gaining and maintain the certification themselves and will receive ongoing support, professional advice and a full resources package to achieve the standard. While Kuditj have achieved funding to support just three organisations at this stage, they are interested in growing this offering into the future.

ACHO Sector Strengthening project

It’s fantastic to see ACCOs initiating innovative projects such as this that will support the ACCO sector into the future.

Shelter WA’s ACHO Sector Strengthening project has met with over twenty-five ACHOs around the state to understand the strengths and challenges experienced in the sector, enable peer to peer knowledge sharing, resource exchange and relationship building between ACHOs. The project is facilitating vital connections between ACHOs, such as those that were formed at the WA ACHO Sector Strengthening Summit in July 2023. The project is also developing a suite of resources to support ACHOs progress towards community housing registration under the Community Housing Regulatory Framework.

Please get in touch by emailing ellie.morrissey@shelterwa.org.au if you are interested in hearing more about the project or if you are an ACCO that provides property and tenancy management services in WA and would like to be involved.