Neil Hockey
cultivate. regenerate. sustain.
As leaders we work for personal, social or corporate well-being.
There are times when we confront uncertainty, confusion or trauma
in our efforts toward genuine transformation that we can sustain.
Our constant challenge then is
first, to empower our teams
in developing a positive sense of self and their goals
that is separate from their actions’ outcomes.
Second, they must identify and build on trustworthy elements
that enable them to consciously accept and fulfill
responsibility for themselves and each other.
Our third challenge is to take responsibility for what we've done
and for its consequences.
In other words, examine and pursue truth.
Yet our current post-truth era appears to be awash with tendencies to deceive.
How then can we strengthen and sustain collective hopes and trust?
Ultimately, long-term transformation is possible only through
discerning truth,
then acting on it, while practicing tough yet tender love.
My formative years were framed by a radical-conservative faith-based extended family. It was no surprise then, that I participated in small-scale debates between diverse faith groups and libertarian communists at university.
There, I played a key role in establishing and guiding a small network of student community houses nearby. These households grew to be a hub of hope, healing and recovery for many trauma-impacted young people.
One key aspect of our common life was daily and weekly gatherings. Here, our passionate discussions, debates and prayer explored historical models of personal, social and political transformation that would stand the test of years. The 1970s was an era fuelled by global upheavals, spawning Watergate, protracted wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
So, matters of truth, hope and trust were crucial.
This community/trauma and truth/transformation scenario became a template for my life’s journey.
The next 17 years began and ended with school teaching, initially in the plains of rural Queensland and later, a boarding school in the mountains of South India.
In between were six years helping establish therapeutic communities in North India, those of New Delhi’s Sahara House and related urban and rural sites.
Living and working with people battling with very diverse addictive behaviours in the face of relentless injustice and oppression, these teams struggled to survive themselves.
Over forty years later, many continue to serve sacrificially.
Having married into a Chinese Malaysian family, I maintain contact with a number of leaders within those communities and others throughout Asia.
Back in Australia, over the past 30 years in South-East Queensland, I’ve worked alongside Indigenous or Goori families and local communities in contexts ranging from formal schooling to participatory community development. My passionate work for grassroots change helped plan, implement and evaluate such processes and structures as
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Local Justice Initiatives
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Community Justice
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Alternative Governing Structures
and longer-term ones including
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school/community-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies - a Senior Board Subject
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Gunya Meta Inc - Logan City - now partnering with community, students, parents, carers, schools and local organisations
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Ganyjuu Family Support Service, Logan City
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Logan-Beaudesert Murri and Torres Strait Islander Network
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Mununjali Jymbi Centre - a Prevention and Early Intervention initiative to reduce the over-representation of Indigenous children in Out-of-home Care
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Maibin Jahyilah Yahgilah Inc. - Men Gathering Supporting
I've learnt a lot, but am still learning, about
what helps us to sustain our groups,
even to flourish
and what factors are most likely to undermine us
so as to falter or fail.
My passion now is to come alongside your team
to challenge and support you in your journey.
My invitation and challenge to your group or team, is to ...
Cultivate Collective Hopes.
Regenerate Integrity.
Sustain Transformative Rhythms.
In my diverse community work I've tended to be unassuming, quietly working behind the scenes.
Then as a public speaker or workshop leader, my passionate presentations have provoked deeper thought and sharing amongst participants in seven countries.
On the one hand, I’ve presented aspects of Indigenous community development for example, to global academic conferences.
On the other, engaging with marginalised village groups, schools, faith-based audiences and NGOs ensures my presentations are tailored to a very diverse range of participants.
About
Talk Topics (example)
Growing through trauma together
(by fanning sparks
of hope and trust)
Whether personally or professionally,
we all want to grow, develop,
improve and flourish.
On the one hand, this assumes we know what is right,
what is safe, good, just, trustworthy!
On the other hand, we have all been hurt, frustrated, or distressed either directly or indirectly when confronted by injustice.
This presentation invites audiences
to identify and respond further
to confronting calls for truth-telling.
With sensitivity, Neil evokes an audience’s varying experiences of trauma. At times these could have lessened their ability to feel a full range of emotions and experiences.
In this talk you’ll explore how to:
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Work consistently with others, in dealing with some consequences of trauma (yours and theirs)
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Focus on specific actions within a sometimes-crazy spiral of progressive transformation
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Engage sources of hope within your own contexts, with confidence that, though faltering, grows and grows
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Identify trustworthy collaborators for ongoing action.
Strengthening hope and trust for building unity
(through pursuing truth, in compassion and tough love)
When we feel abandoned, betrayed or abused, our capacity to trust others
is often reduced.
In turn, we might struggle to be faithful to others, whether within our families, amongst work colleagues or social friends.
From there, a spiral downward might continue, as others experience us as less trustworthy than we want to be.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
To spark hope in our minds and hearts, to begin reversing that negative spiral, we have to come to realise unfolding layers of truth about ourselves, our histories, our social and cultural environments.
But we now tend to live in a world of “post-truth”.
Neil illustrates from his own journey in working with you, to build an upward and outward spiral of hope and trust by gently, but provocatively:
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Drawing out from each audience their own insights into and experiences of post-truth
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Guiding participants through some popular (and not-so-popular) versions of truth
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Painting some common sense true-to-it-all grounds for hope
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Calling you to turn away from the falsehoods in your life, and challenging you: Engage your own spiral of building hope and trust with significant others!
Sustaining your transforming rhythm
(by embedding trust within people and practice)
Have you recently experienced significant changes?
You might even have established a good level of stability, collaboration or teamwork over a number of years.
Then all of a sudden, the unexpected happens. Old habits, forgotten patterns of behaviour begin to re-emerge.
Or there’s a sudden eruption of thoughts and emotions. And you thought those causes and consequences had been dealt with long ago.
Can you trust yourselves and your judgments with the same level of confidence?
It’s easier to sustain change long-term once you regain those healthy patterns.
In this absorbing keynote, Neil prepares more ground for your persistent hard work.
What seems lost has to be regained!
In sequence, you'll traverse:
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Levels of insightful passion and deep thought, that your team must keep in balance
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Essential qualities each participant must strive to embody, and restfully embrace, as active and inactive agents of change
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A totalising way of working, without which your work consumes you, but with this way of working …
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Your work and your essential selves are mutually strengthened in this marathon called life.
Testimonials
Neil Hockey has been working in a government funded community project amongst Indigenous family groups, where his aim is partly to make the work more liberatory for all involved, whether Indigenous or not, in these collaborative processes.
Listening to Neil speak and examining his excellent research over a number of years, I commend his superb account of the methodology for any research in this field, whether it be geared to emancipating the colonizer or the colonized. He also provides an exemplary account of emancipating his own research process from the shibboleths drawn from post-structuralism, positivism and other more or less inadequate methodologies, which together stymy research within a colonial context.
Even those who are not working within this field will benefit enormously from his clear exposition and defence of Critical Realism, including the Philosophy of metaReality.
28 May 2007.
Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014)
Originator of the philosophy of critical realism and author of many acclaimed and influential works. World Scholar and Director of the International Centre of Critical Realism, University of London Institute of Education.
In his speaking and writing as I observed him in several international conferences over more than a decade, Neil Hockey made a valuable and original contribution to the field of Indigenous studies.
His main aim was to contribute to elaborating a metatheory specifying the general conditions of possibility for decolonisation and emancipation.
With his primary focus on Indigenous Peoples or First Nations contexts, both in Australia and globally, this work aims to help create conditions for agentive or effective agency in such contexts and underlabours for decolonisation. In this he succeeds admirably.
Mervyn Hartwig
University Lecturer (retired), founding editor of Journal of Critical Realism, and editor and principal author of Dictionary of Critical Realism.
Neil is a fearless thinker with a scrupulous respect for evidence and the use of forceful but always fair argument. Watching him present at local and international conferences, he is a witty and amusing speaker who does not allow the gravitas of what he has to say, to alienate his audiences.
His direct challenges to participants will always be underpinned by a non-judgemental respect for others.
Every time I get to work with Neil it’s stimulating and enjoyable. I’m pleased that more people will have the opportunity to engage with the unique quality of his thinking.
Gary MacLennan
Research Officer, Department of Seniors, Disability Services and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships Queensland Government
In his vision for transforming society, Neil Hockey recognises the roles played by both organisations and their leaders and through his experience he has identified the skills needed to move organisations toward playing a transformative role. Well versed with challenges faced, he has the ability to assist in navigating through these.
Leaders and organisations would do well to have Neil and his services on call and in support. He possesses an important level of maturity essential to assist leaders in being able to identify possibilities. I personally benefitted from the support and encouragement Neil and the community movement of Sahara House in New Delhi provided, which eventually formed some of the ideas I have explored both in life and practice.
Neil’s ability to be cognisant of the circumstances that have to be navigated and his ability to identify nuances that need attention, rests on his strong listening and observational skills, so important today as people and organisations struggle with the challenges of “sustainability and survival”.
Mathew Titus
Member in the Prime Minister’s Council on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) 2010 – 2014
A key speaker at two early festivals at Sattal Christian Ashram in Uttarakhand, India, and a valued contributor to the organising team over the first five years, Neil speaks with sensitivity and a very evident depth of understanding and knowledge.
Clarifying doubts and debating issues respectfully, he brings to the table his vast experience, challenging audiences to join him in exploring each topic, striving for a deeper understanding by relating his personal journey in faith and social justice through health, healing, education and community
work.
It has always been a joy to work with him in planning for each festival. Easy to work with, he joins in discussion so as to more fully understand and address diverse audiences. We have always appreciated his prompt attention to providing a synopsis.
Anuvinda Varkey
New Delhi Executive Director of the Christian Coalition for Health, India.
Former General Secretary of the YWCA of Delhi
Neil I often look back to the years you spent with us in Ooty. I was struck by your deep commitment to excellence and industry and was regularly provoked and challenged by you to think out of the box in Christian thought and life.
Breaking down lofty content into manageable bits to impact personal life and behaviour was a skill and activity you helped us all with.
And what I admired the most was the humility and simplicity with which all this was done … it was winsome and disarming. Thank you for impacting all our lives Neil Hockey.
Thomas George
Deputy Principal (retired), Hebron School, Udhagamandalum (Ooty), NilgiriHills, South India.
