Go back and get it: the teaching inside our name

A word with a direction built in

Sankofa is an Akan word from Ghana. It is usually translated as “go back and get it”. The symbol most people know is a bird with its feet facing forward and its head turned back, reaching for an egg on its own back.

The teaching inside it is simple to say and hard to live. There is nothing wrong with going back for what you have forgotten, left behind or been told to leave behind. What you carry from your past is not weight. It is material. You build the future out of it.

We named our organisation after that teaching because it describes the people we work with more accurately than any program category ever has.

The problem with the deficit lens

Most of the systems our participants move through describe them by what they lack. No Australian work history. Limited English. No recognised qualification. Disengaged from school. At risk.

None of those descriptions are untrue. All of them are incomplete, and together they produce a very particular kind of program: one built to fix gaps. Fill the gap, tick the box, move the person on.

The trouble is that a person is not a gap. A young man who arrived here at fourteen and has spent four years translating for his parents at Centrelink, the doctor and the school has skills most adults do not. A woman who ran a market stall in Kakuma for six years has run a business. A kid who is “disengaged” from Year 11 might be the most engaged person in his community football club. If the program only sees the gap, it misses all of that, and the person feels missed.

Sankofa means we design the other way around. We start by asking what someone brings. Then we work out what they need. Capability, identity and ambition first. Barriers second. Not because barriers are not real, but because they are not the whole story and they are never the most interesting part.

Why culture sits in the middle, not on the side

Plenty of organisations say they are culturally responsive. In practice that often means a translated flyer and a cultural awareness module for staff.

We mean something different. Culture is not a layer we add to a program so that it lands better. It is the thing we build from.

When we teach workplace communication in Clean Start, we do not start from the assumption that Australian directness is the standard and everything else needs correcting. We start from how respect is shown where the participant comes from, and then we look together at how that same intention is read in an Australian workplace. Both are systems with their own logic. The participant is the person best placed to decide how to move between them.

That is not a softer approach. It is a more accurate one. People learn faster when the starting point is something they already know.

Story is evidence

We say that story and lived experience sit at the centre of our practice, and we mean it in two directions.

First, the stories of our participants. Every program we run makes room for people to tell theirs, in their first language where the group allows. Partly because being heard matters. Mostly because the story is where the capability lives. You cannot find out what a person is good at by reading their intake form. You find out by listening.

Second, the stories of our own team. Sankofa is led by people who have been through the systems we work in. Migration, settlement, the first job, the first payslip that did not add up, the school that did not know what to do with us. We do not use that as a credential to wave around. We use it because it changes what we notice, what we ask, and what we refuse to accept as normal.

Alongside lived experience sits formal expertise: qualifications in community services, program and project management, and higher education research. The two are not in competition. The lived experience tells us what matters. The evidence tells us what works. We need both, and so does everyone we serve.

What going back looks like in practice

Going back and getting it is not nostalgia. It is a design principle, and it shows up in concrete ways.

• We ask about skills and roles from home before we ask about gaps here.
• We treat culture, faith and language as assets to be protected, not obstacles to be managed.
• We measure what people gain, not only whether they got a job or a certificate.
• We put facilitators in the room who have walked a version of the participant’s road.
• We say integration, never assimilation. Nobody is asked to trade one identity for another.

Rooted in the past. Built for the future.

That line is our tagline, and it is a summary of everything above. The past is not something our participants need to get over. It is the ground they are standing on. Our job is to help them build on it.

If that is how you think about community work too, we would like to hear from you. Email info@sankofa.com.au.

Rooted in the past. Built for the future.

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