18 CAPABILITIES

PAMA FUTURES Indigenous designed and led

CAPABILITY BUILDING

The following list of 18 capabilities is our representation of the capabilities we believe need to be built within Cape York society. Pama Futures empowers and supports Cape York people, families and communities to turn these capabilities into reality. This is the next crucial step to facilitate better prospects for our people, to choose a life they have reason to value.

Family Development


We start with prenatal foundations for lifelong good health, care and management. It all starts in the womb. Followed by personal and family responsibility for the active utilisation of health care services and healthy life-styles and disease management.


We provide effective education from early childhood onwards to maximise our children’s potential and set them up for lifelong learning. Parental engagement to ensure financial and emotional support to children and send them to school every day. Individual responsibility to actively search for continuous development opportunities.


Families nurture and provide for each other and have strong bonds of responsibility and care, parents give children good memories and set them up for the future. Family responsibilities are upheld and the home is free from violence and children and youth are the first priority.


Families have access to housing under fair tenancy arrangements or under home ownership and younger generations are being supported down the pathway of home ownership.

Community Development


Our villages are places where there is respect for each other and people abide by our norms, customs and laws, and we are able to settle disputes and violence of all forms is strongly sanctioned.


We ensure the safety, growth and development of girls so that they can realise their fullest potential—and inequality and injustice against women is eradicated from our society. We provide guard rails and opportunities, role models and mentors to support girls, particularly at crucial transitional points of their development.


Our boys grow up with self-esteem and respect for themselves and for women, all deserving of dignity and care. We provide guard rails and opportunities, role models and mentors to support boys, particularly at crucial transitional points of their development.


Our villages provide respectful and mutually contributing neighbourhoods, with a volunteering ethic to build social capital, trust and participation.

Economic Development


Every post-school person is able to engage in work – self-reliance, wage or salary employment or subsidised training or employment – to sustain a living and there are jobs for those needing jobs and mobility to go to places where jobs are.


Every person or group that desires to establish and operate an enterprise is able to do, and there is local and regional economic development and industries to sustain them.


Tribes and communities are able to build their tribal wealth for inter-generational equity. Communities use deferred expenditure and savings policies, avoidi expenditure on consumption and have a strong ethic of inter-generational equity and responsibility.


There are markets for goods and services, property, capital and labour which are accessible and vibrant and enable a strong private and cooperative sector to grow. This includes Food security, access to goods and services markets, local property systems enabling residential and enterprise titles, access to capital and labour markets.


There is necessary transport, telecommunications and energy infrastructure to sustain the community and enable economic development.

Culture Development


The Land and Sea Rights of traditional owners and communities are recognized and settled under the law to enable cultural heritage responsibilities to be upheld and underpin economic development.


There is stewardship of the land and resources of the community, and we are able to use them for sustainable development. Cultural responsibilities to the land, and its cultural and natural values, are discharged.


Our people have the opportunity to learn and transmit to their children their ancestral language and cultural knowledge and heritage to preserve and grow our cultural capital.

Political Development

Natural leadership thrives and we are all free to participate in decisions about the future, organisations are well managed and there is good governance at all levels. Governance is reformed to enable development, partnerships and effective performance and high levels of responsibility and accountability.


Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are recognized as the First Peoples of Australia through constitutional recognition and a Voice to Parliament.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors are advised that this website may contain images and voices of people who have passed away.

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