Waverley Stanley On Providing Powerful Opportunities In Education For Aboriginal Youth

In 2005, Waverley Stanley, his wife Llew and a group of like-minded supporters founded Yalari and established the Rosemary Bishop Indigenous Education Scholarship program.

From the smallest of starting points – five students starting at Toowoomba Grammar School and The Glennie School in January 2006 – Yalari has gone on to support more than 800 Indigenous students through their secondary schooling at some of Australia’s leading boarding schools.

Yalari now has 550 alumni making their way in the world, forging successful careers in health, education, technology, communications, law, business and more. They are learning, contributing, developing and emerging as leaders, changing stereotypes, changing outcomes and changing this nation for the better.

Waverley discusses the barriers between First Nations people in Australia and Access to quality schooling, and the immense power of remaining true to one’s values in the face of adversity.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Could you share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in supporting First Nations children?

[Waverley Stanley] - I grew up in Murgon, which is three hundred kilometres northwest of Brisbane. I'm the eldest of seven children. My mum and dad were born and raised in Cherbourg, and I always say that since my mum and dad were born in 1944, they were part of the flora and fauna of this country, whereas I was born in 1967, so I’m an Australian citizen.

I paint that picture for my children on Yalari because our community is five kilometres from Murgon, which is the nearest big town.

When we grew up in Murgon there were four Aboriginal families there. I did all my primary schooling in Murgon and then my grade seven teacher, Mrs Rosemary Bishop, saw something in me. She got in contact with Mr Dent, the headmaster of Toowoomba Grammar School in 1980, about attending his school. Mrs Bishop sent a letter and a phone call asking for support on how to organise something for me in Toowoomba. Then Mr Dent said to come over and have an interview.

From there, my life changed. I had a different educational journey to my brothers and sisters, but I'm no better than them just because I went to a boarding school. That was a genesis for Yalari. Back in 2006, my wife Llew and I, started Yalari. I was sitting at the kitchen table and coming up with all these business ideas, being already out of business since 2002.

I said how I’d always wanted to give other Indigenous children the same opportunity I had at Toowoomba Grammar School. That's where Yalari came from, and we've been doing that ever since.

As the co-founder at Yalari, can you tell us more about the work you're doing and what's ahead for the organisation?

Our core business is that we select Indigenous children from regional, rural, and remote communities to go to boarding schools around Australia. We select the children, support them financially, and we have staff around Australia. Our core business hasn't changed since we started in 2006.

Our mantra is about educating Indigenous children and that's what we're doing. We're in partnership with families and communities all around Australia. We started in 2006 and we've grown a bit since then, but we've never moved away from our core business.

Now we've got six hundred and thirty alumni around Australia. They're all chasing their own dreams and goals. The best job is just doing something that you love and getting paid to do it.

I've been in education now for thirty years and I always wanted to be a teacher. I'm passionate about it so I turned it into a business idea. We're making a difference with other like-minded people around Australia that believe in what we're doing.

Six hundred and thirty alumni is extremely impressive for your team at Yalari. I imagine that it’s had such a huge impact on the students participating.

Definitely, but it's also the courage of the parents and families to go from your traditional lands into a different environment. Children are adaptable, but the biggest thing for us is picking the right child with the right family support to go to the right school. That's been our foundation right from the word go.

It really aligns with the idea of it ‘takes a village to raise a child’.

For us, our tagline is it takes our whole community to educate a child. That education is not only found in the four walls of a classroom. For a child to get a plane from Jabiru to Darwin, Darwin to Melbourne, Melbourne to Geelong Grammar School. That's an education.

What are some of the other urgent issues and barriers for First Nations people that need to be addressed?

I'm asked this many times, but for me, I don't care whether you're black, white, brindle, purple, or corrugated. I say this openly because I just want to be accepted for who I am.

I spoke at a business breakfast at Toowoomba Grammar School Old Boys’ one year and I talked about being Indigenous. One of the boys come up to me afterwards. His brother was same age as me and he was two or three years younger.

He come up to me and said, “Stan, I didn't know you was an Indigenous. I only just knew you as Stan.” That's all you want.

I say to my Yalari children and alumni, if you can be anything in this world, be humble and kind. Just be a good human being and a good person. Whatever is happening in Australian society right now, be friendly to somebody else.

I'll give you a prime example. Yesterday, I went shopping because we'd lost power, and I saw these two Muslim ladies. I just said, “Hello ladies, how are you today? Are you safe? Have you got electricity on?” And the dear old auntie turned back and thanked me for asking. I said, “No problem at all, ma'am. Can I carry something out to the car for you?”

Just be kind. We live in a multicultural society and Australia is a great country. With me being a black man in this country right now, I know what it's like to travel to South Africa or Papua New Guinea where you are the majority within a country.

But here, we get to see our Yalari become the best of Australians. We get to see their generosity. People here believe in an ideal that we, in collaboration, can make a difference in this country. It's like the Nike ad. You just do it.

That's the same with us when we started Yalari. The friends I had at Toowoomba Grammar School were all white people. I call them my brothers because we all looked after each other. They are my friends and my brothers. I want to espouse this to our children that they’re going to make lifelong friends that will stick by them for the rest of their lives.

I lost my mum three years ago now in 2021. The first seven phone calls to my mobile after my mum passed away were from my mates from Toowoomba Grammar School.

Whatever is happening in Australian society, and for us as an organisation, it's changing the narrative in this country. My value system at Yalari is CORRIE. Our values are compassion, openness, respect, resilience, inclusiveness, and excellence.

When you think of Indigenous people, you think of Indigenous excellence. When you think of Yalari and friendship, you think of inclusiveness. You think of being something in this world, think of compassion for others. Our values at Yalari go hand in hand with me and my personal values. My values as an Indigenous man, as a father, a grandfather, and as a businessman, is caring about others.

My personal values are courage, action, respect, and empowerment. Those are the values I've never moved away from. Anyone that does business with us at Yalari has to have the same values. If they don't marry up, you won't do business with us. We have a Yalari brand, and that's what it stands for: compassion, openness, respect, resilience, inclusiveness, and excellence.

What have you observed in the nonprofit landscape in Australia, and how has it evolved since you've been involved with Yalari?

When we first started Yalari, I went all around Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, just telling my story over and over. When we first started, people would ask if this was another stolen generation. I told them no, this is a choice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families to decide whether they want their children away for forty weeks of the year at a boarding school.

For the first time in their lives, some families now have a choice of whether they want their children educated at home. I also say that these children are not any less Indigenous just because they go to a boarding school.

This is advice that I'd give to other nonprofits or people wanting to start an organisation. Don't ever lose sight of the bigger vision of why you set your company or your idea up. There are moments where you give up, but you have to come back to it.

That was something one old Aboriginal man said to me years ago, when I was out in Central Australia. He said, “Boy, you can rest, but don't stop, because you're doing good work.” That's what we need to do.

I've got Yalari tatted on my left forearm, and I've got “never give up” on my right forearm. I can tell you, there are moments when we operated under the radar, and I was happy about that. But when you get accolades and awards, people know who you are. I told my staff that our success is a two-edged sword. You can fall on your sword as well.

We have to be humble and kind in everything that we're doing. It's the little one percent that you have to keep doing each and every day to keep improving your service. I learned a long time ago that the most important thing to any person is their name.

When I'm out in business, being served at a shop, or at the counter of Virgin or Qantas, there’ll be someone at the desk and I ask how they’re going and call them by their first name. My wife Llew says I always get the best seats. It’s because I always treat people nicely and say their name. It's a simple little thing.

A lot of my children do it too because you treat people how you want to be treated. Don't get me wrong, I can read body language. I can pick up on a lot even before people start talking. From a business point of view, I've always wanted to be the bigger person in it.

To other nonprofit leaders beginning their journey, stay true to your vision. Stay true to who you are. Be the best version of yourself each and every day because the person you're looking at in the mirror in the morning is the same person you've got to look at in the mirror at night. You have to stand by your decisions.

Another thing for us is resilience. In 2012, we lost everything in a fire. I cried out to God. I live in Mount Tamborine, and I ran down the hill and when I started walking back up, I was crying. I screamed out to God, saying, “Why did you do this to us? We're good people. We're doing good in this world. Why'd you do this to us?”

A little voice on my shoulder says, “It's all right. Look beyond the fire. Look to the horizon, because that's where the answer is. That's where you're going.” That was a driver for me.

I'm a big man on quotes. There was a quote by Martin Luther King during that period that lifted me up by the bootstraps. He says, “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge and controversy.” There have been moments where that has kept me going. When I faced challenges, I’d just say next, and call for the next one.

It's the same when I was telling my story out in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. I'd ring back and say how they didn't want to fund us just yet, but instead I started saying, “next, don't worry me.”

I started my formal grammar school journey in 1980, forty-five years ago. I went back for my forty-year reunion with my brothers last year. Throughout those reunions we've stuck by each other.

If you're setting out to make your own business in the nonprofit sector, find a quote that picks you up when things aren't going so well for you. You should also find a quote to pick you up when things are going great. The journey is about being the best version of yourself each and every day.

With the hurdles you've come up against, you’ve ultimately grown stronger because of them in pushing on to create that change.

Definitely. We've come up to twenty years now too, but our bigger vision in the social enterprise space is about us. We want to be self-sustainable. I'm asking our friends, supporters, and businesses to stick with us on our journey to be self-sustainable.

I'm in the middle of setting up a campground in Central Australia. We've been doing orientation camps for year seven and year eight, and then in year nine, we take our children from Alice Springs to Uluru each year. We've been doing this organically and we’d invite families to come on our year nine camp. Two years ago, I said to my chairman, Bruce Davidson, let's invite some of our friends and supporters to a camp with Yalari and let's call it Yalari Yarns.

That's what we're doing; sitting around the campfire having a yarn and a big pot of tea. That's instrumental. Frequently, I have a cup of tea with my mom. That was one part, and then the other was to sit down have a yarn. We turned that into a business idea where I strategically took two corporates with us last year on our camp. We got some seed funding to start our enterprise in Yalari.

I've got dirt coming to be delivered in the next two weeks in Alice Springs. We're setting up a campground that is going to be the foundation for us to do work out in Central Australia, which is one of the ten to twelve enterprises that I want to have for Yalari. The bigger picture for us is to have multiple social enterprises that produce a hundred thousand dollars of profit for our foundation, which is the Mary Bordel Endowment Fund.

Mary was our chairman who passed away a couple of years ago due to brain cancer. We named the foundation after her. We want to have funds coming into the foundation from our enterprises, which will set us up to be sustainable in the next ten years.

We’re not moving away from our core business. We will always have our Rosemary Bishop scholarships. Every child that comes to Yalari is on the Rosemary Bishop scholarship. Mrs Bishop's legacy lives on in the lives of every child that comes to Yalari.

Her legacy lives with me each and every day. If I die tomorrow, the legacy of Yalari still continues. Not because of me, but because of the people that believed in what we can do together as Australians, to make a difference in the lives of another child.

What inspiring projects, initiatives, or organisations have you come across creating some great positive social change?

We're wanting to work with Indigenous young leaders in Central Australia. There's an organisation called Taarna, run by Bobby Abbott and his family. We want to uplift the leadership development in Central Australia with our alumni.

We've got some organisations like Gidgee Healing in Mount Isa that we want to partner with in regards to holistic healing for our young adults and children. It's about working in partnership with other organisations in this space, like Youth Enterprise Trust, who've got some land that we can access.

I also don't just want to stay in this Indigenous space.

There's a lot of good people out there doing good in this world. There are good practices already going on; we don't have to reinvent the wheel. If we partner with like-minded people with the same value set as us, we don't have to do all the heavy lifting.

Another one is the Australian Army. I've got a program called Warrior Spirit where, a brigadier friend of mine, Michael Bond, put together a Navy SEALs type of program for me. It’s seven days of resilience building and mental toughness. We've got a partnership with Enoggera Barracks, and we do Warrior Spirit with them.

We've got plenty of partners around there, and I want to work with other organisations who are doing good. The biggest message I have after our twenty years is about collaboration and gratefulness because I want to do business with people that are doing good. I have a no dickheads policy.

I apologise if I offend anybody, but I will not waste my time with people that are going to waste my time. That has been a mantra for me ever since I was a little boy. For me, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

I've got a meeting with the state government coming up to talk to them about setting up a business and entrepreneurial hub for Yalari. I want to set up a sustainable model where we can partner with Indigenous people that want to go into business. I've called it Ipreneur or YBUB. I call my wife bub, so it's Yalari Bub, Yalari Business Hub.

Leadership development is where our biggest number of alumni are right now. We have a lot a support there because we've now got two hundred and sixty children at twenty boarding schools around Australia, and six hundred and thirty alumni. I've got two alumni that are now on our Yalari board.

We've invested in their leadership because I want to hand Yalari over to them in the future. They are the ones who’ll take the story on.

The long-term sustainable model for us is partnering with like-minded individuals to make a difference together. That's what we're doing and we will never move away from that.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

One book I'm reading right now is called Wabi Sabi. It's about Japanese wisdom and the experiences of life, not the material things in this world. It's about having a balance between the physical, spiritual, mental, emotional, financial, social, cultural, and educational aspects of life.

I've read a lot of books by Robin Sharma, like The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. They're great books. I'm a big reader of autobiographies.

There's a quote by Madiba that says education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world. I'd like to think that Yalari is a weapon we can use to change Australia. We can change the narrative in this country just by being good Australians.

Yalari is in the business of changing hearts, changing minds, changing stereotypes, but also healing hearts, healing minds, and pushing away the stereotypes. The only reason there are stereotypes in this country is because we allow it, but we can start to change the narrative.

I say this to everybody that's involved with us; I don't care whether you're black, white, brindle, purple, or corrugated. I just want to know that you're a true fella or a true woman, and that's it. Full stop.

To everyone, believe in yourself and stay true to your values. Dreams are there to be achieved, and if you get knocked down, you've got to get back up and stay up.