Lisa McMurray
2021 Cohort
Pronouns: she/her
Lisa is advocating for Global South communities to own the rights to their carbon and nature-based solutions, instead of these new industries being another neo-colonial extractive expression.
Based on Gadigal Country, Lisa is Program Development Manager at the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation. Lisa has over 25 years NGO social change experience redressing inequity and injustice caused from neo-colonialism and settler-colonialism within the Indo-Pacific region and Australia. Lisa is passionate about strengths-based approaches and the brokering of the right people and partnerships to leverage collective skills for cultural revitalisation, sovereignty, self-determination, land repair and climate change solutions. Lisa has co-led NGO collaborative community development initiatives in PNG, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Cook Islands, Timor Leste, India, Malawi and Australia and is an Atlantic Fellow with the following academic qualifications: a Master’s in Social Change Leadership and a Master’s in International Social Development with a thesis titled ‘Renewable Electrification in the Solomon Islands – a Panacea for Urban Migration’.
“I aspire to see self-determination and sovereignty expressed through Indigenous-led land management, such as carbon and cultural fire initiatives that leverage existing strengths and knowledges to meet community development aspirations.”
Social change work
In her capacity as a staff member of Aboriginal Carbon Foundation, Lisa works with First Nations partners in Australia, Timor and Fiji to develop First Nations led and owned carbon and/or cultural fire initiatives and nature-based solutions. An important component of this work is facilitating a self-determining community development planning process that identifies existing strengths, talent, resources and skills to leverage in the meeting of community aspirations.What AFSE changed
AFSE provided Lisa with the opportunity, to explore, in depth, historical policy and theoretical frameworks such as settler-colonialism and postcolonialism. Armed with this scholarly knowledge, she feels better equipped, as a community development practitioner to advocate for Indigenous-led solutions and to refute dominant paradigms that continue to disempower Indigenous peoples.