Shane Webster

2019 Cohort

Shane is supporting First Nations to become digitally empowered, enabling them to prosper from the new digital economy.

Shane has Torres Strait Islander, Singaporean, and New Zealand ancestry, and is the General Manager of Jawun in Kaurna Country, Adelaide, South Australia.

He has contributed to significant legislative and policy reforms such as the South Australian Constitutional amendment to recognize Aboriginal custodianship of lands and waters, and the introduction of South Australia’s first Aboriginal Business Procurement policy. In 2021, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer at Jawun.

“The future will position First Nations people to participate in the new economy where businesses are built on artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics.”

Social change project

Since completing his AFSE Fellowship, he has led the design and implementation of a digital network connecting 12 Indigenous regions, supporting cross-regional collaboration as well as connecting them with the best and brightest from corporates and the Australian government.

What AFSE changed

It gave him the opportunity to meet and collaborate with Fellows who have had a transformative impact on how he approaches systemic change. He says it's still early days, however, and the real social impact will come as Senior Fellows grow their network with future cohorts and collaborate to develop project ideas through to implementation.

Next steps

The Fellowship has allowed him to reflect on and experiment with major social change ideas and projects. In doing that he's come to see a need to build digital capacity within the organisations he works with, which leads him to focus his ongoing Fellowship social change project on Indigenous digital empowerment.