The Indigenous Desert Alliance (IDA) is an Indigenous controlled, member based organisation that plays a vital role in 'Keeping the Desert Connected' and building resilience for desert ranger programs.
We are focused on working with our members and partners to ensure that Indigenous people are enabled to collaboratively manage Australia’s desert country and through this, to realise their social, cultural, environmental and economic aspirations.
We do this through:
- facilitating opportunities for Indigenous land managers across the desert to come together to speak with one voice for desert country
- strengthening connections between desert groups through maintaining a vibrant information sharing and ranger team exchange network
- providing capacity strengthening support for rangers and their organisations to enhance the outcomes for the Indigenous land management sector in the desert
- managing critical landscape scale collaborative projects with our members across the desert
Our Story
The first meeting of groups that are now part of the IDA membership happened in 2014 at the World Parks Congress in Sydney. Many desert ranger groups travelled to be a part of this event and we all seized on the opportunity to come together and to get to know each other better. At that meeting, a natural 'alliance of friends' was born. We kept in contact and in 2015 we came together again in Perth WA to continue to the conversation and start thinking of ways to formalise our meeting into a way of working together across borders. So began the development of the IDA network and many collaborations, events, workshops and good times have been had since. We have come a long way from that meeting in 2014 but what made it work then still makes it work today, the strength of connection between desert rangers and the desire to work together.
Where we come from
