Noongar Mia Bidee
Noongar Housing Pathways
Noongar Mia Mia helps Aboriginal people living on Noongar country by providing a range of public and social housing options for eligible applicants.
Our core focus is housing provision, property management and tenancy support, setting the right foundations for eventual home ownership.
By forging solid pathways to a secure housing future, we support our tenants on their journey to economic prosperity. Securing housing for Aboriginal people and their families, we set the right socio-economic foundations to help create a healthier and empowered Aboriginal community.
Aboriginal owned and operated, Noongar Mia Mia is able to offer a unique cultural approach to housing provision, tenancy support and property management.
Mainstream services often fall flat because of a lack of cultural awareness, with many non-Aboriginal organisations simply not equipped with our deep understanding of culture.
A non-cultural approach tends to operate from a deficits-based (what’s wrong) approach. For the tenants, this can be seen as condescending.
Moreover, because of a painful history of interventions purporting to “protect” us, Aboriginal people often struggle to trust mainstream social services providers. In practice, most services in the past – no matter how well-meaning – have been tone-deaf or even harmful.
Instead, at Noongar Mia Mia, we look towards our community our community for what’s strong, not what’s wrong.
The results speak for themselves: Since 2000, we have grown steadily and today own or manage a combined housing stock of nearly over 80 homes, sleeping nearly 500 people every night.
Key to the success of Noongar Mia is our tenancy support and property management programs, helping tenants to meet tenancy obligations and stay housed.
Tenancy Support
In a nutshell, we help Aboriginal tenants to meet tenancy obligations and stay housed. We do this by delivering specialised, whole-of-person tenancy support, working closely with clients individually to understand the type of barriers they may face to secure a home and to keep their home.
This can include helping our clients to navigate the ecosystem of support services, managing referrals and providing personalised psychosocial support.
A trusted community organisation, Noongar Mia Mia’s tenancy support services are grounded in culture. As such, we identify and address risk factors often missed by other providers.
For example, we explain to tenants their ‘rights and responsibilities’, including Housing Standards co-designed with community Elders. We also address address risk factors that initially led to their experience of homelessness, so they are best positioned to exit homelessness permanently.
Tenancy support has proven to be critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring our tenants are supported to maintain their tenancy and wellbeing at a time of upheaval and crisis.
Property Management
Our approach to property management looks through an Aboriginal cultural lens. Our holistic approach is focused on the individual, and their wellbeing.
Unfortunately, in the mainstream market, most property managers tend to focus on the property, and not on the people living within the property. This can leave people feeling stressed and powerless in their own homes. Even worse, it places them at constant risk of eviction.
Eviction is enormously costly – not just for housing providers, but for society and, above all, for the homeless family. Yet by applying a caring, cultural approach to tenancy, we’ve proven that eviction is very much an avoidable outcome.
Our assistance is very hands-on and practical, including advice and support with home maintenance, cleaning and gardening.
“Noongar Mia Mia staff have been really understanding with our tenancy. We love our home but as elders we also struggle to do odd jobs around the House.
Now with the Tenancy Support Team on board they have helped us do our gardens and installed an air conditioner which were so grateful.
Having Noongars in the team makes it easy for us to talk to them without getting shame and they understand our culture and family obligations and can relate to us. Just want to say thankyou to all the staff at NMM we really appreciate you all!”