Demonstrating how ‘things can be done radically differently’

Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg is the co-founder of racial and social justice organisation Hue, entirely run by people of colour. She is this week’s Changemaker.

Educator, facilitator and performer Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg is making noise in the community.

A queer, Chinese and Jewish woman of colour, Tuet-Rosenberg initially studied social work and psychology, which led to the completion of an honours thesis investigating how multiracial people of colour from multiple minority heritages engage with their ethnic identities.

She found a particular passion for peer-to-peer learning models and facilitation, informed by her background in education and youth empowerment, and previously worked as the director of training at racial and economic justice organisation, Democracy in Colour.

While there, Tuet-Rosenberg met Sonia Sofat and together they co-founded Hue, a social justice training and consultancy organisation run entirely by people of colour, which specialises in anti-racism programs for organisations, schools and community groups.

Tuet-Rosenberg also works as an organiser for a small collective called Here, Queer and Jewish Australia and previously served two terms on the QTIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color) board commitee at Switchboard, a peer-driven NFP providing support services for the LGBTIQA+ community and allies.

In this week’s Changemaker, Tuet-Rosenberg explains the importance of serving her community and why she’s looking to the past to inform her legacy.

Did you always want to work in the for-purpose space?

I have always been passionate about justice, and knew that I wanted to do values-aligned work, however what that meant evolved gradually and I certainly didn’t anticipate I would be running an organisation!

When I studied social work, I quickly discovered that the work in that sector was not what I was looking for. I knew I wanted to be involved in creating systemic change, not just working within the confines of the system or worse, being the arbiter of systemic violence in other marginalised people’s lives. I found quickly that much of social work didn’t genuinely embody the values it espoused and didn’t reflect the reality of my communities’ experiences. 

I spent my days at my placement at Centrelink seeing people denied basic human resources, while my down time was spent collecting and redistributing food to anyone who needed it in my communities. It was clear to me that resourcing my community needed to be my priority. 

What led you to co-founding Hue?

When I entered the social change and for-purpose space, the space that I expected to be a haven or hub for people like me, with values like mine, I found it to be incredibly racist. I found I was constantly challenging microaggressions, at the bottom of a hierarchy with all white leadership, delivering programs that lacked understanding of how the systems we’re a part of impact our communities.

Co-founding Hue allowed us to create an environment to do this work in a way that aligned with our values. We wanted to provide anti-racism education that addressed the root causes of discrimination and oppression, that didn’t shy away from tough topics, that engaged people meaningfully in conversation and honoured the intersectionality of our experiences. 

We wanted this work to be led by people of colour who were properly paid for their time and who could access the culturally appropriate mental health support that’s needed to sustain this work. We also wanted to create something grounded in community and the grassroots, and that prioritised lived experience as a genuine form of expertise. 

What does your work environment look like?

At Hue, despite being a business, our approach and values are deeply anti-capitalist (this comes with the territory of being meaningfully anti-racist and valuing decolonial frameworks!). This permeates through so many aspects of our ways of working. 

It means challenging ‘hustle’ or ‘grind’ culture, ensuring our workloads are realistic and spacious, so people don’t feel stressed or burnt out. Sonia and I work eight-day and seven-day fortnights respectively. These are our ‘full time’ workloads, and we’ve chosen schedules that fit meaningfully into our lives, dropping the ‘sense of urgency’ that says everything must be done right now and being flexible about timelines and the realities of our lives. 

It should be a given, but treating our team as full people, with communities, commitments, goals, needs and boundaries, and valuing lived experience and everything that comes with that. We have genuinely flexible working arrangements from all our staff, and leave available for cultural times, gender affirmation, community work, parenting commitments, trauma and burn out and more. 

Over two years, we have grown from a team of two to a team of six, but our goal has never been growth. Rather than participating in the myth of infinite and unchecked growth that has contributed to the exploitation of our labour, and First Nations lands, our focus is on sustainability for our team and for our communities.

What is your proudest achievement?

My proudest achievement has been demonstrating that things can be done radically differently. 

At Hue, we believe in wealth redistribution – not charity. In our first year we were able to not only build and pay our team, but we redistributed $56,000 straight into the pockets of community members – individuals in crisis, leaving violent situations, fundraising for surgeries or bond and rental payments. A significant portion of this was part of our pay the rent commitment, and went directly to First Nations peoples and collectives. 

There is no arduous application process or gatekeeping, no philanthropist donors, just a direct redistribution of wealth and mutual aid. We have meaningful boundaries and we stick to them. We’ve learnt that saying no and being clear about our expectations and what people can expect from us keeps us healthy and intact, as well as those we work with.

Relationships are at the root of everything we do. We recognise our position in the ecosystem of people and organisations doing this work, and we don’t take shortcuts. We recognise that meaningful trust building takes time, and we’ve spent years developing our relationships in the community and showing up. These relationships are genuinely reciprocal, and the ways our communities have shown up for us and supported us at Hue is inextricable from our success.

All of these decisions are approaches we were told were not possible for an organisation – we must be stressed, tired, overworked and operate from a mindset of scarcity to survive. I am incredibly proud of how we’ve been able to thrive when we’ve genuinely embodied our values. 

What are some of the social justice challenges being faced by the not-for-profit sector?

To me, the biggest challenge facing the social justice sector, is the under-resourcing of initiatives led by the communities most affected, and the absence of community members in the bigger and more resourced organisations. This has been an issue across the NFP sector since its conception. 

You’re more likely to see someone in a leadership position of a social service organisation with a degree in social science specialising in homelessness from a prestigious university, than someone with lived experience of homelessness. You often find very few disabled staff at organisations that claim to advocate for people with disabilities. First Nations climate justice initiatives are often undermined or ignored while resources are poured into white-led climate initiatives. 

The reluctance to let people who are most directly impacted by these systems be the ones to lead the solutions means that the social sector will always be missing crucial information. This creates a separation between communities and the resources that are intended to support them, and creates power hierarchies that replicate the ones that have caused these injustices and inequalities in the first place. The social sector needs to reckon with their leadership and put their resources and power directly into the hands of the communities most impacted. 

What do you do when you’re not at work?

Outside of my work I am mostly spending time with my communities, attending community events, performances, actions and celebrations. Spending time with the people in my life is really important to me. 

As facilitating and holding space for so many people can be exhausting, silliness and humour are a big part of my personal life. You’ll find me with my partner and friends, sitting out on our balcony listening to records and chatting absolute garbage, or with my family doing our “Jewish geography”.

What do you want your legacy to look like?

Legacies are an interesting idea to me. I am the legacy of many people who came before me. My family and their decisions and ability to escape from persecution and poverty, the strong justice centred values of my family and our ancestors cultural beliefs, both on my Jewish and Muslim sides. 

I embody the legacies of the queer people of colour who have come before me and fought for our rights. I benefit from the legacies of custodianship and caretaking by Traditional Owners of the lands I’ve lived and worked on for most of my life. 

While I don’t need any individual achievement or success to be attributed to me as my legacy, I hope to have contributed and built upon the legacies of those who came before me, and created more accessible pathways for the people who will come after me too. 

Pro Bono Australia is the media partner for the Purpose Conference, held in Sydney on the 19th and 20th of October. Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg is a speaker.