[Extract] The need for health and social programs in the context of Indigenous Australia to be grounded in rigorous evidence is emphasised by government funding bodies. Yet many evidence based programs are developed in a cultural context very different to that of Indigenous Australians. This is the situation in the case of the Nurse Family Partnership program (NFP), developed in the United States but implemented to address the needs of Indigenous Australians through the Australian Nurse-Family Partnership Program (ANFPP). One significant difference between the NFP and the ANFPP lies in the development of an Indigenous Family Partnership worker (FPW) to work with program nurses, the workforce on which the NFP is exclusively centered in the United States. Despite the challenges associated with the transferability of a program from one social context to another, and need for collaborative practice between workers with often very different personal and professional backgrounds, there is little literature available to assist such processes. In 2008, the Empowerment Research Program team (ERP), a collaboration between James Cook University School of Indigenous Australian Studies and University of Queensland researchers, were invited to pilot the 'Empowerment and Change' short course and other related follow up strategies as tools to help to contextualise the Australian Nurse-Family Partnership Program (ANFPP) into Indigenous Australian settings and build collaborative practice. This report documents and reflects on the pilot strategies and the challenges and opportunities involved
