A Community Employment what?

Its suddenly dawned on me - at Day Six in Darwin, and the fourth post here, no less - that I haven't even defined what a Community Employment Broker is and does.
Using the formal and very, very public service definition, a Community Employment Broker "co-ordinates the delivery of employment-related DEEWR services within a designated community so that all job seekers with a participation requirement are engaged in an activity."
Got all that? It's probably won't make much sense if you're from outside the public service, and even less so if you're outside the social security/employment services portfolios.
In simple terms, a Community Employment Broker works with a remote Indigenous Community to help people find training, work experience and, hopefully, long-term employment and social participation.
The role was created as part of the Australian Government's Northern Territory Emergency Response in late 2007, and aims to provide local support for local people. The big difference between a Community Employment Broker and traditional (Government) roles is that the Broker lives in the community in which they're working.
By actively living in a remote community, a Community Employment Broker helps overcome the 'fly in, fly out' syndrome, allowing for a longer-term approach to be taken, and providing a accurate, current and 'on the ground' perspective.
Obviously, as every Indigenous community is different, there's no typical day for a Community Employment Broker, but most days are spent meeting with community members and representative groups, employment and training providers, other Government agencies and anyone else involved in employment-related business.
In between that, there's a stack of reporting and a lot of travel - in my case, 490 kilometres to the nearest town.

Tools of the trade

Day three, and the tools of the trade arrive. See above, and don't forget that the brown patterned thing underneath all that stuff is a queen-sized bed.
For the detail and techno geeks out there, the standard (and yes, there are variants depending on your specific deployment) issue consists of (clockwise from centre):
- 3 plastic sleeves of stationery
- Panasonic Toughbook
- Telstra 3G modem (works great)
- Olympus waterproof digicam
- diary and first stack of paperwork
- Telstra 3G phone
- cables and chargers for everything
- second stack of paperwork
- reference folders (x3 - contain lego, policy, guidelines, etc.)
- Brother laser printer
- spare cartridge for said laser printer
- ream of A4 paper (x2)
- Iridium sat phone ($10.50 per minute - and you thought your phone was pricey)
- Apple 80gb iPod (backup to Toughbook and podcast updates)

Worse still is that what you're seeing is only a relatively small part of the overall kit. On top of all that, there's more paperwork, a huuuge first-aid kit and a 4WD to put it all in. And don't even ask about that because it has a spare for everything - including the spare.

Legal Mumbo Jumbo...

Just a quick note to remind y'all that this blog doesn't reflect the views of the NTER, DEEWR, the Australian Government or anyone else beyond myself. I haven't sought clearance from the Departmental legal-eagles to run it as it's purely personal. Please help me keep it that way. It's not listed in the Blogger directory, and I've disabled search engine crawling, so it shouldn't show up in Google or any other major directories. In fact, if you're reading this, it's because I've sent you the URL directly - I'm happy for you to forward it on if you think relevant, but do use discretion, and keep in mind the comments above.

T minus twenty-four hours...

Given that I'm flying out at 6am on Sunday morning - and it's now just gone 11pm Friday - I thought I'd better start thinking about what I'm taking up north...
For those who haven't heard, I'll be spending the next six months or so working as a Community Employment Broker for remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory (as part of the Australian Government's Emergency Intervention Taskforce).
It's an opportunity I've been considering since the Taskforce was created last year, and now, thanks to my ever-accommodating partner Julia, a generous boss and a six-month deployment timeframe, I get to experience it first hand (although I won't know where exactly I'm being deployed until early March).
In the meantime, I've got less than 24 hours to work out what I'll take with me. See above for what I've got so far.
It may look like a lot, but it ain't much when you consider that I'll need gear for everyday wear, important-day wear and labouring wear... all during the wet season, too, when the humidity pushes 100% on the cool days.
Of course, beyond that, I'm also planning to sneak up my bike, although I'm not quite sure how I'll manage to hide that from the Head Honchos.