Grace Tame: "It's very important to me that everyone is included in the conversation."

As an advocate for fellow survivors of child sexual abuse, a crime which affects one in six boys and one in four girls, I don't claim to be an expert on gendered issues. This detail is often missed in the media.

It's very important to me that everyone is included in the conversation, and that we can all ask questions without fear of shame or exclusion, which is why campaigns like Her Circle are crucial. Her Circle is about supporting women to claim their fair share of resources, opportunities and decision-making power in order to create lasting change - for herself and for Her Circle.

CARE reports that when a woman has the opportunity to escape poverty, she brings at least four others with her. You may call this 'the multiplier effect', 'the ripple effect', 'the domino effect' or 'paying it forward'.

However you wish to conceptualise it, genuinely investing in individuals - especially women - always positively impacts the community as a whole, notably children, who are our future.

People living in poverty, or any kind of hardship, wherever they were born in the world, usually don't have the luxury to do much else besides survive. As clinical psychologist and Nyamal woman, Dr Tracy Westerman, brilliantly articulated recently in response to the federal government's reactive reinstatement of alcohol restrictions in Alice Springs, "you can't humiliate people out of addiction".

Similarly, we can't shame people out of circumstances they were born into, have fallen into, nor abuses they have witnessed or had perpetrated against them. For many people to even reach the baseline, they have to fight odds that have been unjustly stacked against them since day one, through systems, circumstances, or all of the above.

Westerman also notes chaos as a vital, natural part of change. We have to be prepared to get uncomfortable if we genuinely want to confront hard situations.

Poverty is usually a symptom of a much larger cause that has resulted from a number of overlapping factors. To quote Debbie Kilroy, the CEO of Sisters Inside Inc., "the way we unpack and alleviate poverty is about local community".

Sisters Inside Inc., is a nonprofit based in Queensland who support criminalised women who are disproportionately punished due to poverty-related and survival crimes, such as petty or bail-related offences. The organisation is committed to investing in the lives of individuals by offering practical solutions, such as paying women's fines and rent, providing them with support and care, and investing their education.

CEO Debbie Kilroy consented for me to share this story of Arilla*, a young Aboriginal girl whose mother was criminalised when she was 12, meaning she had to look after her seven siblings.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Sisters Inside supported Arilla in finishing high school, attending university, and invested in her passion of art. They also found her an apartment close by and paid for her rent. Eventually her mother was released from prison and Arilla graduated. As a result of Arilla's education, Arilla's siblings became inspired to follow their sister's lead. They are not only attending school, but graduating. Her mother has not been back to jail. The act of paying rent in this example was more than just paying rent, it was light that lit up an entire family.

Further to this, CARE Australia reports indicate that every additional year a woman spends in school increases her earning potential by 20 per cent. That is a powerful multiplier.

My mother has eight sisters, four full and four half-sisters. She is right in the middle of them. After my grandfather left, when she was about 10, in 1975, my grandmother raised the first five on a secretary's wage.

Mum remembers not being able to afford dog food and items of furniture being repossessed. Nan would have two tonnes of wood delivered and the girls would chop and stack it. My aunt Wendy would cook, and Aunt Jenny - who was a gymnast - did the guttering.

Although mum didn't go to university - only her eldest sister did - she worked from eighth grade onwards in a raft of jobs; as a grocer's assistant, right hand to a knitwear designer, blackjack dealer, recruitment officer and news anchor. She just retired after three solid years of youth work, caring for children aged 12-18 whose parents have relinquished responsibility to the government.

Thanks to Mum, I can sew by hand and on a machine, strip wallpaper, paint, draw, knit, bake, chop wood, light a fire, and pitch a tent. I didn't go to university either, instead I attended a community college for two years, but education in all its forms was something I was raised to value, and if I ever needed help with my homework, it was usually Mum who helped me. She was also the one who paid for my high school fees because she wanted to give me the opportunities she didn't have growing up.

Like my mother, her mother and I, my late paternal working class grandmother had no university education, but forged her own opportunities and independence. Believe it or not, her last name was Free before she became a Tame, and free she was. She passed her tenacity, thirst for knowledge, quick and dry wit down to me. "Were you born in a tent?!," she'd yell after me from the raw concrete slab landing, as I careered into the back yard, far too excited about playing in the outside world to notice I'd left the door wide open.

Lived experience can't be synthesised, mimicked or taught. We can't understand everything in life, especially in the shoes of others, but we can always offer our compassion, respect and support and pay it forward. We have to be prepared to get uncomfortable; we have to be prepared to face ourselves to make change.

Genuinely investing in individuals positively impacts the community as a whole - in doing so, we can create this multiplier effect worldwide. CARE's Her Circle Campaign recognises this and it is why I am proud to be its Ambassador.

There is nothing more empowering than empowering others.

*Arilla is the name that has been assigned to this piece to maintain anonymity