We throw around words like we mean them every single day, yet rarely do we stop to think about whether we are able to truly carry their weight.

Words like Culture, Creativity and Resilience act like mastheads for legitimacy; words like Belonging, Inclusion and Leadership seem like validations of some kind.

They feel good to say, they even have that wonderful—lovely—halo effect on us, as their pre-loaded meaning shines upon us. Making us look, and feel smart. Intelligent. Worldly and well-read.

It's rare to experience these in their truest sense and absorb their meaning; and truly feel their meaning in an act—no—a lifelong practice of learning about their timelessness.

Recently, my family and I were invited to join in a celebration of culture and independence. Seeing a community's young people, its elders, allies, supporters and partners, come together in a show of creativity, of legacy and leadership, is to experience those very human, philosophical words in all their glory.

We watched children dance next to their grandmothers, as their grandfathers sang along to songs of identity, celebration and place. It was wonderful. A profound demonstration of the creativity, power and resilience of a 3,000 year old culture.

We were at the Victorian Kiribati Independence Day celebrations, and as I watched my youngest daughter join in the dancing, I realised how little I knew compared to how much I felt.

About the size and shape of the places and communities that feel like home and those that we actually call home.

About how creativity transcends all kinds of hurdles, and vast seas, to connect us.

About what leadership truly looks like as an act of communal stewardship, not a baton passed from one generation to another; stewardship is not that simple. But rather, a continuous dance where young people slowly learn the steps, movements and gestures from their elders and one another, and reinvent and re-imagine them ever so slightly over time in a messy but funny, sometimes hilarious but always harmonious dance.

Stewardship can be a little chaotic like that. There is a lovely humanness about it, beyond baton-passing.

In environments like that—500 people, music, dance and lots of chatter—my naturally introverted personality sits back and watches. Soaking the nature of everything in. My curious, creative mind asks of me questions and I naturally draw comparisons with my own culture — something I too love to share with others so they can come to an understanding that sits beyond the superficial.

Thirty-three islands and atolls spread across the central Pacific, gained independence from Britain on 12 July 1979.

Kiribati sits less than two meters above sea level across these thirty-three atolls, with almost no high ground to fall back on. Climate scientists expect it could become uninhabitable by 2050.

That's in less than 25 years from now.

Two Kiribati islands have already vanished as rising sea levels pushed saltwater into the soil and the freshwater its people drink and grew food from.

In 2014, the Kiribati government bought land in Fiji.

Just in case.

Cultural literacy asks much of us. Much more than the superficial — more than simply holding the baton, but knowing where it came from, the stories held within its scars and the potential written for its future.

Creativity too, asks us to understand beyond the superficial—to empathise—and good leadership asks of us to consider the people who will sit underneath the trees we plant today. People we may never meet or see.

We've all worked in organisations that have called themselves inclusive. The language of diversity printed on the wall to allow us to talk about belonging, as we should. But that's simply the cost of entry. The easy part. Like passing a baton over.

We can build belonging with warmth and good intentions, a welcome and invitation that actually means it. Cultural literacy asks more. It asks us to actually know something, understand its meaning and impact.

Cultural literacy asks of us to know who made the baton we're holding in our hands, the lessons they learned, and what we're going to do to help that person who passed it to us, realise their aspirations for the future.

The Tongan scholar Epeli Hau'ofa argued that the Pacific is so much more than 'a scatter of tiny, isolated, dependent nations' — often referred to as "islands in a far sea" by non-Pacific Islanders. He argued that the Pacific Islands are a vast connected world with their own scale and sophistication, reduced to smallness only by the way outsiders chose to see it.

Through their own interpretive lens, rather than seeking cultural understanding, and developing their own cultural literacy.

This is not a Pacific problem, but an institutional one because we too often measure what we haven't taken the time to understand, and then we call that 'objective'.

This is where our collective obligation for stewardship lives.

In whether the people making decisions— and often its you and I—about and with a community, have bothered to learn that community's history well enough to be trusted with decisions about its future. An institution that welcomes people it hasn't taken the time to understand is practising hospitality, not stewardship.

Stewardship for future generations is a discipline of knowing who was here before you made the decision, what it costs they bore to create what you inherited, what your decision will cost the people who inherit it from you.

I watched the dancing and I held something beyond the joy of seeing my daughter and her two friends—two I-Kiribati girls she's known since she was a one year old—and I looked over at their parents, two dear friends and colleagues of mine which I've spent the last decade working alongside.

I held both joy and a sense of connection that crosses seas.

In that moment I realised that Kiribati's independence sits inside a difficult truth; that within the lifetime of children born in 2026, parts of that nation of islands in the Pacific, may not even be there. I could see that the people singing and dancing on the weekend knew this better than anyone and they were there to redefine what nationhood and culture looks like for them. Something that stretches far beyond the thirty-three atolls threatened by climate change, and spreads around the world in a vast Kiribati diaspora.

We often discuss the human potential of creativity, and I agree, creativity can and will change the world for the better, yet creativity with cultural literacy has the potential to dismantle many of the barriers we all face and change the world in far more equitable and inclusive ways.

Through the practice and understanding of culture, the sharing of language, the navigation of knowledge and wisdom, ceremony, humour and the playful humanity that dances, sings and swings children around in circles as they giggle, we can make decisions to slow the rising of the waters.

And if we accept that we need to do more than simply pass the baton, but take the time to develop our cultural literacy muscle as a precondition for better judgment, we'll be able to create for inclusion, design for belonging and build through a renewed understanding of one another.

I left the event with what may seem like small things.

Small things felt and small things sensed. Some a little more profound than others.

Yet, as I walked through the cold evening with my arms around my smiling daughter, I saw the immense power of culture in her eyes and I knew I was taking home something grand; something timeless.