The Town Camp movement was catalysed by the displacement of people from their traditional lands and steadily built momentum from early 1974 with the incorporation of the first Town Camp Housing Associations. The Associations and Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation (TCAC) were formed by Town Campers to support their efforts to gain access to land, housing, water, electricity, municipal services, community services and to address the shared experience of disadvantage. TCAC was incorporated in 1979 as a service provider and umbrella organisation for the Town Camp Housing Associations, and these associations are the corporate members of the Council. Tangentyere is an Arrernte word meaning ‘Working Together'.

40 years on and we are a strong Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation (ACCO) delivering human services and social enterprise activities for the benefit of Aboriginal people from Central Australia in the Northern Territory. We have 16 Town Camp corporate members and over 600 individual members. We offer service provision to more than 270 individual households in the Alice Springs Town Camps and in excess of 10,000 people from a region that covers approximately 873,894 square kilometres having strong cultural links into remote Central Australia.

Our leadership has always maintained the significance of self-determination of Town Campers through re- empowerment and community control over their own affairs. In the last decade, we have actively decentralised services through increased numbers of Community Hubs and prioritised the development of innovative programs that have targeted specific issues that are of major concern to Town Campers. We have also incubated several small social enterprises, that exist on their own as stand alone operations focusing on Aboriginal leadership and progress in their varied activities. It is with this impetus that we executed an agreement with the Territory Government in 2019 to further support the local decision-making of Town Campers.