The International Conference on Thinking, to be held in Naarm in July, will see a variety of speakers on the theme: "We are on the edge of what?"

The conference aims to help educators, business, and creative professionals to provoke, challenge and learn different forms of thinking and its application, and by doing so, creating new ideas and solving problems including those related to business and global issues.

One of the speakers will be Kuku-Yalanji man Jeremy Donovan, an artist, musician, speaker and consultant, whose own experience has played a part in his work helping young Indigenous men at risk, by teaching and encouraging them to embrace their culture to help search for their identity and overcome adversity.

His artwork has been published by Nescafé in 2017 and featured on their coffee tins and distributed nationally, while as a respected keynote speaker, Mr Donovan won the Australian speaker of the year in 2011.

He is the Healing Foundation's Champion, and an ambassador for the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation.

Mr Donovan told National Indigenous Times he would be using the platform to talk about the "crisis" of which the nation is on the precipice.

"Right now, we have systemic issues within our out-of-home-care system — looking after young kids that are out of control," he said.

"We have broken families; we have a domestic violence crisis - where too many women are losing their life at the hands of broken men - and we are on the edge of a crisis with masculinity."

Noting the challenge of violence, which has become a forefront in politics and in the media, Mr Donovan said: "I certainly believe that it is only men [who] are doing the damage, and it is men that are responsible for creating the change."

On the topic of men at risk, Mr Donovan said most of his life had been in that field - at one end of the equation or the other.

He said that 25 years on from being incarcerated as a teenager himself, much of the narrative has remained the same, noting any solution to crime is "build more prisons; build bigger youth detention centres".

"The tragedy of this incarceration nation is that incarcerating people is a very big, lucrative business, and what we're not reinvesting into, is reinvesting into lives," Mr Donovan said.

He argued people needed to get out of the way of "our own prejudices," and start seeing the "absolute possibility in a young person, whether male or female, see the possibility and not the problem".

"Because the moment someone invested hope in me, it changed my narrative, and it changed the outcome of my destination," Mr Donovan said.

The International Conference on Thinking will be held in Naarm from July 7-11. A full list of speakers and registrations can be found online.