What a great turn out at the 2025 June Quarterly Forum today with 75 Centre members joining from across Australia. 

Co-Directors Prof Victoria Palmer and Prof Michelle Banfield updated attendees on ALIVE National Centre activities since the last quarter (including the Symposium in March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xykK07m7FY8,  release of the Phase 3 Consensus Statements: https://simplebooklet.com/phase3consensusstatementsthemiddlehorizon2025#page=1, numerous publications: https://alivenetwork.com.au/our-research/publications/),  and presented on the new Centre grant announced in April: Casting the Net for What Matters Consortium for Equitable Wellbeing and Mental Health System Transformation. 

Candice Peart and Kushagra Rathore then presented on A Part of the Crowd. A great overview on the background of this important project on youth loneliness, the role of the youth lived experience advisory group, and the depth of the heartfelt stories shared with them. We look forward to hearing about the next steps.

A warm thank you to everyone who joined!

We’re also excited to share our logo for the Casting the Net for What Matters – The ALIVE National Centre Consortium for Equitable Wellbeing and Mental Health Systems Transformation​ with the artwork created by Muruwori Gumbaynggirr researcher Phillip Orcher.​ 

This piece was created in recognition of the newly awarded ALIVE National Centre Consortium for Equitable Wellbeing and Mental Health Systems Transformation: Casting the Net for What Matters. The piece honours an emerging national movement—one grounded in Aboriginal-led knowledge systems as the stepping stones for mental health transformation, lived-experience wisdom, and the restoration of wellbeing through cultural protective factors.​ At its heart, this piece is not static. It calls to be activated. Stepping in is an invitation to reflect, to listen, to notice what is and what warns. It is Bigaagarri, a Gumbaynggirr cultural protocol, an Aboriginal led process and practice to signal and guide to other local knowledges. The piece represents a collective breath for equitable wellbeing to be realised within communities and by communities.

The Consortium is a direct outcome from the Centre’s Call to Action (2024) Casting the Net for What Matters and for Whom to [re]form national mental health and wellbeing using Five Foundations and guided by nine actions for change. The Consortium will expand the ALIVE National Centre’s flagship projects that are shifting the narratives in what community-level prevention is, creating new models to address missed life years with priority populations and to deliver a holistically focused at-scale system of care. This Mental Health Research Grant 2024 Million Minds Mission Round $10M (AU) funding provides investment to continue to lead the sector in embedded lived-experience co-research models and ways to work in partnership with priority populations.

See the diagram below of what we are doing over the next five years.

​Read more about the ALIVE National Centre Consortium for Equitable Wellbeing and Mental Health Systems Transformation: Casting the Net for What Matters here.