🎉 Big News! 🎉

The ALIVE National Centre is thrilled to announce being funded until 2030 to lead the Casting the Net for What Matters Consortium for equitable wellbeing and mental health system transformation. This major achievement reflects the collective efforts of all members of the ALIVE National Centre networks and research teams across mental health, suicide prevention and social and emotional wellbeing research. It builds on the activities and ongoing support from the Co-Design Living Labs Network, the Implementation and Translation Network and the Next Generation Researcher Network and the Lived-Experience Research Collective members and co-leads.

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.

For the next five years we will:

• Continue to provide a national co-designed roadmap for mental health research translation with pathways forming about the effective mechanisms and protective factors in culturally safe, community prevention (led by partners Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council); priorities for social and emotional well-being of young males and men (led by Prof James Smith); physical health needs of refugee and new arrivals (led by Prof Simon Rosenbaum), pathways of young migrants and the justice system (led by Prof Jioji Ravulo); and priorities for children and parents living with mental ill-health (led by Darryl Maybery and Andrea Reupert).
• Embed responses to the roadmap priorities within the Centre, sectoral and policy level research and develop collective strategies in more than 35 communities to respond to structural inequalities across communities by implementing community level prevention across the life course.
• Support for the implementation of four Demonstration Projects addressing inequalities in health, education, housing and employment with a widening of the net to international links with the WHO Collaborating Centre for Migrants’ Involvement in Health Research (Prof Anne MacFarlane and Prof Helen Phelan) and with the IMPACT Centre (Prof Jon Glasby and Prof Robin Miller) based in UK.
• Advance the implementation of system wide frameworks to support the transition to healing oriented care, with strong data sovereignty frameworks and lived experience measurement frameworks that can account for harms of colonisation, racism, trauma, stigma and violence in communities.

We are honoured to lead and implement the Consortium vision into 2030. We hope you join us in celebrating and taking forward the vision for equitable wellbeing and mental health systems transformation.