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We work across six key wellbeing domains to drive systemic change so decisions, funding, and services truly meet local needs. Our approach is community-led, data-informed, and partnership-driven, focused on better outcomes for children, young people, and families.
Hands Up Mallee is proud to be one of ten Stronger Places, Stronger People sites funded by the Department of Social Services.
The HUM Backbone Team has a reputation for being the experts in town when it comes to community consultation, particularly with youth, and the go-to when we need to know what the community thinks. This doesn’t necessarily mean asking HUM to do it, but HUM are the people that you might ask: how might I go about trying to understand community needs in that space?
Service provider
The Mildura area is a great place to live. We’re culturally diverse, with a large Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and 79 different migrant groups represented. We’re a thriving community of resilient, capable and creative people. But with the strengths come real challenges.
Out of 79 local government areas, we’re the 6th most disadvantaged in Victoria on the SEIFA Index. Compared to the rest of Victoria:
No one single policy, government department, organisation or program can solve the complex issues facing communities in the Mildura LGA. Instead, real change needs ongoing community input. The Australian government has recognised this too, and in 2019 established the Stronger Places, Stronger People initiative. This place-based, community-led initiative is funded by the federal, state and territory governments to break the cycle of disadvantage in ten key communities across Australia. Hands Up Mallee is the only Victorian site that’s part of this initiative, working to build thriving, resilient communities for generations to come.
This is why we do things differently. Using an evidence-based framework, we amplify community voices to be a key part of the decision-making process. We focus on children, young people and their families because this is what our community told us was important to them. It’s also the focus of the Stronger Places, Stronger People Initiative. We work with communities, service providers and government to create fairer, better ways to build positive, long-lasting outcomes.
Hands Up Mallee takes a place-based approach to co-design solutions for local issues, with the community’s voice at the heart of what we do. We combine this voice with data and research to come up with concrete actions to create a better community for children, young people and their families.
Hands Up Mallee is a community-led, place-based initiative that brings together community members, service providers, and government partners to collaborate over the long term to build a thriving community within Mildura LGA. This approach is grounded in partnership and shared design, joint stewardship, and collective accountability for achieving meaningful outcomes and impact (Dart, 2019).
The key catalysts for our work are:
We often start by talking with communities, governments and service providers. What do service providers need to know to deliver a program or service to best suit our community’s needs? What do communities need when it comes to that service? We also look carefully at what the research says, along with relevant local, state and federal data.
Bringing together this local expertise with data is complex work that requires strong relationships, trust in the process, and a long-term commitment. We measure impact not just with traditional metrics, but by broader shifts in relationships, perspectives and ways of working–for services, governments, and the community as a whole.
Co-design is a different way of engaging with communities that supports how place-based collective impact initiatives work. A typical community consultation is when governments and service providers look for community input without necessarily any contribution to the creation and testing of ideas. In contrast, co-design aims to shift power dynamics by putting community and conversation at the centre of the process. Community members and service providers work together to make decisions, come up with ideas and test solutions. There are a few different ways to co-design, from design thinking to human-centred design to participatory design. We use a combination of these in our co-design, with local knowledge and experiences integral to everything we do.
Our Journey of change is like a roadmap for creating positive change in our community. It doesn’t just show us where we want to go–it helps us figure out how to get there.
At the heart of our journey are the ‘enabling conditions’ shown in the middle of the infographic. These are the things we need to change to create better outcomes for children, young people, and families in Mildura. These conditions might seem small at first, but they’re crucial.
The diagram shows how these enabling conditions lead to systemic changes, which in turn create impact for children, young people, and families. In the long term, this work contributes to lasting change in population-level outcomes, as shown at the top of the infographic.
We use our journey of change in everything we do, from planning new projects to measuring our impact. It helps us stay focused on what really matters–creating lasting, positive change.
Our structure is part of what makes us different. We have a unique collective governance structure that was purpose-built to bring together a diverse group of people to make decisions together. Our co-designed structure reflects the broader perspectives and expertise of the communities we work with. We have:
