Engagement and facilitation
Portable brings people into the decisions that affect them, through stakeholder engagement, facilitation, and co-design, designed around the influence the people in the room genuinely have.
What we do
- Engagement strategy and planning
- Workshop and session facilitation
- Co-design with communities and lived experience advisors
- Trauma-informed and culturally safe practice
- Stakeholder consultation at scale
- Synthesis and sense-making
- Co-design capability building
Designing the conditions for contribution and collaboration.
Who's in the room, what format suits them, what makes it safe to be honest, and what happens to what they say. Portable engaged over 600 Victorians across dozens of sessions and formats to shape Wellbeing in Victoria, the state's first strategy for promoting good mental health, then synthesised it while keeping the voice of people alive. Where the subject demands it, our practice adapts. Our work on coronial pathways with the NSW Department of Communities and Justice applied grief-informed design principles, as the families we engaged with had recently lost someone.
Honouring and giving voice to lived experience as essential expertise.
Portable co-designed chatsafe with Orygen and young people: a world-first guide to communicating safely online about suicide, where getting it wrong causes harm and clinical expertise alone can't tell you how young people talk to each other. Understanding why VCAT wasn’t meeting the needs of Koori people meant learning directly from their experiences of the barriers, cultural safety and support within the system. Designing online safety for young Pacific women meant understanding risks shaped by culture, gender, stigma and shame, things that could only be understood by designing alongside the young women experiencing them.
The "co" in co-design includes our clients too.
For the Office of Public Prosecutions, Portable brought victims of crime together with the solicitors and social workers who support them, connecting lived experience with the people who understand the system and can change it. How far that collaboration goes will differ between organisations. Portable works with what’s genuinely possible now, while helping clients build the confidence and capability to go further, as we did through our co-design capability uplift with Creative Victoria.
