Co-creating Victoria’s first strategy for wellbeing and prevention

While reform efforts have rightly focused on treatment and recovery, there’s growing recognition that true mental wellbeing begins with prevention where people live, learn, work, and play.

The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System called for a bold, system-wide shift to promote wellbeing and prevent distress. One of its key recommendations was the creation of a Statewide Wellbeing Plan, a coordinated, cross-sector strategy to improve quality of life for every Victorian.

The Department of Health (DoH) engaged Portable to lead statewide community and sector engagement, ensuring that the strategy would be shaped directly by the people it’s designed to serve.

The Department of Health engaged Portable to lead a major statewide engagement process to inform the development of the Plan. The brief was complex and multi-layered. Our role was to:

• Design and facilitate safe, inclusive engagements that empowered Victorians from all backgrounds to define what wellbeing means to them
• Translate hundreds of community perspectives into a shared vision, with clearly defined needs, goals, and systemic priorities
• Develop and synthesise this information into a usable foundation for policy, delivering a community-led first draft that government could take forward for implementation

This work demanded a facilitation strategy that was not only trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and accessible, but also scalable, agile, and capable of meaningfully engaging with over 600 people across dozens of sessions, formats, and cohorts.

Portable was tasked not just with delivering the data, but with stewarding the conversation; holding space for people to be heard, synthesising insights in real time, and building the trust required to shape one of the most significant mental health prevention strategies in the state’s history.

The final challenge for us was to translate all of the findings into frameworks and recommendations for the strategy. We would need to structure and co-author the strategy in a way that was accessible to the wide audience it would serve, from government to private sector to community.

At every stage, our focus was on elevating community wisdom, embedding trauma-informed practices, and generating strategic insights that would shape a statewide, cross-sector policy.

Creating a safe, trauma-informed foundation

From the outset, we worked closely with our partners at the Department of Health to define what trauma-informed engagement would look like in this context. Together, we developed shared principles of curiosity, respect, and inclusion and embedded them across every workshop, interview, and interaction.

Facilitators disclosed relevant lived experience, ground rules were co-created with participants, and session formats were adapted to meet varying needs for safety, agency, and choice.

Grounding the work in real-world context

We began with deep immersion. Drawing on documents like the Royal Commission’s final report, expert interviews, and prior government consultations, we built a shared knowledge base that informed the design of our engagements and ensured cultural and strategic alignment.

Delivering statewide engagement at scale

• Across four months, we engaged more than 600 Victorians through diverse and inclusive methods:
• 11 co-design workshops with priority community cohorts including multicultural groups, young people, LGBTQI+ communities, people with disability, seniors, and regional residents
• 15 solution-focused workshops with government, health, education, justice, and service delivery organisations
• 4 workshops with local and state government policy leads to align levers of influence
• 140+ vox-pop interviews across Melbourne and Geelong capturing spontaneous, everyday reflections on wellbeing
• Self-facilitated community toolkits, enabling local organisations to contribute insights through grassroots conversations

This layered engagement design allowed us to gather insight from diverse lived and professional experience while ensuring community ownership and input at every level.

To make sure our engagements were truly inclusive and effective, we embedded a simple evaluation framework. Post-workshop surveys assessed how safe, supported, and heard participants felt. Feedback shaped our facilitation in real-time.

"It was a very supportive environment for sharing. I appreciated that the consultation was smaller in size and enabled participation. Other government consultations I've been involved in, have been large and enabled little opportunity to participate or provide feedback. I enjoyed the rich conversation throughout the session and hearing the different perspectives on wellbeing."

- Workshop participant (Older Victorians)

We provided the Department of Health with:

• A community-centred first draft of the Wellbeing Plan, with a clear vision, measurable goals, and practical directions for action
• A detailed mapping of community-defined needs, strengths, and aspirations onto the socio-ecological model of wellbeing
• Strategic recommendations tied to policy levers, service systems, and government roles
• Content and visuals to support internal alignment and public communication of the final strategy

Over 600 people directly contributed through facilitated workshops, interviews, and toolkits spanning First Nations communities, multicultural organisations, LGBTQI+ groups, youth, seniors, and people with disability.

Participants consistently described the process as inclusive, meaningful, and empowering. Our trauma-informed facilitation approach helped build psychological safety, which in turn enabled more honest, constructive conversations.

“You are modelling some great practices... This will lead to the transformational change needed to centre health and wellbeing for all Victorians.”

— Dianne Hill, CEO, Women’s Health Victoria

Our engagement approach and synthesis process became the basis for government decision-making. When the Department launched the Victorian Wellbeing Strategy in September 2025, it drew directly from the draft we co-authored confirming that properly facilitated and managed consultation can enable policy co-design with real-world impact.

The final strategy, Wellbeing in Victoria: A Strategy to Promote Good Mental Health 2025-35, is now live, establishing a whole-of-government framework to prevent mental illness and promote wellbeing across every part of daily life from schools and workplaces to homes and communities.

This strategy is the first of its kind in the state. It represents a shift from reactive mental health care toward systemic prevention, equity, and population-level wellbeing. It reflects the priorities of communities who are often underrepresented in government policy, and it charts a path toward collective responsibility for mental health and wellbeing.

Portable was proud to contribute to the creation of this strategy not just by facilitating community engagement, but by helping shape how government listens, responds, and integrates public wisdom into formal policy. The methods and models developed for this work can be adapted to other portfolios, from climate and education to disability and justice.

Wellbeing is complex. But when government, sector, and community come together with care, structure, and trust, meaningful change is possible. This project proves it.

“I want to congratulate you all on a wonderful day. It was safe, inclusive and welcoming and fostered a sense of wellbeing. You are modelling some great practices throughout this process regarding wellbeing, lived exp including First Nations voices and co-design. This will lead to the transformational change needed to centre health and wellbeing for all Victorians. I feel it is a great privilege to participate in this work.”

Dianne Hill, CEO, Women’s Health Victoria

“Collaborating with an incredible team on this project has been an absolute joy. We've had the unique opportunity to connect with the community, sector, and government in ways that have given us rare and distinctive insights. And the icing on the cake? The Wellbeing Symposia, where we brought everything together before diving into the exciting writing phase. It was the perfect way to transition from engagement to creating something special in our Wellbeing Plan.”

Olivia Gregory, Senior Producer, Portable

• Olivia Gregory, Senior Producer
• Adam Corcoran, Principal Design Strategist
• Belinda Donald, Principal Design Strategist
• Shoni Ellis, Senior Content Strategist
• Daniele Milazzo, Senior Experience Designer
• Joe Sciglitano, Client Partner