In this episode, Matt speaks with Tanya Rong — Chair of the Latrobe Health Assembly, Australia's first community-led health assembly, set up in the wake of the 2014 Hazelwood mine fire to give the Latrobe Valley community a genuine voice in the decisions that shape its health and wellbeing. A former intensive care nurse with a background in health promotion, Tanya is now completing a PhD at Monash University on place-based approaches to health — and she has been part of the Assembly from its earliest days, as a volunteer, board member and chair.

A simple conviction sits at the heart of the conversation: place-based work thrives on trust. Rather than dropping cookie-cutter programs into a community, genuine place-based practice starts by honouring local knowledge and getting the "preparation" right — building relationships and laying the groundwork long before anything is delivered.

If you like this episode, then make sure to check out #13 Governance, Not Geography: Redefining What Place-Based Work Really Means with Luke Craven for more on this topic.

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In this episode, Matt speaks with Michael Hogan — Executive Convenor of the Queensland Kids Partnership, an initiative hosted by ARACY that brings together philanthropy, government, community and research to improve the wellbeing of Queensland's children and young people. Michael has more than 35 years' experience in public-purpose work, including roles as Director-General of two Queensland departments.

A deliberate choice sits at the heart of the partnership: rather than create another organisation or service, it set out to use what's already there — convening, catalysng and connecting the people and programs already doing the work, and drawing on ARACY's national networks instead of adding to a crowded ecosystem.

We talk about what makes work genuinely systems-focused, how the partnership organises its work around six portfolios and the idea of "lead, facilitate, affiliate", and why so much of the most important work — relationships, partnerships, weaving networks together — stays invisible and undervalued by funders. Michael also unpacks the role of philanthropy as active partners rather than passive funders, and why shifting outcomes for kids means following the money and changing how investment is done.

His message is clear: we've spent too long prioritising competitive advantage and not enough valuing collaborative advantage — and systems are built by everybody, over generations.

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In this episode, Matt speaks with Christabelle Darcy and Alison Reedy — co-convenors of the 2026 Australian Evaluation Society Conference being held in Darwin from 14–18 September. Christabelle leads the Program Evaluation Unit at the NT Department of Treasury and Finance, and Alison manages evaluation at the NT Department of Housing, Local Government and Community Development.

Under the theme Making Space, Valuing Place, Christabelle and Alison walk us through the thinking behind this year's program — the four subthemes, the keynote line-up, and why they wanted a conference that welcomes a broader audience into evaluation conversations.

We talk about what it means to do evaluation in place, the role of Indigenous voices and authority in the work, and how the program is designed to encourage people to step outside their usual silos. Christabelle and Alison also share what they're personally hoping to take from the experience — from the richness of working with this year's keynote speakers to the conversations that happen in the margins.

Their message is clear: the evaluation community is wider than the people who already call themselves evaluators, and AES26 is built to bring that wider community into the room.

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In this special episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Diana Connell - lived experience advocate, ambassador for McAuley Community Services for Women and Global Sisters, and a powerful voice for systems change across family violence, housing and economic security.

Diana shares her story of surviving two decades of family violence, becoming homeless with her two children, and the journey that led her into her advocacy and systems change work. She walks us through what genuine co-design with lived experience actually looks like, the importance of creating space for change, slowing down, and crucially what dignity actually looks like.

We talk about the Safe at Home Trial in Geelong (a continuation of the conversation from Episode 18 with Jocelyn Bignold), the deep interconnection between family violence, housing and economic security, and the work of Global Sisters in supporting women into economic independence through micro-business, business school and the Little Greenhouses initiative.

Diana's message is clear: women deserve more than just to survive. We all need to be bold, lift the bar, and build something incredible together.

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What if most communities don't actually need a new co-design project — just someone to notice and strengthen what's already there?

KA McKercher is a co-design and co-production facilitator, trainer and professional supervisor, founder of Beyond Sticky Notes, and author of the book of the same name. In this conversation, they unpack why good co-design is as much about beauty, choice and relationships as it is about methods — and draw on more than 15 years of practice to explain how "purpose" can quietly hide power, why endings matter as much as beginnings, and what it takes to build disability justice into how we do this work.

We also get into the implicit promise that comes with the word "co-design," why seasonality should shape the pace of change, and when not to co-design.

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Family violence is the leading cause of homelessness in Australia. Everything in the system — community expectations, child protection, housing support payments — pushes women to leave. And yet there's nowhere affordable for them to go. The gap in the middle is homelessness.

In this episode, we speak with Jocelyn Bignold, CEO of McAuley Community Services for Women, about the deep intersection between family violence and homelessness, and what happens when we flip the script. Jocelyn walks us through the Safe at Home trial in Geelong and Barwon, which is supporting whole families to stay safe — with zero critical incidents and no homelessness across 23 households so far.

We also dig into how systems mapping became McAuley's "North Star," why early intervention means different things to different parts of the system, and what it takes to turn curiosity into action when the problem feels too big.

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What does it take to engage men and boys in preventing domestic and sexual violence — and what separates the work that actually shifts things from the kind that doesn’t?

Professor Michael Flood is an internationally recognised researcher at Queensland University of Technology and one of Australia’s leading voices on men, masculinities, and violence prevention. With over 30 years of experience spanning research, community education, and pro-feminist advocacy, he has spent his career not just studying this field but actively building it. In this conversation, he traces the shift from arguing why men and boys should be engaged in this work to the harder, more important question of how — and what makes some approaches genuinely effective while others fall short.

Michael explores the distinct challenges of violence prevention compared to other men’s health work, why most men privately reject violence-supportive attitudes but stay silent anyway, how the man box constrains the men inside it as much as those around them, and why the language we reach for — from “toxic masculinity” to “healthy masculinity” — can either open doors or close them. He also reflects on the broader conversation about men in crisis, what’s driving it, and why building communities of support among men may matter more than we realise.

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What does it take to demonstrate value for money in systems change approaches? Where do we start when the work is unpredictable, non-linear, and aimed at shifting mindsets rather than just hitting targets?

Heidi Peterson is Lead Principal Consultant at Clear Horizon and a recent PhD candidate who has spent years wrestling with the "rock and hard place" of complexity versus efficiency. In this conversation, she breaks down why traditional cost-benefit analyses often fail systems change initiatives and introduces a new framework designed to capture value that usually sits "beneath the surface".

Heidi explores the shift from the evaluator as an objective "judge" to a "co-constructor" of value, why the best way to value a system is to get the system in the room, and how to stay pragmatic when resources are tight but the stakes are high.

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What does it take to align place-based approaches with the right kind of evidence — and why does getting that wrong cause so many problems?

John Hitchin is co-founder of Stories of Change and co-author of the Place and Evidence in the UK report. In this conversation, he unpacks what genuinely makes work place-based versus just happening in a place, and walks us through a new taxonomy of five categories of place-based change — each requiring different mechanisms and different forms of evidence.

John draws on over 20 years of experience to explain why misalignment between what funders want to achieve and how they ask practitioners to prove it is one of the biggest barriers in this space. We also get into backbone organisations versus "connective scaffolding," why competitive funding environments sit uneasily with collaborative place-based work, and whether the current policy moment in the UK is a genuine turning point or just another cycle.

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Jessie Robinson is a proud Wiradjuri man and founder of Mawang Consulting. In this conversation, he challenges us to think differently about co-design — not as a process or framework, but as a fundamentally relational practice rooted in power redistribution.

Jessie shares how First Nations ways of being and doing have shaped his approach, and why he believes communities often already have the solutions — they just need the resources and space to act on them. We also get into the messier side of this work: having hard conversations with commissioners, sitting in discomfort, and what it actually looks like to practise two-way learning rather than just talk about it.

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