Introduction by Croakey: Professor Basil Hetzel AC (1922-2017) was an eminent public health researcher and advocate whose work on iodine deficiency disorders had a global impact. He was active across many areas, including helping to establish Lifeline, and described as someone who was “determined to make the world a better place”.
The Public Health Association of Australia’s annual Basil Hetzel Oration is an opportunity to hear personal and professional reflections from other eminent leaders. This year, Professor Anna Peeters AM, CEO of VicHealth, reflected on her career, which began in laboratory science with a focus on HIV, leading to public health research on obesity and food environments, and evolving into the art and science of systems change with a focus on health equity.
In describing how a genetic virologist went on to develop skills in collective impact, co-design and community engagement, Peeters shared many resources, insights and tips for others interested in achieving systems change, which she described as “inevitable and urgent and possible”.
The work of Charlie Leadbeater, featured in the image above, had taught her to “keep pushing and keep going and don’t get put off by the messiness of systems change”.
Her presentation to the Australian Public Health Conference, in Geelong on Wadawurrung Country, is published in full below.
Anna Peeters writes:
I want to start with an Acknowledgment of Country and pay my respects to the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation who’ve taken care of the land, the air and the waterways here, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and future, and particularly the First Nations peoples with us today, here or online on the countries where you are.
I don’t have financial or other conflicts to disclose, but I do want to acknowledge the many different health and medical research funders who have supported my academic career over the decades.
The through line for my presentation today, I’ve got two parts. The first part is a bit of a tour through my academic career and the things that I learned during that period, and some of the reasons behind the choices I made with my research and the through line … is really I was a public health academic for a couple of decades and really interested in developing evidence, but thought a lot about – is evidence enough – and really came to the conclusion that to develop evidence, it’s really important that there’s a purpose to the evidence.
And that purpose comes from people, whether they are those who are experiencing the conditions that drive our health outcomes or those who have some decision-making capacity. It’s the people who drive the purpose. And if you’re doing the research and developing the evidence with a purpose in mind, then to drive the change that you’re interested in requires action.
And so it sounds really obvious, but I think one of the main things that I learned over my career is that if you have a purpose in mind, then it’s really important to design that and the action for change and the communication, engagement and exchange with the people involved from the very beginning.
So it’s a real privilege to give the Basil Hetzel Oration. He is someone who I think really lived up to the experience that I’m talking about. Transforming evidence into action and really focused on improving health and wellbeing of communities both in Australia and globally.
My journey
As I said, I want to start with a bit of a whistle stop tour through how I grew, as an academic, and I hope that’s of relevance to many of you who might be early-career researchers, but also thought provoking for everybody else in the sector.
This [slide below] is really a demonstration of the journey I went on… From a PhD student who was a genetic virologist really interested in, although it was lab-based and quite distant from what many of you do, really focused on trying to do that in an area where there was at that time a public health epidemic.
The AIDS epidemic was emerging, and it was really important to me to be doing my research in a space where I felt like I might contribute to treatment or prevention or vaccination all the way through to … understanding. I wanted to focus on epidemiology and populations and think about public health outcomes and equity.
One of the things I wanted to point out, which I’ve learned from Rob Patten, who is one of the cultural First Nations advisers at VicHealth and which Jordi [Campbell] spoke about yesterday…I’ve been really trying to be braver in telling my story, which starts before my academic career.
And so I did just really briefly want to touch on the fact that a lot of what drives me, I think, is being a child of two different migrant families, both of whom experienced quite a lot of trauma in their home countries of the Netherlands and Italy.
My mother’s side, most of her family dying in Auschwitz as Italian Jews. And so I think that really informed both my experience of humanity, but also the stories that both my parents told were always the good parts of humanity. They always told the stories of where people had shone through or fought back against the structures that were trying to drive harmful outcomes.
I think it’s really important for me to say that one of the big things that drives me is this idea of a common humanity, and really thinking about what’s my potential to contribute to that humanity. You’ll see on this slide a little bit more of the stories in that perspective piece, if you’re interested. But also, I think that idea of life being everything all coming together.
So that’s me with tulips in Holland [see picture above], enjoying a really positive experience, both academically but also getting back to my family roots because my father died when I was quite young.
The other kind of point I wanted to make off this slide was the picture you’ll see from the [Deakin] Institute for Health Transformation. As I went through as an academic, one of the things I got increasingly interested in was what was my potential to support others, to contribute, to make their contributions to the world.
I became really interested in leadership, capacity building, and enabling others. So hopefully you’ll see all those themes as I go through. As an academic, my journey really went through this kind of flow from descriptive epidemiology all the way through to driving systems change.
And I’m going to take you through this with some of the pieces of work that I did, and try and illustrate why I went on that journey.
Tackling obesity
Again, one of the things I want to say at the outset is one of the things I’ve learned and feel strongly about is that actually all these different contributions are really critical. There’s a time and a place for every different type of research, every different type of perspective. And while I’ve gone on this journey, it doesn’t mean it’s a journey that everybody has to go on.
It’s really important that we all carry the “and, and” of appreciating when a particular perspective, approach, partnership or relationship is relevant. To start with, one of the first pieces of work that I was really interested to do when I was in the Netherlands was looking at an emerging epidemic. So at that time, obesity was starting to be understood as a public health challenge, but it was not very globally recognised as something that countries needed to act on.
The team that I was working with in the Netherlands had developed a whole lot of really interesting methodological approaches used on tobacco to look at things like life expectancy, implications of different health risks.
And so we decided to try and create some new methods to look at obesity in that same way. An extremely descriptive piece of work, which identified for the first time that one of the risks of living with obesity from middle age was a six to seven year life expectancy difference, potentially.
When we started to communicate that, the idea was really to reach decision makers and to try and get obesity as a public health challenge higher up on the public health decision maker list, it was really interesting because this actually did achieve that aim. It started to get quoted in things like the Surgeon General report, in national reports, and in global reports on the need, like the World Health Organization, to act on obesity.
When I came back to Australia, coincidentally on a VicHealth Fellowship – so full circle moment – I worked with a group of fantastic PhD students, a number of whom are in the room now leading their own amazing research careers and tried to apply that in the Australian context. And so we did a whole lot of stuff that again today will look really basic – just trends data – but none of that existed at that time.
We were trying to build a picture of the case for public health action on obesity in Australia. So, as an example, we had this trends data on severe obesity in Australia. In 1980 and before that [it] was at around two percent of the population and then [more than] doubled in that 20-year period to five percent, and then doubled again in the next 10-year period to around 10 percent of the population.
We used this information to work with decision makers and make the case that not only was this a growing public health issue, but it was potentially preventable due to the fact that it increased so rapidly over such a short period of time. I tell you this primarily because I was really invested in that sort of descriptive period of research and the success goal for me was trying to get this on the public health agenda.
And it did. It was it was included in many of those national guides and national statements of where work must occur. So what went along with that globally was a range of research from a range of groups around what might successful interventions be then for obesity prevention.
There was a lot of research that happened over about a 20-year period looking at policy, practice interventions, both to improve population nutrition, improve population physical activity, because that was kind of the focus in terms of obesity prevention.
I thought a little naively, as you’ll see now, that that’s great. We’ve built the momentum, now the evidence is being developed around what interventions might be needed. And then of course, they’ll be implemented.
So I turned my attention to something that I thought was not going to be focused on, which was the equity impact of these interventions. It was really clear that some interventions were more likely to be effective in different groups.
Luckily, at that time, many of you will know Katherine Backholer [who] came to work with me also from a basic science PhD. She was also really interested in the same question.
So for the policy interventions that were being developed at the time, we wanted to know: who does this benefit? Who might be missing? Who might be left behind? So could we get ahead of the curve of all these policies that are about to be implemented, and make sure that we were able to support more equitable policies to be implemented.
I’m not going to go through all the detail of my research results. But we fairly rapidly stood up a whole series of systematic reviews trying to pull the evidence from around the world to get ahead of that curve and build the evidence on what sorts of interventions.
So we looked at things like whole-of-community interventions, sugary drinks taxes and healthy food marketing to try and see what evidence was available to inform what might be policies that were more likely to be equitable. And again, that was a really interesting period of research.
We did a lot of work with state government, some work with federal government, some worked globally, and we had some fantastic outcomes. We worked with the state government here in Victoria around things like the Achievement Program [presently Health Places Health Futures], what they were doing in terms of healthy eating advisory service, and trying to inform more equitable approaches to the policies and practices that were being developed based on what we learned. And there was a big flurry in Victoria, there was Healthy Together Victoria. So quite a lot of impetus towards population level prevention.
But interestingly, none of the population level policies that we’d been working so hard on really got implemented at a federal level.
I know Jane Martin’s in the audience, we worked in many different ways to try and drive that policy. Jane and Food for Health Alliance have done an enormous amount of work there. And we have seen change. We’ve definitely seen change.
But it’s interesting, if you look at the amount of work and the momentum that we felt was happening, how that kind of just slowed.
Focus on food environments
So the context for me then was, okay, that’s great. My focus has been decision makers and trying to find the evidence to support them, to make those population level decisions.
In the absence of that, what else can be done at that kind of population nutrition level? And for me, I then became really interested in food environments. And who are the decision makers in food environments, and what’s the influence of kind of community demand, consumer demand, those who run food retail environments and those who are consumers in those environments?
It was a completely new space of work that opened up for me. And I guess just going back to the beginning of this, one of the threads for me in this whole presentation is that drive for the purpose. I’ve always been really interested in what’s my role in improving health and wellbeing, particularly for those who face the greatest barriers.
At this stage, I moved to focusing on these food retail environments and working much more deeply with chefs and store managers and hospital CEOs and then the consumers in the community to understand, well, we might know what works is completely different to getting something implemented that’s actually going to work for that community or that business context.
And that really led to the Centre of Research Excellence REFRESH, which Adrian Cameron is now continuing with and again, led to lots of really exciting outcomes in terms of a number of stores, a number of organisations like YMCAs and hospitals implementing healthier food and drink policies, but again, not at the scale, perhaps, that you might wish across a whole country or across a whole state.
So then from there, and I’m going to talk about this more when I shift to talking about VicHealth. But it was really at that point that I became super interested in: How do you change the whole system then?
I think there are really fantastic paths here to change, particular environments, particular context and to try and drive policy change.
But it had become really clear to me that what I was really interested in was trying to get a picture of the whole system that was driving these outcomes and trying to think about, what are the different levers that are amenable to being pulled, and how do we build that sort of coalition of community, practice and policymaker consensus to drive that systemic change?
So just before I move to that, I wanted to touch on a couple of lessons that I learned during that academic period. And one was a really interesting question that was asked of me about two years into a quite big five-year program of work that had about 20 different partners, was all of Southwest Victoria, and we started with a very big coalition focused on a particular target, healthcare target.
So I won’t go into the detail, but the point of it was to bring together lots and lots of people – community members, patients, hospitals, primary health networks and academics to try and find a new way forward for a particular care pathway, but without knowing what we were actually going to do. So it was really the first year was the bringing everyone together. Trying to co-design the approach going forward, which, you know, people had really different levels of comfort for.
But about two years in, we’d developed a program of work with lots of really great projects, and people could see the momentum building. And somebody said to me, “Oh, did you always have this path in mind? I see it now, but that’s not the path I had seen before.” And I said, “No, I never had this path in mind.”
What I knew is that we would uncover the path together if we had a really good, shared goal, and we brought all the right people to the table. And we went into it with curiosity and listening and … a sense of sense-making so that we could correct as we go. That’s how I knew we would uncover the path together, but I didn’t know the path when I started.
And I think many of people here from VicHealth will really recognise what I’m talking about, that idea of building planes as you fly them, it takes them a lot of different skills, which I’m going to touch on throughout the talk.
System change
So some of the things that I’ve learned from that kind of exploratory approach to my work, it’s really important to not constrain your thinking in one particular channel and to support that, that it’s really important to draw on diverse expertise. And that complex challenges actually really do require system-wide change.
And again, I want to underscore that doesn’t mean that every one of us has to do everything across the system, but it means that we have to be cognisant of the whole system, and we have to understand our role in that system.
Obviously, if you put all of that together, I think one of the really important things I’ve learned is that it means that you have to be able to sit with uncertainty. So as I kind of just indicated with that path story, you’re not going to know exactly where you’re going, how are you going to get there and what it’s going to look like. And different people are going to have different levels of comfort with that.
So I think shifting a bit to the leadership question, as a leader, you have to understand where you sit in that, but you also have to understand how to sense-make for the people that you work with and make sure that not everybody is left sitting in uncertainty because that is not suitable for everybody.
So I want to move on a little bit to my role at VicHealth and what I’ve learned from that. But before I do, one of the things that I think is a really recurring theme over the last few months for me, is the question of hope. I feel like there’s a lot of fear, actually, that we’re not progressing and we’re not able to progress. And I suppose I just wanted to put a slide in that reminded us that progress is really possible.
You know, we’ve done a lot in public health. We’ve had a lot of big public health wins. And this is one that maybe not everybody knows. So I really wanted to put it up there. In fact, incidence of type 2 diabetes in Australia is declining.
And I don’t think you’d know that from the public narrative. So this is a combination of things. It’s not only prevention but it is partly prevention. There are actually some outcomes of the work that we are doing that are benefiting our community. And I think it’s really important that we hold on to that hope.
At the same time, going back to my focus on equity, that benefit is not being seen equally. And so over and over again, we have to really keep our eye on the ball that we may be seeing improvements, which is excellent – and we shouldn’t ignore that – but they’re not being experienced equally.
Methods for change
And so I want to move now to my period over the last year and a half, moving to a role at VicHealth.
And I hope you can see the mirror image in a way. I sat on the board at VicHealth for about six years before I came into the role, and it’s just really interesting to reflect that the transition that VicHealth went through was very similar to mine. From that focus on the different kind of risk factors, if you like to focus on how to reshape systems.
So it’s been a really fantastic shift for me. I think VicHealth has a really sweet spot in the system. It’s got a really amazing line of connection into government. It’s also got this fantastic line of connection into community and a really strong history of building on evidence and experience, and I think that that sweet spot allows us to really think quite comprehensively about what does it take to shift systems.
So that’s what I want to talk to now for the last part of the talk, and I want to shout out to Linda Betts, who’s been a coach of mine for about ten years and has really helped push me. Every time she thinks I’m getting a bit complacent, she says, “No, I think you can do more to shift that system. You really need to think more about how your work is reaching others and how you can actually make change.” So it’s been great to have her on the journey.
So I want to talk about two things. One is some of the kind of methods and technical approaches that I think are just really useful. If you’re in the business of trying to shift systems, and the other is leadership capability.
So in terms of methods and approaches, I want to call out three people and show you the kind of methods that sit with these people. One is Steve Allender, one’s Carol Wallace and one’s Charlie Leadbeater.
Steve Allender, who many of you may know at Deakin University, and you might recognise the map. I really learned from him and his approach, which is getting people in a room to do what he calls group model building. It’s essentially building these systems maps together, a lot about system science and systems maps, which was great.
But more importantly, I think what I learned from him are the possibilities when you bring people together to build these systems maps that allow them somehow to find their place in the system, but also to recognise someone else’s place.
There are so many conversations I’ve been a part of where people started in completely different places in the system with completely different perspectives. By developing these systems maps together, which are really interconnected, they’ve been able to recognise that actually they all share a goal, but they’re in different parts of the system. And it’s possible to work together.
In terms of Charlie Leadbeater, the thing I’ve really learned for him, a little bit like Linda, is to keep pushing and keep going and don’t get put off by the messiness of systems change.
And this is just one example. He’s got many, many different templates which I think are super useful, but this example is his obviously very rough depiction of the many, many different paths that you’re likely to come up against if you’re trying to drive systems change.
And his encouragement is always don’t get put off by the fact that you’re going to have to learn to move between these very different ways of working. That is just how the systems work, and it’s how your role in it is going to be.
More helpful tools
And then to Carolyn Wallace and her team. VicHealth developed this Impact and Evaluation framework and it’s been a really fantastic space for me in terms of learning. So I kind of share this with you in that in that vein.
And two things I really want to call out. The blue up the top, the systems row number three, … thinking about The Water of Systems Change, which this is built on, the idea that if you’re trying to change systems, actually what you’re trying to change is policies and practices, resource flows, connections, power dynamics, mental models.
They’re not necessarily what we would spend all our time talking about. But I found it extraordinarily useful to be able to think about, am I making that change? Then that is a system change.
So these tools are extremely helpful to bound you in what can be quite a big anamorphic space. And similarly, if you look at the light green, the system’s ways of working. Again, I think that gives you a really good instructional idea around how do you sense-make whether you are really in the right space for systems ways of working, making a difference in terms of your own learning, but also the learning of your organisation.
And many of you might have seen Liss and Geskeva present yesterday, the equity ecosystem. There’s some really tangible outputs that have come out of this thinking around being led and informed by community, listening and learning from First Nations people and actually trying to enable that culture of learning and continuous improvement, which I’m very committed to at VicHealth – but also I’ve learned a lot from doing.
There are just a few methodological tools that I think if you’re not already using, I would really encourage you to use them because it starts to make what can feel like amorphous system change actually tangible and give you some specific outcomes. So the other kind of methodological approach I wanted to touch on, which many of you will be expert in, is collective impact.
I’m not going to go through the detail of these approaches. But again, I would say that it’s not where I started from as a genetic virologist. Collective impact, co-design, community engagement are not areas that I was skilled in at all. But if you actually want to shift systems, these are really clearly the skill sets that you need to develop.
As an illustration at VicHealth, we have a program of work around trying to shift the food system to enable better access to affordable and available healthy food. We have a collective impact approach where we invest in a number of local partnerships and then, really specifically as a funder, have thought about how do we support the backbone for that collective impact investment.
And that’s through things like bringing in the evaluator, bringing in a systems change facilitator, bringing in a food systems expert. Making sure that we enable the connection and the exchange so that the systems change and outcomes can be shared amongst those who are learning and then shared to others who are not yet in that collective impact group.
In terms of systems change, really trying to think then about whether it’s a systems diagram or not. What are the levers in the system that you’re trying to pull and why? And at VicHealth, in that Food First approach, we’ve thought a lot about what are the key systems levers that need to shift. And you can you can put your own labels here but they are across the areas of building the evidence, developing the policy, shifting the demand, shifting the access.
We’ve really thought carefully about what is our role that we can play with our partnerships and our investment and we might we need to fund others or partner with others, and where is it completely somebody else’s role in the system.
But I guess the point that I’m trying to make of this is that if you start to be able to develop that skill of visualising the system, understanding the whole system, then you have a much clearer idea of why you’re doing what you’re doing, what you expect to happen when you push that lever, and what other levers need to be pushed at the same time.
Tackling racism
So I want to show you one more example of how we’re thinking about systems shifts, because I want to illustrate this at the end. But one of the other areas we work in at VicHealth is around trying to improve cultural safety, anti-racism in sports, recreation and the arts.
It’s a multi-pronged approach to try and drive systems change. So we support others to build the evidence, we’ve brought that evidence into social marketing communications campaigns – which is Set The Standard and into a big collective impact campaign which is Shifting the Playbook.
We look at how you can actually build the policy levers, so we’re supporting VEOHRC [Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission] to do anti-racism guidelines and all that is aligned with current government strategy and approaches.
And so this idea of trying to think again about what are the systems levers that we need to touch on. And as I said before, what needs to happen with The Water of Systems Change is really critical.
The thing that I wanted to point out of this, that, again, has been a really important learning, is often we can think about the system as this big overarching population level map, if you like, but we can’t forget that that system is made up in lots, lots of people and lots and lots of communities.
So at the same time as thinking about or visualising or connecting on the bigger picture of the system, we need to always continue to think about how does local community show up in that? How do you have that iterative approach so that local communities informing what you’re doing at the level of system go back and around each time so it is made up of community.
I wanted to touch on this particular example [also see video at the end of article]… at Broadmeadows Basketball Club, there was a woman there, Sharin Milner, who just asked this really simple question, which was essentially a systems question.
She said: “Why is it that in my basketball club, none of the members look like the community that live outside the club? Why are no community members coming to this club?”
And so they applied for a small grant in 2023, which was really focused on, then co-designed a basketball team and then a club within Broadmeadows Basketball Club called Dallas Phoenix Club that actually looked like the local community, that engaged the local community, was built on local community needs. And as you can see from the second box, this became the fastest growing club in the whole local competition.
It was extraordinarily successful. Obviously it was not as simple as just asking that question. She worked really intentionally to remove barriers, directed by the community, both with the young people and their parents, and thought about how do you get rid of those hidden rules, make it a place that is both safe and encouraging.
And it’s interesting because often you might see that I think, “Well, that’s great. That’s a nice local community initiative.” But actually what she managed to do was change the system within her local club. So she changed, with them, relationships and connections, power dynamics, policies and practices.
And so we have now used this as one of the pillars of learning that’s gone into our big collective impact investment, through Shifting the Playbook and Set The Standard.
And it’s now being communicated across the state as a social marketing campaign, but also used to build the tools that clubs are asking for in order for them to make a practical change. So again, that connection between the local and at scale – in this case state – I think is really critical.
Leadership matters
So I just want to finish off with a couple of things I’ve learned. In terms of leading through systems change, and I’ve touched on quite a lot of this, I think some of the really important things that I’ve learned is the need to come with: curiosity, humility and to really listen to what you’re being told. To hold that awareness of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. You know, these environments are shifting rapidly.
We used to talk about when things go back to “normal”. I mean, there is no “normal” would be my contention. So thinking really carefully about how do you support yourself, your team, the community, the sector to sit in that uncertainty. And I’ve said it before, but actually I think it’s really critical, and I think it’s a leadership skill that I would encourage all of us to continue to build.
Guiding lights is something that we talk about a lot in all the partnerships that I have. And if you think back to my point before about the path that was illuminated in complexity, there isn’t a single line, there isn’t a path, you don’t know you’ve made it.
So my challenge – I think for me, but for all of us – is: how do you identify with your collaborators, the guiding light? The where are we going? What’s the direction we’re working towards? How do we make sure we use that to illuminate the path as it emerges, without fixing ourselves to something that may not be where we want to be?
I’ve also found that, in working through uncertainty, values have been a really important compass. So being really clear and transparent on my values in decision making, in setting kind of direction and trying to work out where we’re going has been really valuable.
And as I said before, holding the “and, and”. We might have a really strongly held view, but I really think it’s important that we hold on to the fact that many roles, perspectives, actions are critical for driving the changes in the systems we want to see.
So I want to illustrate just one thing that I have found super useful in talking about system change, and is this idea of a Two-Loop model. And the reason I put it up here is because I think when we’re talking about, okay, I would like to see a healthier food system.
So much of the pushback that I get is, “Well, that’s great. That’s a really nice idea. But actually we’ve got a really dominant industrialised food system. So what you’re talking about is ridiculous whenever you’re going to see a change. So let’s not bother.”
That whole paradigm around – too hard, can’t be done, this is how it is right now. What I’ve started speaking about is if we think about the fuel economy, I know we haven’t stopped that. It’s not “flick a switch” from one system to another, but we are seeing modification to the fuel economy. We’re seeing some areas where it’s being dismantled. And we’re certainly seeing the emergence of a renewables economy.
Inevitable, urgent and possible
So I think this idea of giving people a roadmap, if you like, for shifting from one system to another, is becoming increasingly important in all the conversations I’m having.
As an example, I would say that there’s a role for everybody. People who are working on optimising the current system, whether it’s the food system or the economic system, we need that. We need it to be improved. Those who are looking to dismantle those systems, we need that too, we need it to disappear eventually.
And those at VicHealth, we’re focused on: how do we nurture, build, connect, steward the emergent system or the new system? We need that too.
And I’m really hopeful that trying to think about how we have that “and, and” will allow us to do all those things at once. So for us at VicHealth, as I said, we’re really focused in that sort of bottom pink corner with a collective impact I showed you before, how do we invest in these local examples of good practice for healthy, affordable, accessible food?
How do we nourish that, connect that, grow that into an amazing new emergent system without ignoring the fact that at the same time, we need to do all the food regulation we’re doing right now to optimise the system that we have and hopefully slowly dismantle it.
I would argue, based on everything I’ve learned and the position I have in the system now, that moving from our current systems is both inevitable and urgent and possible.
And I think we are the stewards of the systems that promote and protect health. I think there’s a lot of discussion about what’s possible right now. It is possible we just need to be really intentional and connected and listen to those different perspectives.
I’d like to pay tribute to Basil’s legacy. I’d like to say a big thanks to all of those who have supported me over the decades, from all their different positions, and I’d really like to leave the last words to Nabila and Sharin again, to give you that local flavour of what it takes to drive systems change.
Video transcript
I’m Nabila. I’m a mom of three kids, migrated to Australia with my family when I was 11 years old. I didn’t know English except the word hello. It was very hard sportsman fun. It gave me a reason to look forward to schools. That’s how I made friends as well. You will always see me with the ball. That was my first ball obsession.
So I’d asked my cousins, how do I play sports outside the esports aside, but it’s not for us and so you won’t be able to. You’re not going to fit in. All my life I wanted to play for a professional club. I never got that.
So Phoenix was designed around like the real community needs. And in order to, I guess, be true to those, we had to go and talk to the communities. What we found with Phoenix was that cost was a barrier, transport was a barrier. And for a lot of our families who were newly arrived to Australia, understanding the community, sport, landscape and how to navigate and access sport outside of playing sport at school was another issue that we had to overcome.
But also in this area where there’s such rich cultural diversity, cultural safety, 87% of our families had never participated in any form of community sport before. For families living within two kilometers of this stadium, there was no club for them. So it Phoenix, it really is trying to design to the community’s need and that is, you know, handing over power and control to those living in the community.
When I came to Phoenix, I thought, welcome. The players are not expected to change themselves. The club will change to cater for the players and that is really beautiful. That was one of my inspiration to actually join the committee. You know, a club, a real club, structured club to help shape it. Yes, it’s really an honor and I’m really happy here.
I love it when they told me that they needed a coach, I’m like, okay, I’ll help you out. Committee has 11 people on it and nine speak a language other than English at home and were born overseas and nine are women. We had a beautiful opportunity to, you know, hand control over to the local community. So in less than two years, we’ve now got to 23 teams that are competing each Saturday, where the fastest growing club in the junior competition.
And that growth was something we just did not expect to have, you know, over 200 kids, mostly from this local area, who had never played sport before, you know, all running around on a Saturday in the uniform.
Because our club appreciates qualities. You see enormous growth. They feel like they’re heard and they feel like they appreciated for who they are. You become more inclusive then you get you get everyone.
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