MsTiana Felmingham

Improving wellbeing outcomes across communities through the use of systems thinking and collaboration is central to my approaches to research, practice, teaching and leadership in health promotion and public health.

For over 20 years, I have worked on collaborative projects alongside governments, organisations and communities in Australia and in the Pacific region. I have a special interest in really hard challenges and the approaches we can use to elevate community voices to highlight the community's role in creating local and large scale social change. I have been working with communities to apply systems thinking approaches for the last eight years. I particularly love working closely alongside those communities where multiple, complex intersections come together to influence equity and the community's overall wellbeing. With deep community connections, I have worked in partnership with health and community organisations to address a range of complex community problems including violence against women, mental wellbeing, disaster recovery, alcohol and drug use, and healthy eating, among others.

My PhD came from my strong interest of making sure the work we do with community, makes a difference to the community. My research investigates what success means when we're using systems thinking in health promotion and prevention, and how we can measure what is happening, both from an academic perspective and in health promotion and public health practice.

After having jumped into research and academia in the last six or so years, I keep strong connections to community and continue to work directly with communities and practitioners to increase capacity of systems thinking skillsets on the ground. I co-lead the GLOBE Systems Thinking Community of Practice (for community-based practitioners globally) and also co-facilitate training for practitioners in systems thinking and health promotion. I incorporate my experience in the community into sessional teaching in units as part of undergraduate and postgraduate health promotion, health science, social work and public health degrees.

Hands-on health promotion practice is important to me, and after the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires (of which we were directly impacted), I voluntarily led a creative arts project supporting children and young people after disaster to support their mental wellbeing. We were proud to win the Victorian Resilience Australia Award in the Community Category in 2023, which was also nominated as a finalist nationally.