Real Talk: A Forum for Lived and Living Experience Voices

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This forum is designed for people with Lived and Living Experience, those working in Lived Experience roles, and sector partners committed to embedding Lived and Living Experience leadership across Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing system. This session will be held online and will not be recorded.

 

Please join us for the second Real Talk Lived and Living Experience (LLE) Forum (online), jointly hosted by the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health & Wellbeing (the Collaborative Centre) and the Lived Experience Unit, Department of Health.

 

This forum invites LLE folk to come together to explore a period of significant change within Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing sector. This online event will focus on the implications of changes to mental health entities, the Silver Review and the recent restructuring of the Lived Experience portfolio within the Victorian Department of Health. These changes raise important questions for many people in LLE roles, about influence, continuity, accountability, and the future of lived experience leadership across the system. 

 

Real Talk forums exist to create space for exactly these moments—when reform is underway, information is partial, and people are seeking clarity on changes.

 

This session features a panel discussion followed by a facilitated Q&A, bringing together policy, sector, and lived experience perspectives.

 

Panel members include:

·       Pam Anders, Deputy Secretary, Mental Health and Wellbeing, speaking from the Department of Health perspective

·       Sarah Wilson Co-CEO, and Emma Cadogan, Director, Workforce Development representing the system stewardship and workforce development of the Collaborative Centre

·       Sarah Squire, Director, Lived Experience, Department of Health, offering a consumer lived experience leadership lens

·       Michelle Swann, Principal Advisor (Carer), Department of Health, offering a family carer lived experience leadership lens

 

Together, the panel will explore:

·       Recent changes to lived experience roles in the Department and the Collaborative Centre

·       What these changes may mean for LLE roles, pathways and influence

·       How lived experience voices can remain visible, connected and effective during periods of systems change.

 

Real Talk forums are designed as respectful, informed spaces—this one bringing together policy insight, sector context, and lived experience perspectives. This will be an opportunity to ask questions, share reflections, and collectively make sense of reforms that directly affect LLE workers and the communities they represent.

 

We invite you to submit questions for panellists when you register for the forum. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions during the event.

 

An agenda further outlining this event will be available soon. We look forward to welcoming you into this statewide space for connection, learning and collaboration.