VOICE - Victorian Ongoing Initiative for Community Engagement

Community organisations have told us that one of their greatest challenges for sustaining impact is the fragmented service system and short-term funding for services. This has been particularly pronounced during the pandemic, where effective public health responses emerged rapidly in response to emergent issues but were then scaled back before their impact could be fully evaluated and understood.

To address this challenge, and the others identified above, we’ve conceived of and launched VOICE; a multi-modal program which seeks to create sustainable and innovative ways of harnessing community strengths, sharing learnings, growing impact, amplifying unmet needs and co-designing responses to emerging community challenges.

Our program uses a combination of traditional and digital community engagement, along with community and sector collaboration and partnerships, to work towards stronger public health practice in multicultural communities. VOICE is focused on helping communities, service providers and government to work together to achieve more sustainable and meaningful impact.

2022 - Ongoing

• Share current and emerging public health needs
• Problem-solve during emergencies (floods, pandemics, fires)
• Best practice information sharing
• Timely evidence-based support, tools and expertise
• Use a co-designed digital platform to support the achievement of these aims

Through engagement, co-design, and research, we have defined the role of the program as:

• Connecting community organisations with public health practitioners thereby bringing together multidisciplinary and community expertise to guide innovative and effective practice
• Collecting and clearly communicating information on multicultural community needs and the strengths and opportunities to address them via our digital platform and other channels
• Creating and sharing stories, tools and resources to grow good practice; showcasing, sustaining and building on the hard work of multicultural communities during the pandemic
• Building stronger reciprocal relationships between service providers, policy makers, public health practitioners and communities so that multicultural community public health needs are understood and met, including through sustained funding and program evaluation and refinement
• Strategising how what we do and learn can be applied to other communities facing social and structural disadvantage, and to broader public health and social issues and emergencies