Health Justice 2025 national conference

Early risers win! Doors are open and the coffee is brewing. Get in early, grab your pass, and settle in for a day of discovery.

Health Justice Australia Acting CEO, Lottie Turner, takes to the stage to open HJ25.

The Power of Authentic Engagement  

What does it take to listen – really listen – to the voices of people with lived and living experience? What is it that systems change requires of us, and where are our blind spots? In this keynote with internationally renowned speaker, Liz Weaver, learn more about what it takes to navigate our fears and power challenges. Hear more about how authentic engagement seeks to break down the power imbalances in community, and can open us to a future of deep learning and impact.

More information to come soon.

Choose from one of four workshops designed to spark conversations and deep dive into your selected topic:

Workshop 1: Power in practice: Strengthening your awareness and impact
#Inclusion #Practice

Power is the water we swim in – shaping how we lead, collaborate, and influence change. Yet despite being ever-present, it’s often unspoken, misunderstood, or avoided.

Facilitated by HJA’s Lottie Turner, this interactive workshop will help build your literacy around power: what it is, how it shows up in cross-sector work, and how to use it with more intention and impact. You’ll explore a practical tool for identifying and working with different forms of power in your own role and relationships.

We’ll also hear from Kimia Randall (Australian Centre for Disability Law) and Leah Roberts (Liverpool Hospital), who will share how they’ve grappled with power in their collaboration – reflecting on transparency, discomfort, and shared leadership in practice.

Whether you’re a practitioner, service leader, or collaborator across systems, this session will sharpen your awareness of power dynamics and help you navigate them with greater clarity, humility, and influence.

You’ll leave with sharper tools and a clearer lens for recognising power in your everyday work – and the confidence to use it more intentionally for change.

Workshop 2: The CollabLab
#Foundations #Practice

Collaboration is at the heart of health justice partnership – but what does it really take in practice?

In this hands-on workshop, HJA’s Karyn Gellie will host a peer-driven space for health, legal and social service practitioners to explore the realities of working together across services and with people with lived experience.

Whether you’re new to partnership or looking to strengthen existing collaborations, the CollabLab will draw on participants’ own expertise to surface challenges, share practical strategies, and build confidence in the everyday work of collaboration.

Workshop 3: How to build organisation-wide partnership culture
#Management #Leadership

Embedding the principles of partnership across an organisation can have benefits well beyond partnering with other services. This interactive session will explore how a whole-of-organisation approach to partnership can shape service design, leadership, and day-to-day practice.

Drawing on the experience of Hume Riverina Community Legal Service (VIC/NSW), participants will hear how partnership has been embedded across their service – supported by Partnership Foundations training, the creation of a Partnership Champions Group, and strategic oversight from senior management. Together, these initiatives are helping to embed a culture of collaboration and strengthen capability across the service.

Led by Debi Fisher, Karlee Hirt, and Gabby Maginness from Hume Riverina Community Legal Service, the workshop will also feature problem-solving activities that surface common partnership challenges and support participants to test new approaches.

This is more than a workshop – it’s a rare opportunity to learn alongside peers, try out new ways of thinking, and spark practical changes in how your organisation approaches partnership. Expect to leave with both inspiration and a concrete pathway forward.

Workshop 4: The secret sauce of health justice partnership
#DeepDives #Research

We’re so excited to share early findings from our collaborative research in this workshop, which is designed for those experienced in health justice partnership. Facilitated by HJA Research Fellow Suzie Forell, we’ll explore what makes a health justice partnership, what is needed for it to be effective, and our approach to understanding the impact of health justice partnership for frontline workers, partner services and clients.

Enjoy a long lunch at the University of Technology Sydney, and take the opportunity to chat with friends and colleagues. We’ve left you plenty of time to grab a feed, check your emails and devour the brain food on offer.

Your choice of breakout sessions, taking the concepts and insights we discussed in workshops through to their real-world applications.

1. Breakout 1: Lessons and strategies from the front line
#WomensSafety #CaseStudy

What does partnership look like in practice on the front line? This session will share real-world lessons from health justice partnerships responding to women’s safety and gender-based violence. You’ll hear case studies, insights, and strategies from those on the front line, designed to spark ideas and offer encouragement for your own partnership journey.

The session will feature:

• A presentation with soon to be announced speakers.
• A panel chaired by Elena Rosenman, CEO of Women’s Legal Centre ACT and Chair of Women’s Legal Services Australia.

Elena will facilitate a conversation with:

• Jasmine Pavan, Women’s Legal Service WA
• Kimberley Allen, Women’s Legal Service QLD
• Carmel Lohan, Women’s Legal Service Victoria

Together they’ll share practical experiences of collaboration, common challenges, and strategies for driving systems change in women’s legal and health services.

This session brings together some of the strongest voices in the women’s legal sector. You’ll leave with practical ideas, renewed energy, and a deeper sense of what’s possible when partnerships are built on trust, courage, and a commitment to women’s safety.

2. Breakout 2: How to build and maintain an effective partnership
#Practice #CaseStudy

What does it really take to sustain effective partnerships over time? This session brings together practice wisdom from across sectors – mental health, alcohol and other drugs, care and protection, youth justice and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing – to share how partnership work can be embedded, strengthened, and sustained.

Debi Fisher and Gabby Maginness (Hume Riverina Community Legal Service) join David Noonan (Albury Wodonga Aboriginal Health Service) to reflect on a decade of embedding legal help within an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service, exploring the lessons and insights that come from Community-led, long-term partnership.

We’ll then hear from John Bamborough (Mind Australia), who will share how a health justice approach is helping transform systems in mental health, drawing on his experience leading the establishment of three Mind-led Mental Health and Wellbeing Locals.

Finally, a cross-sector team – Karlee Hirt (Hume Riverina Community Legal Service), Kathrin Baer (Gateway Health), and Claire Harris (Upper Murray Family Care) – will present on their integrated work in alcohol and other drug residential care, highlighting how partnership can improve outcomes by bringing together legal, clinical, and financial support.

Together, these stories offer strategies for managing boundaries, building allyship, and embedding partnership practice across services. You’ll leave with fresh ideas and inspiration for keeping your own partnerships alive through change and challenge.

3. Breakout 3: Health justice partnership for children and families
#EarlyIntervention #CaseStudy

What happens in your childhood can follow you for the rest of your life. The earlier we can make a difference for children and families living with adversity, the bigger a difference it will make for our whole society. So what does it look like when we support the intersecting needs of children and families? Hear directly from health justice partnerships doing just this.

4. Breakout 4: Evaluating health justice partnership outcomes
#DeepDive #CaseStudy

This session explores three real-world case studies from health justice partnership evaluations across Australia, along with an introduction to evaluation and outcomes measurement. We’ll cover the process and outcomes of the three evaluation case studies, the challenges we often share when it comes to evaluation, and what we’re learning along the way. Whether you’re new to evaluation or deep in the weeds, join us for practical insights into what it takes to evaluate cross-sector collaboration.

Take a quick break, grab a snack, and re-charge before the final conference hours of the afternoon.

In our final plenary for Day 1, we explore complexity from a new perspective.

Day One is done. Grab a drink and exchange ideas with friends, colleagues and peers. This is a wonderful opportunity to connect with people you’ve heard from and met during the conference – don’t miss out!

Health Justice Australia Acting CEO, Lottie Turner, takes to the stage to kick us off for Day 2 of the conference.

More information to come soon.

Writing your Impact Story  

In this exciting workshop, all conference registrants will engage together and with international guest speaker, Liz Weaver. Liz will introduce how to craft your impact story using two frameworks: the water of systems change and the collaboration impact story. 

We often miss the essential ingredients in writing our impact stories including how people, process, and resources were essential components of impact. During the workshop, we’ll talk more about these essential ingredients as we develop, write, and share the first draft of our impact stories.   

Enjoy a long lunch at the University of Technology Sydney, and take the opportunity to chat with friends and colleagues. We’ve left you plenty of time to grab a feed, check your emails and devour the brain food on offer.

Is your organisation leading the way? What does the future of partnership look like? Choose from one of four forward-thinking breakout sessions below.

1. Breakout 1: Working towards health and justice equity

This session will explore how people experience the intersections of health and justice, and what questions this raises about power, stigma, access, exclusion and human rights.

2. Breakout 2: Partnership and what we bring to it, what we get from it and what we need to develop
#Practice #Capability

Every partnership starts with what we bring to the table – our skills, knowledge, mindset, and confidence. But partnership also changes us. It pushes us to grow in new directions, to develop different capabilities, and to see our work in fresh ways. This session will explore both sides of that equation: the strengths we contribute and the capabilities we build by being part of health justice partnership. Together, we’ll ask the critical question: what needs to be developed next to do this work well?

Hosted by Cathy Bucolo, Manager, Capability at Health Justice Australia, this session brings together special expertise from the field and beyond.

We’re joined by Michele Leering, Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Faculty of Law and former Executive Director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre, Canada. Michele has decades of experience leading access to justice initiatives, community-based legal services, and international research into health justice partnership. Her work spans legal empowerment, people-centred justice, and holistic, evidence-based approaches to client and community need. In recognition of her impact on access to justice, Michele was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2022.

With insights from Michele and other guests still to come, this session will challenge and inspire you to think differently about capability in partnership – what we bring, what we gain, and what we must develop to meet the challenges ahead.

3. Breakout 3: Policy, funding and health justice partnership
#PolicyMakers #Government

What are the power dynamics that influence the policy and funding environment, and how do these actors respond to, learn from, and build upon innovation? This session will discuss opportunities to contribute to health and social policy reform and funding initiatives to better support collaborative ways of working.

4. Breakout 4: Shaping the collaborative, early response workforce of the future
#Leadership #FutureWorkforce

What will it really take to build a workforce that can deliver collaborative, early support – one that centres people and families, not just systems?

In this roundtable, leaders from health, legal assistance, and social services will work together to imagine that future and map out what it could look like in practice. Using a “future scenario” approach, we’ll explore:

• What will be true of this workforce – and what will they be doing differently?
• What organisational and system changes will make it possible?
• How collaborative leadership and practice will shift to enable it.
• What supports and mindsets will sustain those changes.

Lottie Turner, Acting CEO, Health Justice Australia, will host this session. She will be joined by Dr. John Chan, Managing Director of Infinite Potential, an internationally recognised expert on workplace wellbeing, burnout, and the future of work.

Participants will leave with their “3×3 gold” — three new connections, three practical takeaways they can apply now, and three things they’re ready to unlearn.

This is a session for executives and decision-makers who can shape the workforce of the future — and who are ready to move from ideas to action.

Take a quick break, grab a snack, and re-charge before the final conference hours of the afternoon.

In times of uncertainty, harm, and misinformation, what does it take to keep showing up – or to step back – while holding onto collective hope?

This plenary brings together a panel of queer leaders whose advocacy is inseparable from their professional work. Grounded in lived experience and shaped by navigating complex systems, they drive change at the intersections of communities, policy, and practice.

Facilitated by Lottie Turner, Acting CEO at Health Justice Australia, the panel will:

• Explore how personal identity shapes leadership and advocacy
• Examine lessons learned from working at the intersections of systems and communities
• Share the practices and relationships that sustain them in the face of harm, misinformation, and burnout
• Imagine what it might take to build more connected, resilient, and collaborative futures

While rooted in queer experience, this conversation speaks to something universal: the need for connection, solidarity, and courage when working for change. Delegates will leave with new insights on resilience, leadership, and what it means to keep showing up – for the work, and for each other.

Health Justice Australia Acting CEO, Lottie Turner, takes to the stage to close things out for 2025.

Absolutely not!

If you work in health justice partnership, great! This conference is definitely for you.

If you don’t, but you’re interested in how services can work better together to address unmet need, this conference is also for you! You might be grappling with some of the same challenges as those currently working in partnership, you might be interested in how policy environments and funding impact this kind of work, you might be interested in the data that sits behind these kinds of innovations, or you might be a member of a community looking for solutions to the problems you’re facing.

Still not sure if it’s for you? Get in touch at conference@healthjustice.com.au 

We’re pleased to share that we have single day tickets available! Head over to registration checkout to purchase yours now.

HJ25 will be in Sydney at the Aerial Function Centre, UTS, in Ultimo.

Yes. Just select ‘invoice’ payment option at checkout.

One of our main objectives for HJ25 is for participants to make connections with each other, and feedback from attendees of past conferences is that they highly valued the opportunity of one large, national event where this connection can happen in-person. For these reasons, and because all of HJA’s other offerings are online in between conferences, HJ25 is an in-person only event.

We’re pleased to offer the following cancellation and refund policy:

• Cancellations up to 30 days before conference incur a $150 administration fee.
• Cancellations between 29 and 14 days before conference receive 50% refund.
• Cancellations less than 14 days will not be refunded.

Absolutely. You can transfer your registration ticket to another name up until 4 business days before the conference at no cost. Reach out to events@healthjustice.org.au to request the transfer.

Unfortunately, tickets cannot be shared between multiple people. However, we do have single day tickets available for those who are available to only attend one day of the conference.

Health Justice 2025 aims to be a fully accessible conference. You will be able to provide your accessibility needs during the registration process. We encourage you to be as detailed as possible. Your registration information will be treated with confidence and respect.

Do you need assistance in registering? Please email us at conference@healthjustice.org.au to arrange an assisted registration session.