Anglicare Australia member representatives met in Darwin earlier this month for the Anglicare Australia Conference 2026. This year’s theme, Act Justly: Ideas to Impact, explored how accounts and insights can be turned into meaningful action.

Anglicare NSW South, NSW West & ACT (Anglicare) collaborated with Charles Sturt University to explore how frontline knowledge and lived experience can help drive meaningful social change.

Dr Monica Short, Shyanne Watson, Director Workforce Development at Anglicare, and The Right Reverend Dr Mark Short, Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn (via video message), brought this idea to life in their session, Co-operative Inquiry: Empowering Frontline Workers and Stakeholders.

Dr Short began by highlighting a challenge familiar to many community sector organisations. While frontline staff and volunteers witness injustice, unmet need and emerging issues every day, organisations can struggle to capture these experiences in ways that influence policy, demonstrate impact and drive systemic change.

Co-operative inquiry offers a different approach. Rather than conducting research about people, it is undertaken with people. It brings together frontline workers, volunteers, managers, chaplains, ministry leaders and policy makers to explore issues, build evidence and shape solutions together.

The presentation stepped participants through the four phases of co-operative inquiry and showed how the approach has already been used to explore important workforce challenges, including the recruitment, retention and wellbeing of rural mental health workers.

Conference delegates were invited to participate in a mini inquiry exercise, giving them a firsthand experience of how the methodology can be used within their own organisations. The exercise showed how frontline knowledge and lived experience can become valuable evidence for positive change.

For Shyanne, the presentation also provided an opportunity to reflect on the scale and complexity of supporting Anglicare’s workforce across a vast geographic region, sharing that Anglicare employs 632 staff members and is supported by 359 volunteers, delivering services across an extraordinary 374,500 square kilometres of regional, rural and remote communities.

Supporting a workforce across such a vast region brings unique challenges. Shyanne highlighted the importance of ensuring staff and volunteers feel safe, valued and supported, with opportunities for ongoing learning, development and reflection.

Ultimately, this is about creating an environment where people can thrive, remain connected to purpose and continue delivering high-quality support to individuals, families and communities.

The presentation reinforced a simple but powerful idea: those closest to the work often hold the insights needed to improve it. By listening deeply, learning together and giving frontline workers and stakeholders the tools to help shape solutions, Anglicare can turn lived experience into evidence, advocacy and meaningful action.

As the conference theme suggested, moving from ideas to impact requires more than good intentions. It means ensuring the voices and experiences of those closest to the issues are part of shaping the way forward.