There is something Elise Owen wishes more people understood.

Being part of a community matters.

Not simply knowing the people who live around you, or belonging to a Facebook group with your suburb’s name on it. Elise means the deeper kind of community. The kind where somebody has walked a path before you. Where experience is shared. Where people look out for one another. Where someone can say, I’ve been there too.

There’s always people who have been there, done that,” Elise says. “And that lived experience is so valuable.”

It is a simple observation, but it says quite a lot about why Elise feels like such a natural addition to the growing team of writers at Purpose Media Canberra.

Because we believe that too.

Purpose Media has always been interested in the stories that sit underneath the obvious story. The experiences that may never make a media release.

The people who do not necessarily think of themselves as experts, despite knowing more about an issue than almost anyone else in the room.

The quiet moments of change happening across Canberra every day. And, importantly, we believe the people telling those stories matter too.

As Purpose Media grows, we don’t want every article to sound as though it came from the same person, with the same experiences, the same interests or the same way of seeing the world.

We want to expand the voices telling Canberra’s stories and expand the ways those stories can be told.

Elise is part of that next chapter. And we are so excited to welcome her!!

A curiosity about people and the unknown

She is also an aspiring writer.

A reader.

A gardener.

A candle maker.

A baker.

A mum who enjoys baking with her daughter.

Someone who loves sitting in the sun with a coffee and a book.

And, because every good introduction needs at least one unexpected turn, Elise is also a body piercer.

Then there are the stars. Elise loves stargazing and would one day like to learn astrophotography.

She is drawn to mysteries, questions and exploring the unknown.

In some ways, that curiosity connects all the different pieces.

A good writer is rarely interested only in what is immediately visible.

They wonder what happened before.

What somebody was thinking. Why something matters. What has been overlooked. What might happen next. They keep asking questions after other people have decided they already know the answer.

That curiosity is something we want more of at Purpose Media.

There is more than one way to tell a Canberra story

For a long time, media has operated on a fairly predictable model.

A small number of people decide what is newsworthy. A small number of voices explain what happened. The story is published, and everyone moves on to the next one.

There is absolutely a place for traditional journalism.

But there is also an enormous amount of community knowledge that can disappear when stories are only approached in one way.

A service announcement can tell us that a program exists. A person who has used it can tell us whether asking for help felt possible. An annual report can tell us how many people participated. A participant can tell us about the moment something finally changed. A policy can tell us what should happen. Someone living within that system can tell us what actually happens. Neither perspective needs to replace the other.

We need more of them.

That is part of what we are building at Purpose Media Canberra.

A place where professional expertise and lived experience can sit alongside each other.

Where community workers can become storytellers.

Where people who have rarely seen their experiences reflected in local media can recognise something of themselves. And they don’t have to bare their own soul to do it!

Where Canberra gets to hear from more of Canberra.

“Things can always change”

There was another answer Elise gave us when we asked what she wished people knew.

That things can always change, they can’t stay how they are forever.”

Because stories about people experiencing hardship can easily become stories that freeze somebody at the most difficult point in their life.

The diagnosis. The crisis. The homelessness. The family breakdown. The financial difficulty. The moment they needed help. But people are not circumstances. And circumstances change.

Good community storytelling needs enough room for complexity, contradiction, growth and possibility. It needs to recognise that somebody can be struggling and funny. Strong and uncertain. An expert in their own life and still need assistance.

A parent, worker, neighbour, friend, advocate, artist or volunteer, while simultaneously navigating something incredibly difficult.

That matters enormously to us.

One of the responsibilities that comes with telling somebody else’s story is remembering that the hardest thing that has happened to a person is not necessarily the most interesting thing about them.

Sometimes it is barely the beginning.

Learning from people who have already walked the path

Elise’s belief in community is particularly powerful because it challenges another assumption we often make about help.

We tend to think expertise flows in one direction. Someone has professional knowledge. Someone else needs it. One teaches and the other receives. Community rarely works that neatly. Sometimes the most useful sentence a person can hear is:

I remember what that was like.

There are people across Canberra carrying incredible stores of knowledge because of the lives they have lived. There is tremendous wisdom in those experiences.

That does not mean one person’s experience represents everyone.

It means experience deserves a place at the table.

And sometimes, before we design another solution, launch another campaign or explain another community issue, we should ask the people who have already been there.

Why new writers matter

When we say Purpose Media is expanding our writing team, the goal isn’t simply to publish more articles.

We want to broaden perspective. Different writers notice different things. They ask different follow-up questions. They connect with different people. They are intrigued by different issues. They recognise importance in places another writer may have walked straight past. That diversity changes storytelling.

And eventually, it changes whose experiences become visible.

Elise brings her own combination of community services experience, curiosity, advocacy interests and emerging writing voice to that mix.

We want writers to discover the issues they cannot stop thinking about. The people they want others to meet. The questions they want Canberra to discuss.

The stories they find themselves telling friends over coffee because they cannot quite believe nobody else knows about them.

That is where some of the best stories begin.

Meet Elise

So, Canberra, meet Elise.

She may be writing about community services.

She might introduce you to someone whose advocacy deserves greater attention.

She may find herself drawn to women’s stories.

Perhaps she will explore something unexpected entirely.

That is part of the fun.

We know she likes mysteries, after all.

What we do know is the perspective she brings fits beautifully with what Purpose Media is trying to build: a local media platform where community knowledge matters, lived experience is valued and more people have the opportunity to shape how Canberra understands itself.

And perhaps one day, somewhere between articles, community work, gardening, candle making and baking with her daughter, Elise will point a camera towards Canberra’s night sky and master astrophotography too.

We hope so.

Because the thing about looking at stars is that you quickly realise there is always more out there than you first noticed.

Stories are much the same.

Sometimes you simply need another person looking in a slightly different direction.

Welcome to Purpose Media, Elise. We’re very glad you’re here.