Some events are valuable in the moment. People attend, hear from a panel, ask good questions, make a few notes and return to work. But if the conversation ends when the webinar closes, much of the value disappears with it.
That was the opportunity behind Strengthening Youth Mental Health Pathways, a 90-minute online session hosted by the ACT Child & Youth Mental Health Sector Alliance in partnership with the Youth Coalition of the ACT, the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing and Capital Health Network.
The event brought together more than 70 people from across government, community, education and youth services, with 31 organisations represented. Its purpose was not simply to showcase services. It was to explore a harder question:
How do we make it easier for young people and the people supporting them; to find, access and stay connected with the right help?
The session became an example of what can happen when engagement is designed not just to inform, but to listen, connect and create something useful afterwards.
The challenge: good services can still be hard to navigate
Youth mental health systems are often described as complex. That complexity is not necessarily because there is nothing available.
Sometimes the issue is that people do not know what exists, how services connect, where one service stops and another begins, or what to do while waiting for the next step. That creates a very different challenge.
If the services already exist, the question is no longer only:
What else do we need to build?
It becomes:
How do we make the existing system more visible, connected and usable?
The webinar provided a practical way to explore that question.
Two services were used as starting points for the conversation: MindMap ACT, a free navigation service for young people and families, and MOST — Moderated Online Social Therapy, a digital mental health platform delivered by Orygen Digital.
But the session was not designed as a series of service presentations. The broader goal was to examine how people actually move through the system.
The opportunity: design the event around the problem, not the presenters
Purpose Media CBR was engaged to facilitate the session. That meant thinking beyond who would speak and what information needed to be presented.
The session was designed to bring together:
- service knowledge
- sector experience
- lived experience
- interactive polling
- facilitated discussion
- practical questions from participants.
The panel included representatives from mental health organisations, navigation services, digital mental health, community services and youth advocacy. Importantly, lived experience was part of the discussion itself, not an addition at the end.
Participants were encouraged to think about system navigation from the perspective of the young person moving through it.
That helped shift the conversation away from individual organisational boundaries and towards the experience of the person trying to find help.
What the conversation revealed
Several themes emerged clearly from the webinar.
Awareness
One of the strongest findings was also one of the simplest.
People cannot use services they do not know exist. Workers and families were not always aware of available navigation supports, reinforcing the need for clearer communication and referral pathways across the system. This is an important distinction. A gap in awareness can look like a gap in service provision.
Before creating another program, platform or resource, organisations may need to ask:
Have we made what already exists easy enough to find and understand?
Connection
Participants also recognised the value of combining human and digital support. Technology was not viewed as a replacement for relationships. Instead, the discussion reinforced the potential for digital tools to extend access while maintaining relational support around the young person.
That matters in a sector where innovation can too easily become a conversation about platforms rather than people. A digital solution may improve access. A human relationship may build trust.
Strong systems work out how the two can complement each other.
Continuity
Navigation is not simply about telling someone where to go next. The period between services matters too. Participants particularly valued approaches that maintain contact with young people while they are waiting for care, including MindMap ACT’s Active Hold model. That raises a useful system-design question:
Who holds the relationship while the person is moving between parts of the system?
A technically correct referral is not necessarily a successful transition. If the person becomes disconnected somewhere between “we referred you” and “you have now commenced support”, the pathway has failed from their perspective.
Co-design
Youth advocates emphasised that lived experience needs to be embedded in service design, policy and evaluation. That means going further than asking young people whether they liked a service. It means involving people in questions such as:
- What is difficult about finding help?
- What information makes sense?
- Where do people fall out of the pathway?
- What does a good transition feel like?
- What would make someone more likely to stay engaged?
When lived experience helps shape those questions, organisations are more likely to see problems that are invisible from inside their own systems.
Collaboration
The webinar also demonstrated a strong appetite for continued cross-sector work. Participants wanted greater clarity, common language and opportunities to work together around navigation. That matters because navigation problems rarely belong to one organisation.
A young person may move between primary care, mental health services, schools, community organisations, digital platforms and family supports. Each organisation may be delivering its own role well while the overall pathway remains difficult.
Collaboration allows organisations to examine the gaps between services, not just performance within them.
The part that often gets missed: what happens after the event?
The webinar itself was only one part of the work.
The information generated during the event was then synthesised into a Post-Event Impact Summary and a practical FAQ and Resource Sheet.
The FAQ responded to questions raised during the webinar about eligibility, referrals, privacy, access, collaboration and how services could be used by young people and professionals. This matters because consultation creates information and this information should be harnessed for the future and not lost. The question is whether an organisation captures it and how they plan to use it.
When designed well, an event can generate:
questions people still have → barriers they are experiencing → misunderstandings about services → areas of shared concern → opportunities for collaboration → practical next actions.
That information should not disappear into someone’s meeting notes. It can become part of how organisations understand their system.
The numbers tell part of the story
The event recorded:
- more than 70 registrations
- 31 organisations represented
- participants from government, community, education and youth services
- two lived-experience youth representatives
- 17 submitted poll responses
- a five-star average webinar rating.
Those numbers are useful. But attendance is not the most important outcome. The greater value was the ability to take a group of people with different perspectives and turn the conversation into clearer shared understanding. That is the difference between hosting an event and designing engagement.
What this case study tells us
Organisations often know they need to consult. They organise a roundtable, workshop, webinar or community conversation. The risk is that the event itself becomes the deliverable.
We held the consultation.
We had 70 people attend.
People said it was useful.
Done.
But good engagement should leave something behind.
It might be:
- a clearer definition of the problem
- insight into the experience of people using the system
- areas of agreement and disagreement
- practical recommendations
- new partnerships
- questions requiring further investigation
- resources that make the system easier to navigate
- evidence that influences the next strategic decision.
The event is the mechanism.
The value is what you learn and what happens next.
Interested in this webinar and outcomes? See the publilshed recording, slides and event report here.
The question I would ask your organisation
If you are planning a consultation, sector forum, strategy workshop or stakeholder event, ask:
What will we know after this conversation that we do not know now and what will we do differently because of it?
And then ask one more:
What happens to everything people tell us after they leave the room?
If there is no clear answer, there may be an opportunity to redesign the engagement before it begins.
Purpose Media CBR works with organisations to design and facilitate stakeholder engagement that goes beyond participation, bringing together lived experience, sector knowledge and practical evidence, and turning the conversation into insight that can inform communication, strategy and action.
Learn more about how to work with us!
