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Get access to the latest research, impact stories, opportunities, news and events from the Institute every second month.Health Voices Victoria is dedicated to strengthening the engagement of communities and people with lived experience in health and related sectors. Meet the team behind the scenes.
We're a team united by a simple belief: people are experts in their own lives.
Our team includes lived experience advocates, researchers, community engagement specialists, health professionals, designers and facilitators who work alongside communities to turn insights into action. Whether we’re conducting research, facilitating co-design, strengthening consumer participation or supporting service improvement, our focus is on ensuring community voices genuinely influence decisions that affect health and wellbeing.
Meet the team
Anny Biagioni
Administration Officer
Anny’s favourite thing about her role is that it’s so eclectic; no two days are the same and she’s always getting opportunities to experience bits and pieces of the many projects that the wider team work on. But perhaps most of all, Anny loves having the opportunity to build bonds of trust with community members and stakeholders, even via communication over the smaller or often-forgotten fiddly admin tasks.
Katherine Burnard
Consultant, Learning and Engagement
Katherine’s role is dynamic. One day she is delivering training on consumer and community engagement, and the next day, she’s planning a co-design workshop. No matter the project, building relationships is key to Katherine’s work. Whether that be with lived experience advocates, researchers, grassroots groups, or value-aligned people doing great work in the community – it’s all about collaboration.
Alison Coughlan
Senior Manager
Consumer and community engagement has been a great passion for Alison for almost thirty years now. She feels that it is such a privilege to be the Manager of Health Voices Victoria, as she gets to work every day that she cares about so deeply with many amazing human beings.
Alana Faust
Senior Engagement Officer
Alana facilitates engagement and collaboration between people in the community and organisations, to improve outcomes and shape better and fairer systems. As a big people person, Alana has always been drawn to the collaborative aspects of this role, and since joining Health Voices Victoria, she has also been trusting herself to experiment and lean into the creativity of the process.
Renee Fiolet
Research Fellow
Renee has taken on the role of research partner with the Health Voices Victoria team. Bringing a passion for equity-focused approaches to healthcare and education, Renee’s experience in research, co-design, and participatory methods have found a happy home within the HVV team. She may only be with the team a few days a week, but she is as happy as a kid in a candy store!
Jess Franks
Consultant, Co-design and Engagement
Jess is in the unique position of working with Health Voices Victoria and Western Victoria Primary Health Network (WVPHN). Her role sits at the intersection of creativity, systems thinking, and humanity, helping researchers and health teams bring best-practice co-design to life so that consumer and community voices do not sit on the fringes and genuinely shape what we do.
Abdurrehman Nadeem
Senior Engagement Officer
Abdurrehman loves the multifaceted nature of his work. Not only does he have the privilege of working together with people with lived experience, but he also has the opportunity to contribute to resource development and training initiatives that support meaningful engagement between health organisations, researchers, and the communities they are looking to engage with.
Ali Peipers
Project Consultant
Ali enjoys working across many different elements of the often multi-faceted projects she undertakes. Her role as a Project Consultant with Health Voices Victoria gives her the opportunity to work directly with consumers and community members (which she finds so insightful), as well as other stakeholders and project partners.
Pia Sappl
Lived Experience Research Fellow
Pia describes her role with the centre as her dream job! She was thrilled to join the team in October 2024, and she is currently working part time (2 days per week) which allows her to look after her health. There are so many things that Pia loves about her role; her wonderful colleagues, the interesting and meaningful work, and being able to use her professional skills in research in combination with her lived experience knowledge.
Angelica Scott
Human-Centred Design Consultant
Gel is a human-centred design consultant working with the Health Voices Victoria team on the AI in Health Trust Lab. The thing Gel enjoys most about working with the HVV team is being a part of an organisation that is unwavering in its advocacy to centre the consumer in everything.
Jo Szczepańska
Manager of Innovation and Service Development
Jo is really excited about this role’s potential to support community members and health services to partner in new ways, and she’s particularly keen on building networks of support and next-practice.
Steph Thow
Manager, First Nations Engagement
Steph sees her journey with Health Voices Victoria as a garden – if she is the seed, Community is the soil that sustains her. Everything Steph does is grounded in being led by Community. She believes that meaningful engagement starts with humility. It means not arriving with a solution but arriving with open ears, as we were born with two for this reason, for listening. Steph believes that Community holds so much knowledge, and her role is to help create the space for it to grow.
Our newsletter
Each month we share our Health Voices Chorus newsletter – with our subscribers. In it we share:
- Updates from the team
- Engagement opportunities for consumers and communities
- Resources and events
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Get in touch
Deakin University,
221 Burwood Highway,
Burwood VIC, 3125