My name's Gill Townsend, and I work for Beacon Strategies. My role in the collaborative is as the lead of the backbone team. When the strategy came out, we really liked it. It reflected a lot of the things that across Far North Queensland in our collaborative that we'd been talking about. And we knew about the amount of work that had gone into the strategy. We'd been part of submitting information for the strategy and inviting people to submit. So, we wanted to make the strategy live for people in our collaboratives. We ran three sessions. So one, like an introduction, two, diving deeper, looking at the objectives, and then three, touching on the outcomes framework. And then with those, we did one online and one face-to-face. So in all, in that we did six sessions. And we designed them in a way that people could interact with each other. So you mentioned the human bingo. We did play human bingo with the objectives. So we put the objectives on a card, and invited people to move around the room and talk to each other about what the objective meant for them and where they saw their work in the objective. So for us, it hit a couple of things. It got people talking about the objectives, and it got people talking with each other and then exploring where they had similarities. Firstly, we were surprised about how interested people were. We had groups of 25 people in the room, then we had another groups of 12 or so online, or more online, each time. Some people came to every session. Some people just dipped in and out. Some people came then brought more people along.
And from the beginning, some of the feedback back was, "Wow, this is a roadmap. I can use this." The first session we did was we almost played like a puzzle game with the domains and the objectives. So we put them all on cards, and then the domains and the objectives, and then we put them around the room on tables and got people to sit and talk about what that meant for them, and then feedback, workshop style, and got people moving around the room. So, to break down the intimidation is if you look at it one piece at a time, that's what we did. I think when you look at the document as a whole, it may not stand out that way.
But when you're invited to look at it in relationship with another person, then it starts to be quite meaningful. So people could relate to all of the objectives. One of the things that people said to us throughout the sessions that we've held is that you can hear the voice of lived experience throughout the strategy. And I think that it's important to make sure that the voice of lived experience is not a sidebar, and that it really is infused in all of the work that we do in this area.