Key people

Helen is responsible for leading the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health Partnership and Implementation strategy. She has vast knowledge of Human and Community Services that includes over 30 years executive management experience, identifying service gaps, developing community partnerships, and advocating for quality training and systems support to improve knowledge, skills and practice across service sectors. She has lead action research, community consultation, community development, co-design and workforce development capacity building initiatives. Helen’s recent roles have involved developing evidence-informed training products and delivery of these to national audiences along with supported systems and implementation strategies to inform practice change to key audiences such as the ACT government and Queensland and New South Wales Health. Before joining Emerging Minds Helen was the Project Manager of national workforce development initiative Protecting and Nurturing Children: Building Capacity Building Bridges (BCBB) at the Australian Centre for Child Protection, University of South Australia. This initiative was responsible for supporting organisations across Australia in adult-focused, and child and family focused services to enhance their knowledge, skills and collaborative relationships to support parents to meet the developmental and social and emotional needs of children in their care.

Ben is responsible for leading the development of resources and tools for parents and families on infant and child mental health. A strong focus of his role is to improve communication and partnerships between families, educators and health service providers. A qualified Occupational Therapist, he has held positions in a variety of mental health and child and family services across Australia and the United Kingdom. This clinical experience has seen him focus on supporting rural and remote families as part of a telehealth assessment, therapy and capacity building service. Ben also has extensive experience leading projects of a complex nature, including: leading the design and delivery of national mental health promotion projects and activities that seek to improve child mental health literacy in families; development and delivery of an education focused workforce development framework and training package for staff as part of the Be You bushfire response program; large scale Telehealth projects which supported Royal Far West’s clinical work in rural and remote areas of Australia; and the redesign of an NSW Health funded complex developmental assessment service, known as the Paediatric Developmental Program (PDP). Ben is also a trained facilitator of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program and enjoys facilitating this program in his local community.

Dr Goodyear leads development and implementation of the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health's research and evaluation strategy, and the Research and Evaluation team. She specialises in codesign and capacity building of research and evaluation methodologies to support the translation of evidence into practice. Melinda has a background in psychology, family resilience and neuroscience, and 20+ years experience working as an implementation scientist and researcher of intergenerational vulnerability in families. Also as a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University, she is particularly interested in understanding how to support and promote mental health and wellbeing among family members. Dr Goodyear has an established academic track record and demonstrated ability to conduct complex quantitative, qualitative and mixed method studies with highly vulnerable and marginalised people, including children. With 75+ peer reviewed publications (including 60+ journals), she has been awarded >$6 million dollars in competitive research funding to explore the needs of families where there is a mental illness, including workforce development initiatives with mental health and social services to address those needs. Melinda’s broad work covers: supporting organisations and workforces in understanding the program theory behind key outcomes they want to achieve; understanding the evidence base from academic literature, practitioners and families; practice design and implementation of evidence based interventions; knowledge translation and organisational change approaches, including the building of self-determination in practitioners and families; and evaluation design and quality improvement approaches.

Rachael is responsible for leading Emerging Minds' reporting, business process improvement and development activities. She has held a range of project, operational and managerial roles, including six years managing fundraising programs in the not-for-profit and university sectors. As Project Lead at Cancer Council SA, she led the planning and execution of all state based funding products, including events like Ride for a Reason, Relay For Life and the community fundraising portfolio. She was responsible for developing project plans, communications, donor engagement and stewardship strategies through to event day execution. Rachael brings project management, systems and process development skills to the Emerging Minds team. She is passionate about ensuring our work is delivered efficiently and effectively to optimise Emerging Minds' impact on the health and wellbeing of Australia’s infants, children and adolescents.