Delivering better outcomes through partnership: our Collaborative Charter

The Collaborative Centre exists to bring together researchers, practitioners and people with lived and living experience to transform how mental health and wellbeing services are delivered.

We know it’s only by working together that we can achieve meaningful, sustainable change.

Partnership and collaboration must have benefits for all parties, and be based on trust, mutual values and a shared understanding about what we are trying to achieve together.

To support the establishment of successful partnerships, we’ve developed a Collaborative Charter that outlines how we will collaborate across the sector to support mental health and wellbeing system transformation.

What the Collaborative Charter includes

The Collaborative Charter outlines eight principles that will guide our partnerships and collaborations. It also defines what success looks like against each principle, so we can measure whether our collaborations are having positive outcomes for all participants.

The Charter also ensures that our partnerships and collaborations are deeply aligned to our foundational values – ensuring lived and living experience participation, building strong connections and relationships across the sector, and upholding human rights and social justice.

How we will apply the Collaborative Charter

The Collaborative Charter will be our roadmap for how, when and why we collaborate. It will guide our decision making, and ensure that our collaborations are beneficial for all parties.

We are also developing practical guidelines to support implementation of the Charter, and these will be our toolkit for how we consider, formalise and evaluate collaborations.

The principles of the Charter are already informing our work towards developing a Memorandum of Understanding with our consortium lead partners, the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne. Taking a relational approach and creating space for discussing ideas and opportunities has enabled us to reach shared understandings of how the partnership can achieve its aims. The Memorandum of Understanding is currently being drafted, and we look forward to sharing it in the coming months.