About Health Futures Australia.
Health Futures Australia (HFA) is a not-for-profit, health promotion charity.
HFA provides services and leadership to a wide range of stakeholders looking to create change and improve the health of their audience, customers and community.
HFA also incubates ideas and champions projects within communities that improve health and wellbeing by building sustainable business practices and economies with a focus on local produce and resources.
Our mission is to create systems for health and wellbeing and the prevention of chronic disease.
Primary prevention is our focus, why? Because “38% of the burden of disease in Australia in 2018 was preventable … almost half of all Australians have at least one chronic condition and almost 9 in 10 deaths were associated with the top ten chronic diseases – many are largely preventable” (AIHW 2021)
How we operate
Health Futures Australia has a committed and talented Board made up of three non-executive directors Professor Rob Moodie (Chair), Rebecca Johanson, and Janelle Ryan, and one Executive Director – Dr Shelley Bowen CEO.
The Board are supported by our Company Secretary, Board member, Rebecca Johanson. The Board provides governance oversight and strategic direction to ensure HFA can deliver on its mission of transforming systems for a healthy population.
Health Futures Australia Ltd is an Australian public company, incorporated as a company limited by guarantee holding ACNC charity registration as a health promotion charity whose subtype is advancing health by promoting healthy living at a national population level. HFA has Deductible Gift Recipient status (DGR1).
Meet our team
Headed by public and population health leaders Dr Shelley Bowen and Professor Rob Moodie AM, the Health Futures team is leading the thinking in redesigning systems for wellbeing.
Our small agile team brings vast experience and knowledge gained globally in public and population health policy, law, finance, strategy, innovation, collaboration, communication and systems design thinking. We bring deep understanding from working within the system to lead transformational change and pursue our big vision to create the future we want to see.
We can and need to make it happen.
Our wellbeing future depends on it.
Dr Shelley Bowen.
CEO
Shelley is a population health system and community changemaker, transformer and disruptor. She designs and enables big thinking, practice and social change processes and transformative policy for better health and wellbeing outcomes. Her expertise is in population and preventative health, collaboration, innovation, scale, strategy and communication, and system design thinking. Shelley is Chief Executive Officer of Health Futures Australia and a Westpac Social Change Fellow.
Prof Rob Moodie AM.
Board Chair
Rob is a public health thought leader, changemaker, activist, life guru and Victorian Father of the Year. Rob’s passion is for urgent community-driven through to global action to build a very different future for our population, doing his part to drive a different future market for prevention in Australia with a focus on leaders for the future. Rob is Chair of Health Futures Australia and Professor of Public Health at The University of Melbourne.
Rebecca Johanson.
Board Director and Company Secretary
With a long career in executive roles spanning Finance, Strategy and People, Rebecca is passionate about delivering sustainable change. Change that is community led and underpinned by a commercial model that transcends the traditional model for prevention. In a constantly changing landscape, her focus is on commercialising prevention to enable us to break free from our ‘stuck’ funding models and enter a new world of market possibilities, driven by partnerships and shared goals.
Janelle Ryan.
Board Director
Janelle is a strategic communications specialist with over 15 years of experience in stakeholder engagement and communications across the UK and Australia.
With a degree in Public Relations and Journalism and a Master of Politics and Policy, Janelle brings expertise in communication, stakeholder engagement, policy development and strategic leadership.
Her recent research paper, Fostering Food Security through Collective Action: Unveiling the Collaboration of Food Democracy and Deliberative Democracy for Food Governance in Victoria’s Central Highlands, explores innovative approaches to food governance by merging food and deliberative democracy principles. This work underscores her commitment to empowering individuals and driving meaningful social change through transparent communication.
Lynda Poke.
Advisor CFO
Lynda is an independent critical thinker and business management professional with a depth and breadth of experience across the private, public and profit for purpose industries. Dedicated to bold and diverse leadership and management, she values nurturing and resourcing teams and individuals to identify and maximise their potential.
As a postgraduate student of management, finance, commercial law, environmental sustainability, and governance, she models and enables the pursuit of excellence in business service delivery, innovation and problem solving.
Lynda has successfully owned, led and managed numerous businesses and organisations across the health and medical, higher education and research, business consulting and accounting, and women’s human rights sectors.
Kevin Mao.
Population Health and Social Innovation Intern
Kevin has volunteered with Health Futures Australia for over three years and is currently the population health intern jointly supported by Health Futures Australia and The University of Melbourne.
He is an aspiring public health focused clinician-scientist working to integrate bench-to-bedside discoveries and policies into the global community utilising population health measures.
Kevin is a passionate volunteer for numerous not for profit organisations like UN Youth Australia, MUHI and 180 Degrees Consulting. Kevin is a Doctor of Medicine candidate with the University of Melbourne.
Jacinda Roberts.
Health Futures Lead (Central Australia)
Jacinda is dietitian who has worked in Central Australia on and off for seven years, in government roles and in an Aboriginal Medical Service. While trained as a clinical dietitian, her experience working with remote and urban Aboriginal communities alongside her learnings from completing her Master of Public Health have challenged her former beliefs of health education for improving health. Rather, she now believes that social enterprise endeavours which employs local Aboriginal people to lead their own health outcomes is the key to reorientating Aboriginal health interventions from this outdated health education model, which is prominent in Central Australia.
The shortcomings of current health initiatives locally drive her commitment to seeing prevention, sustainability and promotion of the welfare of First Nation’s people underpin all health interventions within Central Australia.
Louise Baldwin.
Advisor, Population Health Innovation
Louise is an innovative health promotion specialist with a passion for sustainable change to build healthy communities. She is an award winning practitioner, active researcher and author with extensive experience across nonprofit, government and tertiary sectors.
Louise is an academic and the founder and director of Health and Social Change Australia whilst being an avid mentor for the next generation of health promoters. She is leading the charge to highlight links between entrepreneurship and health as part of broad approaches to wellbeing and thriving communities.