Dr Coralie Wales, Lead Facilitator, Community Partnerships at WentWest, with Judith Murray, Greg Kilby, Tapan Bhasvar and Joseph Meyer from the Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly

We are delighted to have been awarded the 2024 Highly Commended Health Core Value Award for our work conducted in partnership with community in establishing the Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly. This award, given by The International Association for Public Participation Australasia (IAP2) at the awards ceremony on Tuesday 3 September, recognises our team for setting primary health and social care priorities and using a deliberative democratic participatory approach.

IAP2 Australasia’s premier Core Values Awards recognise and encourage projects and organisations that are at the forefront of community and stakeholder engagement. The awards were created to encourage excellence, quality, and innovation in public participation.

On the night, Dr Coralie Wales, Lead Facilitator, Community Partnerships at WentWest, was honoured to receive this award on behalf of our organisation and the Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly. Dr Coralie Wales commented, “Winning this award reflects WentWest’s appetite to innovate, excel and improve health outcomes for our community in Western Sydney. The journey so far that has delivered the new Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly has been exciting. This added foundation increases our understanding of the health and social care priorities of our population in Western Sydney. Our great colleagues inside WentWest, and the colleagues that make up the Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly, are why the program has been so successful to date. It is extraordinarily gratifying and validating for our team to receive this award.”

The Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly officially launched in July this year, following the success and recommendations uncovered in the Citizens’ Juries which ran in late-2023.

The goal of the Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly includes promoting better connections between health and social care, tracking the implementation of the health and social care priority recommendations made by the juries and demonstrating meaningful allyship between First Nations and other culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Western Sydney.  

As an organisation, we are delighted both at the work already completed in consultation with members of our community and the receipt of this honourable award. For more information about the Citizens’ Juries process and what the juries recommended, please visit our Citizens’ Juries webpage.

This information is accurate as of 5 September 2024.