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If you’ve been to a community event anywhere between Coffs and Nambucca in the past 18 months, chances are you’ve met proud Wiradjuri woman living and working on Gumbaynnggirr Country, Janene Chitts. As Health Voyage’s Partnerships & Cultural Engagement Officer, Janene is the connective tissue between our services and broader organisation, and the communities we serve across Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung and Yaegl nations.
This year, her work was recognised with a nomination for the Community Development Award at the Yandaarra Aunty Grace Roberts Awards. We sat down with Janene to talk about partnerships, culture, and why nothing beats showing up in person.
Three circles, one goal
Ask Janene to describe her role and she’ll tell you no two days look the same – and that’s exactly how she likes it. She thinks about her work in two halves, partnerships and cultural engagement, and in three circles.
“I think of it in three circles,” she explains. “Our internal partnerships between the Women’s Health Centre, Endometriosis and Pelvic Pain Clinic, headspace Coffs and headspace Grafton and Work and Study Program; our partnerships with Aboriginal organisations; and our partnerships with mainstream service providers.”
Janene brings more than 30 years in health to the role. She moved to Coffs Harbour for a position with the Healthy North Coast Primary Health Network, coordinating primary health across GP practices in Woolgoolga, Coffs Harbour and Bellingen.
The power of being in the room
If there’s a philosophy underpinning everything Janene does, it’s this: relationships are built in person.
“What I love most about this role is the human relationships,” she says. “There’s nothing that replaces sitting down with someone face-to-face – listening, responding, reading the room. That’s where real rapport is built.”
In a world grown reliant on screens, Janene sees her job as nurturing the personal connections that technology can’t replicate – and the results speak for themselves. From a single stall at the Living Well Expo at the Coffs Harbour Showground, she fielded two requests for information sessions, alongside countless conversations introducing people to Health Voyage and its services.
“It’s the opportunistic stuff that’s so valuable,” she says. “People still come up to our stall and say, ‘Oh, that’s you?’ They don’t always realise Health Voyage is the organisation behind key primary health services in our community and the services that are available to them either within Health Voyage or other community services. Every conversation helps.”
That visibility serves a bigger purpose, too – showing the community that services work together, not in silos. When Janene sits down with another agency and discovers overlapping work in women’s health or youth mental health, the conversation turns practical.
“You can say: We do A, B and C – you do X, Y and Z. How can we bring those together? That makes things easier for both of us, and better for the community.”
Lately, that commitment has taken her deeper into the Nambucca Valley, including the Care and Community event and the Mums and Bubs NAIDOC event. For Janene, consistent presence is how trust is built.
Meeting young people where they are
Connection-building is also opening doors for our headspace centres. Janene has begun early conversations with Coffs/Clarence Police about how headspace can support their local PCYC activities – talks that are still in their infancy, but grounded in a simple, relationship-first idea.
“It’s about building relationships so young people feel comfortable telling us what they actually want and need,” she explains. “Then we work out how headspace can meet that need.”
That behind-the-scenes connective work was also on show when two headspace Coffs Harbour staff recently delivered a mental health resilience program with female students at the Gumbaynggirr Giingana Freedom School – the program focused on building confidence and self-esteem. While the program was developed and delivered by the headspace team, young people and families, Janene played the supporting role she knows best: helping the staff build rapport with the school and smoothing out delivery challenges along the way.
With the program now being evaluated, she’s looking forward to the conversations that might follow.
“If the outcomes are what we hope, I want to sit down with the team and ask: where do we take this next? Other schools? Other service providers? That excites me.”
Cultural safety, the everyday version
Ask Janene what culturally safe engagement means in practice – not the policy version, the everyday version – and her answer is disarmingly simple.
“Cultural safety is about genuine engagement. Genuinely asking people: what do you think is going to work? Why do you think it will work? And if you don’t think it will work – why not, and how else could we do it? That’s the guts of it.”
Over three decades in health, Janene has seen consultation done in all sorts of ways. What she values about Health Voyage is that engagement with the various cultures within our community is never a box-ticking exercise. “This organisation genuinely cares,” she says. “And that’s half the battle.”
Her advice for any organisation wanting to build real relationships with communities from a different culture or origin? “Bring real interest. A genuine desire to learn and know more, without assuming you already know.”
‘Our Christmas in July’
When Janene arrived at the Aunty Grace Roberts Awards as a nominee for the Community Development Award, what struck her wasn’t her own nomination – it was the company she was in.
“There were eleven people nominated in my category alone. Eleven! That instantly told me something wonderful – there are many people in this community interested enough to nominate other community members. That’s amazing.”
The awards fell within a NAIDOC Week that Janene describes with genuine delight.
“I said to somebody during NAIDOC Week: this is our Christmas in July. There are so many events, so much happening in communities all around Australia – and more and more non-Aboriginal people are realising they’re invited too. It’s not just for the Aboriginal community to celebrate. We are the oldest living cultures in the world, and belong to this country. That’s something for everyone to be proud of, to acknowledge, and to wear as a badge of honour.”
What’s next
There’s plenty on the horizon. Health Voyage has submitted it’s first Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan to Reconciliation Australia – it has been endorsed by the Board, and shaped by staff and community feedback.
And on 2 September, for Indigenous Literacy Day, Janene is hosting a lunch in Coffs Harbour for Health Voyage staff, the Board and the Young Leaders Council, featuring guest speakers from the MuurrbayAboriginal Language Centre in Nambucca Heads on the importance of preserving Aboriginal stories and language. True to form, Janene has been preparing her own contribution – research on the Aboriginal names of towns and cities across Australia and their meanings, along with Aboriginal authors, writers and playwrights.
“I’m excited about that one,” she says.
Open, not closed
Asked what message she’d leave about community and connection in our region, Janene reflects on how quickly Coffs Harbour made her feel at home.
“Some communities, you have to live there twenty years before you’re a local. Here, within a couple of days, I felt like it was okay for me to be here. That feeling will stay with me.”
And perhaps that’s the thread running through everything Janene does – the openness she brings to every stall, meeting and community hall across our region.
“People are intuitive – they can tell whether you’re open or closed,” she says. “I try not to be closed.”
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