Our work. Impact in practice.
We work with organisations tackling some of Australia's most pressing social and environmental challenges. From national organisations seeking to strengthen their impact, to community services making difficult choices about their future, our role is to help turn complexity into clarity and good thinking into practical action.
Every organisation is different, and so is the work. What connects our projects is a focus on bringing the right perspectives together, challenging assumptions, making clear choices and developing strategies that people can genuinely use.
Our experience at a glance
90+
organisations supported
180+
projects delivered
Every Australian state and territory
reached.
Selected work
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Big organisation. Many moving parts. One clear direction.
When you're delivering services across Australia, how do you create a strategy that brings everyone together without losing what makes each part valuable? We helped SSI make the big choices about services, sustainable growth and national influence.
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Big ambition needs more than big ideas.
Preventing violence against women requires change across entire systems. We've worked with Our Watch over several years to strengthen strategic direction, leadership alignment and ways of working - helping turn complex challenges into clearer priorities and practical action.
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When everything matters, where do you focus?
For a community legal centre facing growing need and finite resources, strategy means making some difficult choices. We helped Southside Justice connect its commitment to social justice with clear priorities, a stronger focus on impact and a sustainable way forward.
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What if better health starts with changing the system?
Health is shaped by far more than individual choices. We worked with VicHealth to develop a bold ten-year systems change strategy, focused on the wider environments and systems that influence health and equity across Victoria.
A closer look at our work
SSI: Big organisation. Many moving parts. One clear direction.
National strategic planning | Stakeholder engagement | Organisational alignment
The bigger an organisation gets, the harder it can become to hold a shared sense of direction. Different services, different communities, different funding arrangements and different views about where to go next. All important, but not always easy to bring together.
That was the challenge facing Settlement Services International (SSI) as it looked towards 2030. With a significant national footprint and a growing range of services supporting refugees, migrants and multicultural communities, SSI needed a strategy that did more than bring its many activities under one banner.
It needed to make some real choices. What should SSI be known for? Where should it grow? And how could the organisation use its scale, experience and community relationships to influence the systems that shape opportunity and inclusion across Australia?
Where we came in
Ensemble worked closely with SSI's Board, Executive, leaders, staff and members to develop its 2026–2030 strategy.
There was no shortage of ideas or ambition. Our job was to listen carefully, make sense of the complexity and help the organisation work through the choices that would make the greatest difference.
Through extensive engagement, strategic analysis and facilitated conversations, we brought together different perspectives, challenged assumptions and helped build a shared understanding of what SSI was ultimately working towards.
What came out of it
A strategy built around three connected directions: services that change lives, growth for sustainable impact, and influence that shifts systems.
Importantly, these aren't three disconnected ambitions. Together they describe how SSI can deliver excellent services, grow deliberately and use the evidence and experience from its frontline work to create change beyond its own organisation.
The result is a much clearer connection between what SSI does, where it wants to grow and the bigger contribution it wants to make — with greater ownership of that direction across the organisation.
"Ensemble listened carefully, made sense of a lot of complexity and kept bringing us back to the choices that mattered. They were provocative and challenging in a way that was engaging, constructive and pushed us towards better thinking."
Ram Neupane
Executive General Manager, Business Operations & Service Excellence
Settlement Services International
Our Watch: Big ambition needs more than big ideas.
Strategy facilitation | Leadership alignment | Innovation and organisational capability
Stopping violence against women before it starts is an enormous ambition. It requires changes in attitudes, institutions, policies, behaviours and the systems that shape everyday life. No single organisation, team or initiative can achieve that alone.
For Our Watch, the national organisation working to prevent violence against women, that creates some very real strategic and organisational challenges. How do you translate an ambition for systems-wide change into the work of individual teams? How do you maintain focus when priorities are complex, stakeholders are diverse and the environment keeps shifting?
And just as importantly, how do you make sure the people doing the work have the clarity, capability and ways of working to deliver?
Where we came in
Ensemble has worked with Our Watch across several years and different parts of the organisation, supporting both its strategic thinking and the practical conditions needed to turn that thinking into action.
Our work has included helping establish the Innovation Directorate, developing strategic frameworks and ways of working, and facilitating conversations around leadership, priorities and organisational direction.
More recently, we've supported leadership teams navigating change and considering how to strengthen their collective contribution to Our Watch's wider prevention agenda.
These aren't always easy conversations. Different perspectives, competing priorities and complex relationships are part of the territory. Our role has been to create the space to work through them constructively, bring clarity to what matters and turn the discussion into something useful.
What came out of it
Clearer strategic frameworks, stronger shared understanding and more deliberate approaches to how teams plan, collaborate and deliver.
Across these engagements, the common thread has been connecting the organisation's big ambitions with the people, structures and decisions needed to move them forward.
Because when you're trying to influence change at a national and systems level, how an organisation works is as important as what it sets out to achieve.
"I always reach out when we need strategic assistance because they truly understand the NFP sector and deliver bespoke approaches. They are exceptional at managing stakeholders with disparate views and bringing complex ideas into crisp outputs."
Krista Seddon
Director of Innovation
Our Watch
Southside Justice: When everything matters, where do you focus?
Not-for-profit strategic planning | Board engagement | Community impact and sustainability
For organisations working on the frontline of social justice, there is rarely a shortage of things worth doing.
The needs are significant. The issues are complex. And the ambition to make a difference often runs well ahead of the resources available to do it.
That was an important part of the strategic conversation with Southside Justice, a community legal centre with a long history of supporting people experiencing disadvantage and challenging injustice.
Its work sits across two connected but different ambitions: helping people access legal support today, while also challenging the systemic barriers that create unfair outcomes in the first place.
Both matter. But with limited funding, growing community need and an evolving environment, strategy has to do more than describe everything an organisation cares about. It has to help make choices.
Where we came in
Ensemble worked with Southside Justice's leadership and Board to develop its 2023–2028 strategy, bringing together questions about community need, organisational strengths, advocacy, partnerships and long-term sustainability.
We helped create the space to step out of day-to-day pressures and ask some bigger questions. Where could Southside Justice make the greatest difference? What role should it play in the wider justice system? And what would the organisation need to strengthen or change to continue delivering on its purpose?
Importantly, the conversation wasn't about choosing between ambition and practicality. It was about bringing the two together.
What came out of it
A strategy built around three connected priorities: Securing the organisation, Demonstrating its value and Strengthening its ability to thrive.
Together, they connect Southside Justice's community impact ambitions with the people, partnerships, funding and organisational capability needed to deliver.
Our work together has continued, including revisiting the strategy as the organisation considers what's changed, what's working and where its focus needs to evolve.
It's a good reminder that strategy shouldn't be treated as something finished when the plan is approved. It needs to keep helping organisations make decisions as the world around them changes.
"Ensemble helped us turn complex ideas about systems change, community need and organisational sustainability into a clear direction that feels both ambitious and genuinely ours."
Mel Dye
Chief Executive Officer Southside Justice
VicHealth: What if better health starts with changing the system?
Systems change strategy | Long-term strategic planning | Health equity
We know that good health is shaped by more than individual choices.
Where people live, what they can afford, the environments around them and the systems they interact with all influence their ability to live healthy lives.
So, if we really want to improve health outcomes across a population, how much can we achieve by focusing on individual behaviours alone?
This was a central question in our work with VicHealth, as the organisation looked to develop its next ten-year strategy.
After a decade of work under its previous action agenda, VicHealth had an opportunity to think differently about where and how it could create lasting impact. Not simply which programs to support, but which systems it could help shift.
Where we came in
Ensemble partnered with VicHealth to design and facilitate the development of its 2023–2033 strategy, bringing together evidence, internal and external perspectives, and some big conversations about health, equity and the organisation's future role.
This wasn't traditional strategic planning built around a list of programs or activities.
Instead, we worked with VicHealth to explore the wider systems influencing health outcomes, identify where the organisation was best placed to contribute and translate systems thinking into a clear strategic direction.
The challenge was to hold onto the ambition of long-term transformation while being practical about the choices, partnerships and levers needed to pursue it.
What came out of it
A ten-year strategy centred on changing the systems that shape health.
The strategy identifies three systems where VicHealth can contribute to meaningful change: Neighbourhood and Built Systems, Commercial and Economic Systems, and Food Systems.
It also embeds broader considerations around climate, community leadership and the wellbeing of future generations.
Rather than treating health promotion as a series of individual interventions, the strategy provides a framework for making choices about where VicHealth can invest, influence and work with others to create healthier, fairer outcomes.
For us, it's a powerful example of what strategy can do when it starts with the bigger picture — and then gets specific about the role an organisation can play in changing it.