Maranoa/South West Qld Grow Your Own Non-Clinical Community Mental Health Workforce: Online Session

For the community mental health workforce and community service providers supporting people with mental health challenges across South West Queensland: help shape how our region grows its own workforce.

Do you work in community mental health, or in a community service that supports people experiencing mental health challenges? This session is for you. Grow Your Own (GYO) is a Queensland-first approach to building the non-clinical community mental health workforce from within regional communities.

This is not a consultation. It is a working session to set priorities for action.

It identifies, develops and supports people already living in our communities, rather than relying on recruitment from elsewhere. First Nations, people with lived & living experience of mental health, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) and language-diverse communities are part of the approach at every stage.

In March & October 2026, QAMH held a GYO session in Roma and received valuable input and local knowledge. We also heard that many communities and services across South West Queensland weren’t able to be in the room, including organisations that cover several towns or fly in to deliver services.

This online session widens the conversation, so the region’s plan is shaped by the whole South West.

The community mental health and wellbeing sector is under sustained pressure. Community services organisations across Queensland report the same pattern: rising demand and thinning capacity to meet it. In the 2025 QCOSS State of the Sector survey, 81% of services reported increased demand for what they provide over the previous six months, while 48% reported difficulty finding and keeping appropriately skilled and qualified staff.

In South West Queensland, these pressures are amplified by geography.

Health care and social assistance is the largest employing industry in the Darling Downs -Maranoa region, yet services consistently struggle to attract and retain workers in communities where housing is scarce, training requires leaving the region, and chronic vacancies leave remaining staff carrying unsustainable loads.

Queensland Alliance for Mental Health is working with the region to develop the Grow Your Own Non-Clinical Community Mental Health Workforce Plan (Maranoa, South West Qld region), a locally designed blueprint to create sustainable pathways into non-clinical mental health roles for First Nations peoples, multicultural communities, people with lived and living experience, and local community members.

Organisations, services and community members from Roma, St George, Charleville, Quilpie, Thargomindah, Cunnamulla, Mitchell and surrounding communities, including:

• community mental health, AOD, youth, family and wellbeing services, including fly-in and outreach providers

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled and SEWB services

• multicultural and language-diverse community organisations

• peer workers and people with lived or living experience

• local government, training providers and employers

• Funding bodies, government representatives, & decision makers, including Primary Health Networks, Local Government, & Qld & Commonwealth government agencies

• Community groups, networks, and individuals interested in local workforce pathways

If you work in, live with, fund, or care about mental health in this region, this session is for you.

We’ll work through the same approach we’ve used in Roma, Cairns and Mount Isa, using short interactive polls and discussion. You don’t need to prepare anything. You’ll help build a shared picture of workforce strengths, gaps and opportunities across the South West, and what each community needs to grow its own.

If you couldn’t join in Roma, or work across more than one South West town, this session is for you.

Please share it with colleagues and partners who should be at the table.

For questions or access needs, contact the QAMH Workforce team through this event page or email Michelle Wattridge at mwattridge@qamh.org.au