Australian Rotary Health

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Australian Rotary Health We fund possibility. We back researchers early, at the point where funding is hardest to find and matters most.

Australian Rotary Health is not only committed to providing funding and research into mental health issues, we also provide funding into a broad range of general health areas, provide scholarships for rural medical and nursing students, as well as Indigenous health students. Australian Rotary Health prioritises high-quality research projects which directly benefit the community. Our mission is to support healthier minds, bodies and communities through research, awareness and education.

Leila Thurling’s grandmother was a nurse. So was her mother. Both of them, she says, are the reason she has a passion fo...
17/10/2026

Leila Thurling’s grandmother was a nurse. So was her mother. Both of them, she says, are the reason she has a passion for medicine at all.

She is a Palawa woman, born in Nowra, who grew up between Wagga Wagga, Adelaide and Ballarat. She is now studying a Bachelor of Medical Science and Doctor of Medicine at Monash University, and she has just finished an 18 week GP placement in Marong. Next she goes to Mildura for paediatrics, obstetrics and psychiatry.

Eighteen weeks in a regional general practice is not a gentle introduction. It is long days, a lot of responsibility and a long way from home.

She does not pretend it was easy. There were times, she says, when the demands appeared overwhelming. Facing them head on, with her supervisors behind her, is what let her learn and adapt and grow.

The Rotary Club of Geelong Central funds her 2025 Australian Rotary Health Indigenous Health Scholarship.

Three generations of women in the same family answering the same call. One Rotary club making sure the third one gets to finish.

Back a scholar with us.

australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

Australian Rotary Health is 45 years old this year, and I have been asked more than once lately what that actually amoun...
17/10/2026

Australian Rotary Health is 45 years old this year, and I have been asked more than once lately what that actually amounts to.

Here is the arithmetic. Since 1985, Australian researchers have received more than $56 million through us. This year alone we have committed almost $2 million: eleven research projects into the mental health of children aged 0 to 12, forty Indigenous Health Scholarships, twenty nine PhD scholarships, two postdoctoral fellowships, and eleven rural medical and nursing scholarships.

But numbers are the easy part, and they are not what I think about.

What 45 years buys is a screening tool built here in 2018 that is now also being used with mothers in Japan and in Turkey. It buys a regional Queensland primary school where referrals for problem behaviours halved, because every teacher in the building was taught to understand what trauma looks like in an eight year old. It buys a free guide any teacher in this country can open on their phone tonight. It buys an app, proven in two separate trials, that measurably reduces the severity of suicidal thoughts in young people.

It buys a decade-long study that found that many children living with family violence are doing well, and then went looking for why, because that is the finding you can actually act on.

It buys the first female First Nations optometrist in Australia going back to study audiology, because the communities she serves need both.

And it buys the outcomes nobody can see yet. The PhD that started in January. The question nobody else has funded anywhere.

We have hundreds of stories to tell, and not one of them happened because a committee decided the evidence was finally strong enough. Every single one happened because Rotarians and donors and partners backed a person at the point where there was nothing to show yet, and then waited, often for years, often without ever being told how it turned out.

That is a particular kind of generosity, and it is rarer than it sounds. Thank you for 45 years of it.

If you want to be part of the next 45, start here. australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

We fund possibility.

Yvonne Keane AM Chief Executive Officer, Australian Rotary Health

When a teenager is struggling, the first person who finds out is almost never a parent, a teacher or a counsellor.It is ...
16/10/2026

When a teenager is struggling, the first person who finds out is almost never a parent, a teacher or a counsellor.

It is another teenager. Usually at a bus stop, usually at eleven at night, usually someone with no idea what to say next.

We have all been that friend at some point. You want to help. You are terrified of saying the wrong thing. So you say nothing much, and hope it passes.

Dr Louise Birrell started there. If the person who hears it first is a fifteen year old, she reasoned, then the fifteen year old is who needs the skills.

In 2019 we funded her at the University of Sydney, through one of our Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellowships, to build exactly that. It is called Mind Your Mate, and it was co-designed with young people rather than written at them. Classroom lessons and an app, teaching the practical business of being a good friend to someone who is not doing well. What to notice. What to say. What to do when it is beyond you.

Then they tested it across 12 schools.

The young people who did the program had fewer symptoms of depression than the control group, twelve months later. Not the ones being worried about. The ones doing the supporting.

Teaching a young person how to help their friend made that young person better too.

Mental health, as she puts it, is the top issue of national concern for young Australians, with alcohol and other drugs close behind. And the country’s usual answer is to tell teenagers to ask each other if they are okay, without ever teaching them what to do with the answer.

The work has already travelled further than the trial. Her team co-led the Respect Your Brain resources for NSW Health, which have been watched more than 200,000 times, and the classroom program is being expanded now.

Mind Your Mate is still in research, so it is not something a school can simply sign up for yet. When that changes, you will hear it here.

This is the kind of question that only gets asked if somebody funds it early. That somebody was Rotarians.

Back a breakthrough with us. australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

Here is the part of research funding that almost nobody counts.When you fund a researcher, the impact does not stop at o...
15/10/2026

Here is the part of research funding that almost nobody counts.

When you fund a researcher, the impact does not stop at one study. It carries into every person she goes on to teach, mentor and support.

Associate Professor Melanie Porter is a clinical neuropsychologist at Macquarie University. She has spent more than twenty years assessing and treating children, adults and families, much of it with children who have Williams syndrome, Down syndrome and other neurodevelopmental conditions. Children whose brains work in ways the standard tests were never designed to measure. She has published more than 85 papers on it, and she directs ADHD Australia.

And she has supervised more than eighty postgraduate research students.

Eighty. Sit with that number for a second. Every one of them is now somewhere in the system, assessing a child, running a clinic, teaching the next lot.

One of them is our very own Flynn Vamos. Flynn holds an Australian Rotary Health scholarship to produce Australia's first co-produced wellbeing guide for primary school children with ADHD, and Associate Professor Porter is supervising her.

Here is what your scholarship actually buys. Not a document at the end of three years. A person, placed alongside someone who has been doing this for two decades, at exactly the moment when that changes the course of a career.

She is speaking at our Chairman’s Gala Dinner tonight, on her journey through research with Australian Rotary Health.

Back a scholar with us.

australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

The Chairman’s Gala Dinner is tomorrow night.It is 45 years since Australian Rotary Health started funding research, so ...
14/10/2026

The Chairman’s Gala Dinner is tomorrow night.

It is 45 years since Australian Rotary Health started funding research, so this is not a fundraising dinner with a mission tacked on the side. It is the people who funded the work, in one room, with the people who did it.

Our guest speaker is Associate Professor Melanie Porter, who will take the room through A Journey Through Research with Australian Rotary Health. She also supervises Flynn Vamos, who holds an Australian Rotary Health scholarship, which tells you something about how this actually works. You fund a researcher, and years later she is training the next one.

For years, the help offered to a family after an autism diagnosis worked like three separate queues.One for the child’s ...
13/10/2026

For years, the help offered to a family after an autism diagnosis worked like three separate queues.

One for the child’s social communication. One for the behaviour that was making the mornings unbearable. And nothing at all, usually, for the parents who were holding the whole thing together on four hours of sleep.

Professor Mark Dadds thought that was the wrong shape entirely. The person who is with that child for every hour of every day already knows them better than any clinician ever will. Put the right tools in a parent’s hands and you are not adding an hour of therapy a week. You are changing every hour of the week.

In 2019 we funded him at the University of Sydney to build the world’s first parenting program for autism that did all three at once. The child’s communication, the child’s behaviour, and the family’s own wellbeing, in one short, structured, affordable course, delivered in the years when a young brain is changing fastest.

Over the past decade, he says, more and more of the children coming through his clinic have been presenting with features of autism, and it has become clear that a parenting intervention can significantly change the wellbeing of those children and their families.

They called it ParentWorks-Spectrum, and it worked. Families came out with fewer behaviour difficulties, better social communication, and measurably less anxiety, stress and depression in the parents themselves. In 2021 it went to a national rollout, free to the families who took part, and the design has carried into the clinic’s work ever since.

The Sydney Child Behaviour Research Clinic still runs free, evidence-based parenting programs by telehealth, for children aged 3 to 9. You can reach them on [email protected] or (02) 9114 4326.

That is what backing an idea in 2019 looks like six years later. Somebody answers the phone.

Back a breakthrough with us.

australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

Almost everything in children’s mental health starts after something has gone wrong.A child struggles long enough that a...
12/10/2026

Almost everything in children’s mental health starts after something has gone wrong.

A child struggles long enough that a teacher notices. A parent worries long enough to make a call. By then, the thing you were trying to prevent has already happened.

Professor Sonja March has spent her career arguing this is the wrong way round.

So in 2023 Australian Rotary Health funded her at the University of Southern Queensland to build something that acts earlier. Healthy Minds Happy Hearts is disarmingly simple. Parents and children answer a few short questions, and the parent gets a plain summary of their child’s wellbeing, support matched to what that child needs, and a path to a professional if that is the right next step.

162 families used it, and most said they would recommend it.

Then came the finding that mattered more than the tool.

It was offered to nearly 3,000 families across six Queensland primary schools, and only a small proportion took it up. Mostly those already worried about their child.

The school guidance counsellors explained why, and it is the most valuable sentence in the study. Families are already under significant pressure, and a screening program, however well designed, can feel like one more overwhelming thing.

Read that again, because it is not a disappointing result. It is the actual problem, finally located. The assumption has always been that if the help were good enough, families would come. The help was fine. What needs designing is the way in.

It changed Professor March too. She did not build a slightly better app. She widened the question.

She is now Executive Director of the Institute for Health at USQ. We also need to challenge the notion, she says, that we must wait until problems are bad before we can act.

A far bigger question than the one she started with, and it is the question the answer sent her to.

Healthy Minds Happy Hearts is a research trial, so there is no public sign-up yet.

This is what a research grant is for. Not to confirm what we hoped, but to find out what is actually in the way.

Back a breakthrough. australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

Flynn Vamos has three children with ADHD.She also has ADHD herself, which she did not find out until she was an adult. S...
11/10/2026

Flynn Vamos has three children with ADHD.

She also has ADHD herself, which she did not find out until she was an adult. So she has seen the same thing from two directions. What a school day feels like when your brain works differently, and what it looks like from the kitchen table when it is your child coming home from one.

There is no shortage of material written about children with ADHD. There is almost nothing written for them, by them, about how to get through a school day and still feel like you belong in the room.

In January we awarded Flynn a General Health PhD Scholarship, co-funded by The Hancock Family, at Macquarie University. Her PhD will produce what we believe is Australia's first co-produced wellbeing guide for primary school students with ADHD.

Co-produced is the word that matters. Those children are not the subject of the research. They are at the heart of it, telling her what actually helps.

In her own published words:

“The project will meaningfully improve the lives of children with ADHD by providing the first student-centred, evidence-based resource designed specifically for their needs in primary school and transition to high school.”

What Flynn hopes for is that those children grow up with confidence, connection and belonging. Not to simply manage or cope with ADHD, but to thrive.

She is supervised by Associate Professor Melanie Porter and Dr Emma Burns.

Nobody will read that guide for years. That is exactly the point. Somebody has to fund the question long before anybody gets to read the answer.

Back a scholar with us.

australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

Thank you to every Rotary club that wore a hat yesterday. Here is the kind of thing your money goes looking for.No eleve...
10/10/2026

Thank you to every Rotary club that wore a hat yesterday. Here is the kind of thing your money goes looking for.

No eleven year old decides one morning to dislike her body.

It accumulates. A comment at school, a filter, a hundred images of a face that does not exist, and somewhere in there an ordinary child starts auditing herself in a way she will not easily stop.

The window to interrupt that is narrower than most parents realise. It is late primary school and the first year or two of high school, which is exactly the age when nobody is talking to children about any of it.

So a team at Flinders University built eight lessons. Not a talk about self-esteem. Eight classroom lessons that show children how the images are actually made, why they are made that way, and what to do with the feeling when it arrives.

Then they tested it properly, which is the part almost nobody pays for.

In a trial of 1,316 students, the girls who did the program had half the risk of the control group of developing clinical concerns about their body shape and weight a year later. Half. Twelve months on. From eight lessons in an ordinary classroom.

In 2019 we backed that team, Professor Tracey Wade and Dr Simon Wilksch, to take the online version of their work further and reach more young people with it.

This is what we mean when we say we fund possibility. Not a slogan about children’s mental health. Eight lessons, 1,316 children, and a measurable difference a year later in how a girl sees herself.

There is a great deal more of this waiting to be funded.

Back the next breakthrough with us. australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

If body image or eating is hard for you or someone you love, the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline is 1800 33 4673.

A thought on World Mental Health Day, which this year falls on the same day as Australian Rotary Health’s annual Hat Day...
10/10/2026

A thought on World Mental Health Day, which this year falls on the same day as Australian Rotary Health’s annual Hat Day.

Every October the country gets very good at talking about mental health, and I am glad of it. But there is a step after the conversation that gets far less attention, and it is the one I care most about.

Somebody has to find out what actually helps.

Not just what sounds compassionate, not just what feels intuitively right, but also what stands up when it is tested properly.

That work can be slow, and it can feel unglamorous. Worse, it is almost impossible to fund at the start, because at the start there is nothing to show anyone, and nothing yet to demonstrate that it has value.

That is exactly the gap Australian Rotary Health exists to fill. We back researchers before the evidence exists, because somebody has to produce that first evidence before a larger funder can act on it.

So today, alongside the conversations and the hats, I want to name the people who make that possible. Rotarians, donors and partners who fund a question without needing to be told how it turns out.

Thank you. You are the reason the answers exist.

If you would like to fund the next answer, you can do that today at australianrotaryhealth.org.au/donate-now

Yvonne Keane AM Chief Executive Officer, Australian Rotary Health

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