This Intersectional Toolkit is designed to support practitioners and service providers across the mental health sector to better support the needs of people who experience diverse and intersecting forms of marginalisation.
Mental Health at the Margins
The toolkit is a product of the Mental Health at the Margins project, funded by the Victorian Department of Health as part of the Diverse Communities Grants program. The project took place amidst ongoing reforms to the mental health service system, in response to findings from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. These findings broadly highlighted the system’s failure to support the diverse needs of people needing support.
Recommendation 34 of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System specifically advised that services need to be safe, inclusive, and responsive to the mental health and wellbeing of diverse communities. This toolkit aims to contribute to the reform agenda, and Recommendation 34 specifically, to support services and practitioners to be able to better support the needs of people with intersectional identities. The toolkit was informed directly from diverse community members with intersectional identities and either practitioner knowledge and expertise and/or lived experience knowledge and expertise.
The purpose of this toolkit is to:
- Further understand intersectionality and its application to practice within local
and community mental health services. - Provide guidance for service providers to support intersectional practice and
contribute to system level change. - Provide practical ways to create change at team and practitioner levels and at a
‘whole of service’ level to see how these changes are interrelated.
What is the toolkit?
We developed up this toolkit to support the mental health sector to apply an intersectional practice lens to their work.
At its core, intersectionality is about understanding:
- The whole person within their context
- Their experiences of overlapping discrimination/oppression/marginalisation
- The significant relationships in people’s lives, including with their families, communities, organisations, systems and society
- The contexts in which these relationships occur, including historical, current and systemic
- How the above factors shape how people see, interact with and experience the world.
Services and practitioners can consider intersectionality as a ‘lens’ to critically reflect on positions of privilege and oppression. Applying intersectionality to practice is an active process that requires:
- Respectful curiosity about the experiences of ourselves and others
- Investigation of one’s own beliefs, assumptions and experiences of privilege, power and marginalisation
- Recognition of the overlapping effects of systems and structures that contribute to marginalisation and oppression.
How we did it
Our approach to developing this toolkit drew on the expertise and experience of interdisciplinary practitioners and community members from diverse intersecting LGBTIQA+, multicultural/multifaith and disability communities who had lived and living experiences of mental health challenges and experiences navigating the mental health service system.
This toolkit is intentionally designed to be active and participatory. We invite you to complete reflective activities about yourself and your practice, as either a service leader or as a frontline practitioner. It contains considerations and activities for service leaders and practitioners to work through and reflect on.
Our impact
This toolkit has been designed to support the implementation of intersectional practice across the mental health sector in order to improve service responses for marginalised people, who have traditionally been excluded from mental health service support.
Download the Toolkit
The Intersectional Toolkit is available now.
Click here to download a PDF copy!
Training and support
If you would like to chat to CFRE about tailored intersectionality training for your organisation or sector, please email: training@ds.org.au