Ayla Hope - Principal Consultant
About
Ayla has nearly 20 years’ international experience across the health sector, community services and not-for-profit organisations, including five years in the PHN commissioning environment. She’s worked across a range of sectors, including population health planning, housing and homelessness, mental health, AOD, youth services, disaster management and community resilience, refugee and migrant health, infectious disease strategy and supporting people who have been criminalised. Ayla brings strong systems thinking, human-centred design methods and social impact practice to Beacon’s consulting team.
Most recently, Ayla was Associate Director of Community Impact at Healthy North Coast PHN where she led the disaster management, community resilience and climate adaptation portfolios.
Capabilities
Ayla brings a strong systems thinking approach, an integrated social justice lens and thrives in wickedly complex spaces – particularly around the intersections of vulnerability. Working from a strong values-based perspective, Ayla has a knack for framing the work inside the ‘Big Why’ and inspiring others to do the same.
Ayla’s key capabilities include:
Excellent facilitation skills; Ayla leads engaging, creative, participatory conversations, workshops and engagement activities
Big picture strategy and futures thinking, with an emphasis on intersectionality and systems integration
Human-centred design methods, having completed a range of professional development through TACSI, CSI and the Huddle Academy
Strong insights into community resilience and disaster management, with systems-level skills in designing joined-up responses to crisis
A relational, curious approach.
Approach to work
Ayla values and connects humans and the human experience, delivering work in a way that builds out from central tenets of social justice, ethics and impact. Bringing energy and curiosity, Ayla loves critical discussions and celebrates dissent and disagreement as an avenue towards even better quality of outputs and outcomes. She’s a methodical connector of people, ideas and principals.
Achievements at Beacon Strategies
Ayla has led or contributed to a range of projects at Beacon:
External Stakeholder Engagement Process - YFS
Development of an Organisational Practice Framework - YouTurn
Consultation process for the design of the Tomorrow Ready program, managing Spontaneous Volunteers in disaster - Northern Rivers Community Gateway
Codesign process for the Healthy Me, Digital Solution - Healthy North Coast Primary Health Network
Suicide Prevention Lived Experience Workforce Development Initiative – Central and Eastern Sydney Primary Health Network
Stakeholder engagement to inform the design of the Healthy Hearts Healthy Minds program – COORDINARE
Professional experience
Associate Director, Community Impact, Healthy North Coast (Aug 2023 – Oct 2024)
Senior Manager, Climate Ready Communities, Healthy North Coast (Nov 2021 – Oct 2023)
Program Manager, Youth, Social Futures (May 2021 - Oct 2021)
Planning Consultant, self employed (Jul 2018 – Mar 2021)
Manager, Practice & Service Design, Flat Out Inc (Aug 2019 – Jan 2021)
Health Service Planner (AOD), Odyssey House Victoria (Jan 2015 – Aug 2018)
Population Health Coordinator, South Eastern Melbourne Medicare Local (Apr 2013- Dec 2014)
Local Innovation Partnerships Coordinator, Southern Academic Primary Care Research Unit (Oct 2013 – Oct 2014)
Public Health Project Support Manager, NHS North West Strategic Health Authority (May 2012 – Dec 2012)
Public Health Project Officer, NHS North West Strategic Health Authority (Aug 2011 – May 2012)
Programmes Administrator, IHC New Zealand (Feb 2010 – Oct 2010)
Project Administrator, Meridian Energy Renewables (Aug 2009 – Feb 2010)
Academic qualifications
Graduate Certificate in Design for Social Impact, Swinburne / UNSW (2016) •
Bachelor of Health Sciences (Public Health and Environmental Science), Massey University (2010)
Career highlights
2024 NSW Winner and National Finalist in the Resilient Australia Awards for the Community Wellbeing and Resilience Program, helping communities to recovery from and prepare to face future disasters
2024 designed and delivered a Participatory Grant Making approach for Community Wellbeing and Resilience Program
2024 Poster Presentation for the Australian Disaster Resilience Conference
2022 led the Primary Health response to the catastrophic NNSW floods – the largest disaster in colonial Australian history
2020 winner of the SIMNA award for Innovation in Social Impact Measurement
2015-2018 led the implementation of Catchment Based Planning in the Victoria Alcohol and Other Drug sector, following the 2014 sector reform – local planning and place-based responses. Achievements included successful advocacy for LGBTQIA+ data fields in the Victorian Minimum Dataset and the establishment of the Muslim Youth and Families Centre in Broadmeadows.
2011-2012 led the North West of England’s Tuberculosis Prevention and Control Strategy, which achieved a decline in the incidence of TB for vulnerable populations.
Personal interests
Ayla is an avid cook and passionate food snob (she blames Melbourne for this), dabbles in regenerative agriculture and syntropic food farming, is great at *starting* DIY projects with her very basic carpentry skills, makes art, goes hiking, is learning Arabic and is always primed for a yarn about community resilience and hopeful ways to survive the poly crisis.
Originally from the black sand West Coast of Aotearoa (NZ), Ayla lived in Manchester (UK), and Naarm (Melbourne) before relocating to Bundjalung Country (NNSW) at the end of 2020.
