Robbie Phillips

Practitioner Profile

My practice has been formed through lived experience, community participation, frontline social work, organisational leadership, field education and continued reflection on how people create hope and change within their places.

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Education And Lived Experience

My formal education began with an interest in primary-school art teaching before I moved into social work and completed a Bachelor of Social Work at La Trobe University. I am also completing a Master of Business Administration through the University of Adelaide, bringing organisational strategy, governance and financial thinking into conversation with social-work values and community knowledge. Alongside formal education, creative arts practice has remained part of how I observe, communicate and make sense of experience. My connections with Albury, Melbourne and L’Isle Jourdain, and the influence of Australian, French and Welsh places and cultures, continue to shape how I understand identity and belonging. Together, these experiences have taught me to approach professional knowledge as situated rather than universal: something that develops through education, place, relationships, creativity and reflection.

community groups And Advocating For Change

My early participation in the Wodonga Student Association included responsibility for publications, finance, organisational leadership and representation through roles as Treasurer, Vice President and President, as well as participation on the University Council. This provided an early experience of how groups make decisions, whose perspectives are heard and how formal systems can either support or constrain participation. Community engagement later became part of my professional work through community centres, community-development activities, family programs and engagement with Aboriginal services and communities. These experiences have reinforced that advocacy should not mean speaking over people or assuming that professional authority provides the best understanding of their circumstances. In my current practice, I seek to help community members and frontline practitioners make their own knowledge visible and influential within organisational and government processes.

Child Protection and Out Of Home Care Casework

From 2008 to 2015, I worked in statutory child protection and out-of-home care in Deniliquin and Albury. My responsibilities included intake, assessment, case management, court-related work, out-of-home care, carer assessment and support, and group-based parenting work. This practice required decisions to be made within statutory authority while engaging children, parents, carers and other professionals in situations involving uncertainty, risk and significant consequences. It taught me that authority does not remove the need for curiosity, humility and careful attention to how decisions are experienced by others. It also developed my understanding of how organisational systems, local relationships and access to services shape the options available to families. This experience continues to inform my approach to risk, professional judgement, supervision and reflective examination of power.

Managing Parenting support and development

As Program Manager for Family Services and subsequently in senior management, I was responsible for services including early-intervention family casework, intensive family preservation, parenting groups, community building, Aboriginal family work and playgroup activities. The work took place across regional communities, where small teams often held broad responsibilities and relied upon strong local relationships. My role involved supporting practitioners, maintaining program accountability and creating conditions in which families could be engaged respectfully rather than treated as passive recipients of services. This experience changed my understanding of management: effective management is not separate from practice, because decisions about resources, workload, program design and reporting directly affect the quality of relationships practitioners can build with families. It now informs my supervision, program-development and community-engagement work.

Managing Mental Health Practice

My senior management responsibilities included early-intervention child and young-person mental health, family and mental health services, Aboriginal health, community centres and related community-strengthening programs. I was accountable for workforce support, service quality, operational planning, budgets and the interaction between different programs and professional perspectives. Rather than positioning myself as the holder of every form of specialist knowledge, I worked with practitioners and service leaders whose direct experience gave them detailed understanding of their fields and communities. This reinforced the importance of creating reflective space around complex decisions, particularly where organisational pressure can encourage rapid or habitual responses. It also developed my interest in how practitioner wellbeing, professional reasoning, service systems and community context interact. These understandings now inform my independent reflective-practice supervision and service-development work.

Social Work Field Education

I have provided supervision and field education to more than 20 Bachelor and Master of Social Work students from La Trobe University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Southern Queensland. I am particularly comfortable supporting students undertaking placements in rural and regional communities, regional centres, small agencies and community-development settings. My work follows the relevant university field-education handbook and AASW requirements, using structured supervision, liaison visits, learning and assessment processes, and collaborative review of progress. I understand field education as more than demonstrating competencies. It should help students develop a social-work identity, including knowledge of self and the ethical use of self when engaging people around hope and change. This experience forms the basis of my independent field-education and external university liaison services.

Senior and Executive experience

Between 2019 and 2026, I held senior management responsibilities across family, mental health, children’s and community services, including a period as Acting General Manager Operations. I was accountable for people, programs, budgets, operational risk, performance and the translation of strategic decisions into frontline conditions. I have supervised social workers since becoming a Program Manager in 2015 and have engaged approximately 35 practitioners in reflective-practice processes. Leadership taught me that organisational choices are never abstract: they shape practitioner safety, service capacity and the experiences of communities. It also required me to work across competing priorities while remaining attentive to ethical responsibility and the limits of my own knowledge. This experience informs how I now approach governance, professional supervision and organisational consultation within private practice.

Service Design and Program Development

As Senior Manager Service Design and Evaluation, I worked with evidence-based management, funding applications, program development and evaluation. This work brought community and practitioner accounts of meaningful change into contact with the structured language required by funders, executives and government systems. I became increasingly interested in what is lost when complex human experiences are reduced to activity counts or isolated performance measures, while also recognising that services require credible evidence, governance and accountability. My approach is to involve community members and frontline practitioners as context experts, using collaborative sense-making, visual methods and program logic to make assumptions and different perspectives visible. This experience now informs my consulting work in needs analysis, grant development, program design and evaluation.

Pathway Into PRIVATE PRACTICE

My move into private practice follows nearly two decades of frontline, management, field-education and service-design experience within statutory and community-sector organisations. It is an opportunity to take more direct responsibility for the choices that shape my work: the services I offer, the relationships I enter, the pace and limits of practice, and the standards by which I hold myself accountable. Private practice is not a rejection of organisational work; it is a deliberate attempt to bring together place-based community development, reflective supervision, field education, evaluation and creative sense-making in a coherent way. I expect the practice to continue developing through reflection, consultation, published governance commitments and evidence from the work itself.

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