Projects & Impact
From public campaigns and wellbeing education to workplace culture and community co-design. Selected projects, the people behind them, and the practice that connects the work.
Landmark projects
Culture & community mobilisation
Melbourne concerts & ZeroSeven Roadtrip
Co-created the Make Poverty History concerts in Melbourne and the ZeroSeven Roadtrip, bringing music, community and social action into a shared public experience.
Emeli's role: Co-creator
Explore the roadtrip archiveWellbeing education & coaching
From a social enterprise to a body of practice
Built Collective Potential's wellbeing education and coaching programs, reaching 10,000+ customers and participants. An impact report by Dr Peggy Kern at the University of Melbourne brings a research perspective to this work.
Emeli's role: Founder & program builder
View the impact reportScale & reach across my practice
Career-wide reach and delivery, not measures of evaluated outcomes. Emeli’s LinkedIn profile (opens in a new tab)
10,000+
Collective Potential customers & participants
Practice meets research
The Collective Potential impact report by Dr Peggy Kern at the University of Melbourne sits alongside the lived experience of participants. Reach tells one part of the story; the report offers a closer look at the work.
Selected client work
Government & community · Client work
Facilitated cross-sector collaboration across government, service providers and community partners, alongside bespoke learning to help staff integrate lived experience into everyday practice. Network transition planning saw six partner organisations volunteer to host future sessions beyond initial program funding.
Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) · Paving the Way Forward
Hospitality · Client work
Values and behaviour mapping, leadership reflection and practical culture rituals such as team huddles, recognition and onboarding buddies, so values hold up during everyday service pressure.
Cobb Lane Bakery
Amy Newman
Workplace culture · Client work
Work spanning the people who own, lead and deliver the service, so direction is shared across regional locations.
Keystone Radiology
Leadership · Client work
Facilitation for leaders and high-performing sales teams working across Victoria and Sydney.
Gore Medical
Community · Client work
A connected series that started with the board and carried through leaders and staff.
Midsumma Festival
Media & creators · Client work
An ongoing retainer for content creators and media talent, moving from personal coaching to team culture design to day-to-day operations, so the business behind the content can keep pace with the audience.
Luke and Sassy Scott
Content creators, in partnership with Mushroom Connect
Clients & testimonials
The capability workshops delivered by Emeli were transformational for our organisation. Her expertise in experience design ensured that every session was not only informative but also engaging. Our leadership team left with actionable insights that we could implement immediately.
Karen Bryant
CEO
Midsumma Festival
Emeli is truly a master facilitator of the human spirit. By creating a safe and trusted environment almost instantly, she allowed us to have authentic and real moments and quickly build intimacy as a team. Her natural wisdom paired with decades of experience result in a talent that is hard to come by. I couldn't recommend her more highly to organisations and teams looking to explore elusive yet crucial topics like inclusion, emotional intelligence and team connection.
Claire Pilley
The Difference, PwC
Selected community, cultural, organisational and research projects.
Projects
Each entry uses the same case study structure.
Filter the portfolio
Showing 19 of 19 projects
Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) · Paving the Way Forward
No More Shame
Reach Foundation
Catholic Archdiocese
The Virtues Project International
Community placement, Northern Ireland
Experiential education program, upstate New York
Midsumma
ILGA Oceania
Pacific Sexual and Gender Diversity Network
University of Melbourne
Keystone Radiology
W. L. Gore
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
CareerSeekers
Safe and Equal
Medical Pantry
ASHM
Birdcage
Workplace culture, community co-design and locally interpreted applications.
Applications
Each application uses the same eight stages. What changes is the context, the authority structure, the cultural knowledge involved and what the community or organisation decides to build.
The method can travel. Culture, authority, language, ownership, history and knowledge remain specific to the people and place.
The experience and capabilities behind the practice.
Experience
Emeli's role is not simply facilitation. She works as a human systems designer, participatory practitioner, community researcher, pracademic and cultural infrastructure strategist.
Domains of practice
Regional community mapping, service ecosystem work, youth and family engagement, Elder engagement and community-led program design.
Nearly two decades of practice across Central Australia, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and regional Victoria, with repeat community relationships and facilitator development.
Camps, school programs, leadership pathways and experiential learning in Australia and internationally.
Northern Ireland, the United States, Botswana and Namibia, including teacher development and culturally responsive program adaptation.
Reconciliation Action Plan processes, cultural capability programs and work across institutional gatekeeping and shared authority.
Governance, decision-making, role clarity, meetings, accountability, ways of working and implementation across health, education, events, hospitality, social impact and professional services.
Women's leadership, female facilitator development, LGBTQIA+ organisational practice and Pacific and Pasifika feminist practice.
Participatory inquiry, qualitative synthesis, collective sensemaking, evaluation frameworks and evidence-to-decision translation.
The measures used to understand change beyond activity.
Impact
Measures the register can track
Human Ecosystems Design, Human Infrastructure Design and the theory of change.
The Model
Human Ecosystems Design helps communities and organisations understand how culture, relationships, identity, power, participation and institutional structures shape outcomes. Human Infrastructure Design provides the practical method for locating the work, mapping the system, gathering evidence, identifying patterns, co-designing responses, testing solutions, building capability and sustaining change.
A relational web, not a hierarchy
The practitioner, the infrastructure, the two design practices and the communities involved are held in relationship. Change moves in every direction.
Relationships are not soft. Relationships are infrastructure.
Emeli Paulo
The practitioner. Human systems designer, participatory practitioner, community researcher and pracademic.
Select any part to see how it connects. Every part shapes and is shaped by the others.
Theory of change
Too many programs try to change people while leaving the conditions producing the problem untouched.
Human potential is constrained by systems, cultures and conditions that exclude, disconnect or disempower people.
Human Ecosystems Design: participatory research, cultural knowledge, co-design, facilitation, collective capability and shared infrastructure.
More equitable, connected and resilient communities with greater collective capacity to shape their own futures.
The critical assumption: when people have meaningful influence over decisions, access to resources, supportive relationships and opportunities to build capability, they are better able to sustain change together. This assumption is tested through the work, not simply asserted.
Human Ecosystems Design, stage by stage
An agnostic model, a specific practice
It can be applied across:
The work might take the form of:
The model can involve:
The method can travel. Culture, authority, language, ownership, history and knowledge remain specific to the people and place.
Shift statements
What the model refuses
Connected roles in the ecosystem
Core positioning
Human Ecosystems Design is a sector-agnostic, context-responsive and culturally situated human systems design model.
The model is sector-agnostic in application, but culturally specific in practice.
Emeli spent more than 25 years working across communities, cultures and institutions. Through that work, she learnt that sustainable change does not come from fixing individuals or delivering standardised programs. It comes from understanding relationships, culture, power, participation and place, then redesigning the conditions through which people can act together.
SoCo creates the infrastructure for that work. Human Ecosystems Design reads the system. Human Infrastructure Design builds what holds change in place.
The central problem
Too many programs try to change people while leaving the conditions producing the problem untouched.
Theory of Change
This is the social-impact logic behind the work. It is written so partners, funders and communities can hold the practice to account against it.
The chain
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Assumptions the model makes
The relationships, cultural care and governance that shape the work.
Origins
This is a practice timeline rather than a résumé. Each period shows what Emeli experienced, what she learnt and how that learning shaped the model.
RMIT Design Futures
Emeli's postgraduate study in Design Futures at RMIT provided additional language, theory and design architecture for practices she had already been developing through community work.
Decades of practice gave Emeli the knowledge. Design Futures helped her recognise, connect and formalise it.
Cultural Lenses
This page is explicit about authority, ownership and boundaries. Cultural knowledge referenced here belongs to the communities, custodians and practitioners it comes from.
First Nations practice and Human Ecosystems Design
Human Ecosystems Design does not claim or replicate First Nations methodologies. Emeli's long-term work alongside First Nations communities taught her the importance of listening before designing, community authority, place, relationships, cultural knowledge, reciprocity, capability and accountability.
Pacific relational knowledge and vā
Across many Pacific cultures, vā provides a relational understanding of the space connecting people, families, communities, ancestors, culture, institutions and place. That relational space carries responsibility and must be nurtured, respected, maintained and repaired.
Human Ecosystems Design is not based on vā and does not claim ownership of Pacific relational knowledge. Pacific concepts such as vā provide an important relational lens through which aspects of Human Ecosystems Design can be understood and applied.
What relationships matter, what conditions are shaping them, and what must be nurtured, redesigned or repaired so people can participate with dignity?
Cultural cartography
Cultural cartography is acknowledged as a contribution of Mat Rua. Where it is used within Human Ecosystems Design work, cultural interpretation remains with appropriate cultural knowledge holders.
Māori, Pacific and First Nations cultural knowledge is not presented as SoCo-owned intellectual property. Interpretation, authority and ownership stay with the relevant cultural knowledge holders.
Cultural stewardship
Cultural knowledge is not raw material for a consultancy product.
IP and Cultural Governance
Governance is part of the method. Consent, attribution, payment and withdrawal are agreed at the start of a partnership rather than negotiated after publication.
May include:
Remains with the relevant practitioner or cultural custodian. Contribution is attributed and paid. Interpretation stays with the knowledge holder.
Community-contributed knowledge does not automatically become SoCo intellectual property.
Protocols should address
Cultural knowledge is not raw material for a consultancy product.
No sales pitch. Just humans finding common ground. If I’m not the right person for what you need, we can explore other consultants within SoCo Collective (opens in a new tab).