Professional Development
Online courses that actually get the work
Our courses are practical, accessible, and grounded in trauma-informed, strengths-based, and person-centred approaches — designed by people who understand the realities of community sector work, not just the theory.
Built for the sector
Not adapted from corporate training — designed for community workers by community workers.
Peer-based learning
Lived experience is valued as expertise throughout every course.
Flexible & self-paced
Fit professional development around your work, your life, and your community.
Affordable pricing
Respectful of the realities of sector wages — quality learning that doesn't break the bank.
All courses
32 courses · All self-paced · Online
Advocacy
Rights-based advocacy, ethical practice, and systemic change
Advocacy Through Policy: Speaking Up Effectively
Policy advocacy is a powerful tool for systemic change. This course empowers community workers and lived experience advocates to engage in effective, ethical, and inclusive policy advocacy — learning to identify issues, influence decision-makers, and amplify community voices.
Collaborative Advocacy: Partnering with Clients for Systemic Change
Advocacy is most powerful when it's collaborative, centring the voices and choices of people most affected. This course supports workers to partner with clients in ways that uphold dignity, power, and agency — exploring everyday advocacy, systems navigation, and strategies for addressing broader injustice together.
Introduction to Human Rights and Social Justice Frameworks
Human rights and social justice are foundational to ethical, inclusive, and equitable community work. This course introduces key concepts and frameworks that guide practice, advocacy, and service delivery in line with the rights and dignity of all people.
Making Systems Work: Micro-Advocacy in Bureaucratic Spaces
Micro-advocacy is about helping clients get what they need from complex systems. This course equips workers with practical, ethical strategies to advocate within bureaucratic spaces — such as Centrelink, the NDIS, housing, health, and justice — without burning out or taking over.
Supporting Clients with Legal or Justice System Needs
Clients involved in legal or justice systems often face complex, overwhelming barriers. This course equips workers with foundational knowledge to support clients safely and respectfully — covering common legal issues, referral pathways, trauma-aware engagement, and rights-based advocacy within professional boundaries.
Ethical Dilemmas in Frontline Work
Frontline workers often face complex ethical dilemmas — balancing duty of care with client rights, navigating conflicting values, and working in systems with limited resources. This course helps workers recognise, reflect on, and respond to ethical challenges using clear frameworks and real-world scenarios.
Consent, Confidentiality and Supported Decision-Making
Consent and confidentiality are cornerstones of ethical practice. This course explores how to uphold privacy, support informed decision-making, and respect individual rights — especially when supporting people with cognitive or communication differences in complex circumstances.
Ethical Storytelling and Representation
Stories are powerful tools for advocacy and change — but without consent, care, or context, they can cause harm. This course explores how to share lived experience stories ethically, amplify voices without appropriating them, and promote authentic, consent-based storytelling.
Advocacy vs. Allyship: Knowing Your Role
Advocacy and allyship are both essential in human services — but they are not the same. This course explores the differences, how to act in solidarity without centring yourself, and how to support the leadership and voice of the people you work alongside through ethical, rights-based advocacy.
Trauma-informed practice
Safe, healing-centred approaches for complex and sensitive work
Building Safety and Trust in Service Relationships
Safety and trust are foundational to all effective service relationships. This course explores how community workers can intentionally create environments that promote emotional safety, build trust over time, and strengthen client engagement — especially for people who have experienced trauma or systemic harm.
De-escalation Techniques in High-Stress Environments
High-stress situations are common in community and disability work. This course provides practical, trauma-informed de-escalation techniques to help professionals respond safely, reduce harm, and build trust during challenging moments.
Engaging Resistant Clients: Building Connection
Some clients seem "hard to reach" — but what if we flipped the lens to see them as self-protective, not resistant? This course explores compassionate, trauma-informed ways to engage cautious or ambivalent clients, building trust gradually and respecting autonomy at every step.
Rebuilding Trust with Clients After Service Harm
Many clients carry experiences of harm by the very systems meant to support them. This course helps workers rebuild trust with clients who have been hurt by prior service encounters — learning to acknowledge harm, repair ruptures, and hold space for healing.
Trauma-Sensitive Intake & Assessment
The intake process sets the tone for everything that follows. This course helps workers conduct assessments in ways that are safe, respectful, and trauma-informed — gathering essential information without re-traumatising clients, and creating space for autonomy, consent, and dignity at every step.
Trauma-Informed Approaches in Community Work
This course introduces foundational principles of trauma-informed care and how they apply to community work. Participants will explore the impacts of trauma on individuals and communities, learn to recognise trauma responses, and develop practical strategies to create safer, more supportive interactions.
Understanding the Impact of Developmental Trauma
Developmental trauma results from ongoing exposure to neglect, abuse, or disrupted attachment during childhood. This course helps frontline workers understand how early trauma impacts behaviour and development — equipping them with trauma-informed strategies to respond with empathy, consistency, and safety.
Case management
Person-centred planning, documentation, and practical tools for case workers
Case Management Hacks: Tools for Efficiency and Empathy
Case management can be both rewarding and overwhelming. This course offers practical strategies to manage competing priorities without losing your heart — discover time-saving tools, digital tricks, and trauma-informed approaches that balance efficiency with empathy.
Collaborative Care Planning with Clients
Care plans should be living documents that reflect the goals, needs, and preferences of the person they're for. This course supports workers to move beyond transactional planning and embrace a genuinely collaborative, client-led approach — co-creating plans that support autonomy, access, and outcomes that matter.
Developing Client-Centred Risk Management Plans
Risk management doesn't need to be fear-driven or agency-centred. This course helps workers develop trauma-informed, rights-respecting, and practical risk plans tailored to each client's context — moving beyond compliance checklists to genuinely empower clients.
Effective Case Notes and Documentation
Clear, objective, and timely case notes are essential for consistent support, managing risk, and meeting legal requirements. This course supports workers to write high-quality case notes that are professional, person-centred, legally sound, and trauma-informed.
Creative Approaches to Care Planning
Care planning doesn't have to be rigid or overwhelming — it can be a space for creativity, self-expression, and collaboration. This course supports workers to co-create care plans that are meaningful, flexible, and led by the person's own hopes and values, using storytelling, visuals, and strengths-based language.
Micro-Mapping a Client's Support Ecosystem
Understanding a client's world requires more than ticking service boxes. This course introduces a practical approach to "micro-mapping" a client's support ecosystem — identifying formal, informal, cultural, emotional, and structural supports, uncovering gaps, and collaborating on meaningful next steps.
Strengths-Based Planning and Goal-Setting
Strengths-based practice shifts the focus from problems to possibilities. This course supports workers to identify and build on clients' strengths, skills, and interests — co-creating plans that are meaningful, achievable, and rooted in dignity, autonomy, and self-determination.
Communication
Listening, conflict, power-aware communication, and team collaboration
Communicating Across Power Differences
Every interaction in community work is shaped by power — whether visible or not. This course supports workers to develop greater awareness of power dynamics and learn practical strategies to communicate more equitably, listen with humility, and foster safety, dignity, and collaboration.
Conflict-Resilient Communication with Clients and Colleagues
Conflict is a natural part of working with people. This course helps workers develop communication skills that support de-escalation, clarity, respect, and repair when tensions arise — through a trauma-informed, strengths-based lens.
The Art of Listening: Holding Space for Real Conversations
In human services, listening is more than hearing — it's a practice of presence, patience, and respect. This course explores how to hold space for honest conversations, especially when working with people experiencing distress, trauma, or marginalisation.
Working Effectively in Multidisciplinary Teams
In community work, collaboration across roles and disciplines is essential to holistic, person-centred support. This course explores how to communicate, coordinate, and build mutual respect in multidisciplinary settings — navigating role boundaries, resolving conflict, and centring the client's voice.
Community engagement
Grassroots organising, co-design, facilitation, and peer-led models
Community Engagement for Social Change
True community engagement is not just about outreach — it's about building lasting, respectful relationships that centre community voices in driving change. This course equips workers with tools and frameworks to engage meaningfully, foster collective action, and support grassroots leadership.
Grant-Writing and Micro-Fundraising for Local Projects
Securing funding doesn't have to be overwhelming. This course provides practical guidance on crafting effective grant applications and securing funds through micro-fundraising — learning to tell your story, develop budgets, find the right funders, and build regional support.
Supporting Peer-Led Models of Support
Peer-led models place lived experience at the heart of service delivery and social change. This course helps workers understand how to collaborate with, elevate, and sustain peer leadership in ethical and empowering ways — while avoiding tokenism, gatekeeping, or co-optation.
Co-Design Methods for Inclusive Service Development
Co-design is more than consultation — it's about sharing power and creating services with communities, not just for them. This course introduces workers to the principles and practices of inclusive co-design, with practical tools to engage people with lived experience in shaping the services they use.
Workshop Facilitation 101: Leading Inclusive Groups
Facilitating inclusive, engaging, and respectful group workshops is both an art and a skill. This course introduces the fundamentals of group facilitation — with a focus on inclusion, safety, participation, and adaptability — learning to prepare, lead, and evaluate group sessions.
Disability-inclusive practice
Rights-based, intersectional, and trauma-informed disability practice
Digital Inclusion and Accessibility in Community Settings
In today's world, digital access is essential for participation and independence — but many people are left behind. This course introduces the principles of digital inclusion, equipping workers with knowledge and strategies to support clients in bridging the digital divide.
Understanding the Social Model of Disability in Practice
The social model of disability shifts the focus from "fixing" people to fixing the barriers that exclude them. This course explores what the social model means, why it matters, and how to embed it in everyday practice — centring access, rights, and dignity.
Working with Complex Trauma in Disability Contexts
People with disability experience disproportionately high rates of complex trauma, yet their trauma histories are often overlooked. This course builds foundational knowledge in recognising and responding to complex trauma in disability contexts — with a focus on rights-based, relational, and trauma-informed approaches.
Disability and Intersectionality: Power, Privilege and Practice
Disability does not exist in isolation. This course introduces an intersectional lens to disability-inclusive practice, helping workers understand power, privilege, and systemic inequality — and how to apply inclusive, rights-based approaches in day-to-day work.
Worker wellbeing
Burnout, vicarious trauma, sustainability, and self-compassion in practice
Recognising and Responding to Burnout
Burnout is a common and serious challenge in human services. This course helps community workers identify the signs of burnout in themselves and others, understand its root causes, and explore practical strategies for recovery, workplace support, and sustainable practice.
Vicarious Trauma and Self-Compassion for Frontline Workers
Frontline workers are frequently exposed to the trauma and distress of others, placing them at risk of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue. This course explores how to recognise the signs, build awareness of the impact, and apply self-compassion practices to support wellbeing and sustainability.
