Tandi Kuwana
After graduating, I built on my nursing background to work across multicultural mental health, community education, workforce equity and mental health system improvement.
My lived experience of depression is one of the main reasons I am passionate about advancing equity. Combined with my professional experience in nursing and mental health, it has shaped my commitment to improving services for people from culturally diverse communities and helped me influence policy.
While working in nursing in Western Australia, I became passionate about changing help-seeking behaviours among migrants and people from culturally diverse communities, particularly those from countries without well-established mainstream mental health services. This led me to establish Mental Wellness Keys, an initiative focused on promoting mental health awareness, wellness and positive self-image within ethnic minority communities.
Through Mental Wellness Keys, I have delivered workshops to schools, colleges and non-profit mental health service providers. I have also worked with organisations including the Metropolitan Migrant Resource Centre, ISHAR Multicultural Women’s Health Services, The Smith Family, Richmond Wellbeing and Palmerston to facilitate targeted mental health capacity-building programs.
My advocacy has taken me into local, national and international spaces. I was invited to appear as a panellist at the African Studies Association of Australia and the Pacific conference in 2017, where I presented a paper on mental illness in people of African descent. I also spoke on multicultural mental health at the G200 Youth Summit in Dubai and received a Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia scholarship.
Alongside my community work, I have worked as an associate lecturer and mental health clinical facilitator with Curtin University and The University of Notre Dame Australia. I have also contributed to events and initiatives focused on mental health awareness and social cohesion, including The Social Impact Festival Human Library, the African Youth Visibility Summit and Conversations with the South Sudanese.
To promote social inclusion, I have served on the City of Wanneroo Multicultural Advisory Group, which provides feedback and advice on multicultural strategies and services. In 2018, I was appointed Co-Chairperson of the Recovery College Expert Panel by the Mental Health Commission of Western Australia, where my contribution focused on ensuring equity assurance in the development of health services. This led to my appointment as co-developer of Australia’s first Multicultural Mental Health Framework in 2019.
Nationally, I have contributed as a consumer advisor to the Multicultural Mental Health Project, which aims to improve mental health services for people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. In 2018, I was awarded the SANE Hocking Fellowship and travelled to Zimbabwe on a study tour with the Friendship Bench to better understand stigma around mental illness and how communities are working to address it.
My work has also been featured in The Huffington Post, The West Australian, The North Coast Times, ABC Radio and West TV. I have shared my own mental health story through This Is My Brave in Perth and hosted the first Mental Health Film Festival in Western Australia in 2018.
Today, I am the Safer Staffing and Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework Transformational Lead with Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom. My work involves implementing safer staffing methodology within the nursing workforce and supporting implementation of the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework to advance equity in mental health care.
Among the achievements I am most proud of are being inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame in 2020 and receiving CQUniversity’s Alumnus of the Year (Social Impact) Award in 2021. My studies helped me narrow my area of specialty, and I remain passionate about volunteering in communities to help narrow the mental health literacy gap.
