Who are we

MI Fellowship is a not-forprofit membership organisation and is a Company Limited by Guarantee.

Our primary purpose is to support people with mental illness and other psychosocial disabilities, their families and their friends in order to gain inclusion into communities; to create a home, get a job and build meaningful relationships. We provide this support through recovery, education and advocacy programs. 

Recovery approaches and advocacy underpin all of our work and are our two very clear ‘reasons for being’. MI Fellowship’s advocacy and recovery services enable us to work toward social inclusion for people with mental illness and other psychosocial disabilities. 

We operate in a context that maintains that people with mental illness and other psychosocial disabilities have both the right, and the potential, to live their lives untouched by societal stigma or discrimination. We work proactively to support this right and potential through a range of partnerships.

We acknowledge that mental illness and other psychosocial disabilities have a broad impact on associated families and friends who are often denied effective support systems. We work to assist people with mental illness and other psychosocial disabilities and their families to gain better access to community supports. We work towards enabling social inclusion with people who experience mental illness and other psychosocial disabilities, their families and friends. 

Our model of support brings together evidence from research with understanding of people’s lived experience of mental illness. We work in partnership with people to assist them to identify their own needs and goals, and to support them along their individual pathways to recovery.

Our organisation was established in 1978 by families wanting to improve the services and information available to people affected by mental illness. Today MI Fellowship is one of Australia’s leading mental health community support agencies, providing services to around 5,000 people a year, and reaching many more through advocacy and community education activities.

We deliver programs across metropolitan and regional Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Tasmania.

We aim to ensure that our services are culturally sensitive, meeting the diverse needs within our community. We recognise that people’s cultural backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender and sexual identity can have an important part to play in their mental health.

Read our Constitution.