About Ellen
I’m a psychologist and social-change practitioner with a background in writing, broadcasting and communication. I’ve spent much of my working life exploring how people develop, grow and change.
How I got here
My early work focused on individuals and organisations: coaching leaders, designing wellbeing and development programs, and helping teams work better together. Over time my attention widened to communities, places and systems. The underlying question stayed much the same: what happens in and between people that makes change possible?
What I kept noticing was a gap. Organisations invested in programs, events and engagement, and hoped for outcomes like trust, belonging and resilience. Very little attention went to what happened in between. That missing layer became the focus of my work, and I established Arbour to give that inquiry a home.
What I do
My work brings together psychology, systems thinking and grounded community practice. I design and lead inquiries, develop explanatory frameworks, facilitate collective sensemaking and turn what we’re learning into forms that communities, practitioners, institutions and funders can use.
The work I find most energising is finding the patterns in a complex body of conversations and evidence, linking ideas that haven’t yet been connected, and writing it up so others can see what’s going on.
“What happens in and between people that makes change possible?”
How I work in the room
Alongside the frameworks and methods, there’s a practice that is harder to see but often matters most. It comes from years of coaching psychology and working with groups:
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Noticing what people are signalling through energy, hesitation and who speaks or stays quiet, as well as through what they say.
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Staying with uncertainty long enough for something useful to emerge, rather than rushing to a neat answer.
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Recognising when the most important conversation is not the one on the agenda.
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Helping people shift from what’s stopping them to what they can actually do.
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Connecting what’s happening in a single conversation to the wider patterns, conditions and power that shape it.
None of this is a technique to be taught from a slide. It’s judgement built through practice, and it’s a large part of what I bring to the work.
Ballarat
I’m based in Ballarat, regional Victoria, where I led the foundational development of the Ballarat Civility Exchange and its place-based Living Lab. The Living Lab, hosted by the Ballarat Foundation, has been where much of Arbour’s thinking has been tested in real community settings.
Background
Registered Psychologist (MAPS)
MSc (Coaching Psychology), BComm
More than 20 years working with organisations across government, education, not-for-profit and private sectors
Host of the Potential Psychology Podcast
I also run Potential Psychology Services, a workplace psychology practice.
Let’s talk
If you’re working through a question about how change is happening, or why it isn’t, I’d love a curious conversation.