As we count down to the TheMHS Sydney Forum 2026, we’re excited to continue our interview series spotlighting the speakers who will help shape the conversation around help when you need it – urgent and crisis support in mental health.
In these short, light-touch interviews, we invite speakers to share their perspectives, experiences, and the insights that guide their work — offering a chance to get to know the people behind the presentations ahead of the Forum.
This week, we’re excited to introduce Anya Satyanand. Anya will join us to convene an Open Space session — an emergent, participant-led format designed to spark collaboration, challenge assumptions, and generate bold, action-focused conversations for collective impact.
BIOGRAPHY
Anya Satyanand is an educator, systems thinker, and Executive Director of Ember Innovations, where she’s working to catalyse change in Aotearoa’s mental health system. With a background in youth development, education, ethical investment and entrepreneurship, Anya is known for designing courageous, relational interventions that centre equity and possibility. She has led leadership programmes across sectors, including with Global Women and Leadership New Zealand.
Creating spaces where people who rarely share the same room can think together – people with lived experience, researchers, innovators, and funders. Some of my happiest work moments are watching a conversation in one of those spaces grow into a real initiative that shifts how things work.
A deep curiosity about how change happens, and a belief that communities already hold much of the knowledge needed to create it. What keeps me here is seeing people trusted to lead solutions that matter to them.
Ember Innovations exists to help bold ideas in mental health and wellbeing take root. We connect people, resources, and insight so that community-led innovation has a real chance to grow.
Collective sensemaking methods that help groups interpret complexity together. I’m also deeply interested in Indigenous and relational approaches to innovation that prioritise relationships and stewardship over quick fixes.
The Mana Taiohi framework from Aotearoa. It reframes young people not as problems to be solved but as leaders, knowledge holders, and partners in change.
Being in or near the ocean. Salt water, big horizons, and a long walk tend to reset both my thinking and my nervous system.
Systems that respond with humanity and timeliness. Help shouldn’t require navigating a maze or proving you deserve it.
Instead of a one-way presentation, with a booming voice from the lectern, we’ll open up a shared space for conversation and creation. The goal is to draw on the collective intelligence of the room, surface the insights people are already carrying, and see what new ideas might emerge when we work on the questions together. Click here to find out more.
