Balanced Choice in Community

Walking with Communties

Balanced Choice is passionate about supporting community, from distinct cultural groups within cities, to regional towns and remote outstations. Our company was founded in Darwin, one of the most geographically isolated capital cities in the world. Since the beginning we have worked with communities to deliver services that make a lasting impact. Our people appreciate the complex relationships between geography, local history, culture, language, politics, industry and hardship in the makeup of every community’s identity. And we know that no two towns are the same. 

Above all, we recognise the values that unite us. A Balanced Choice facilitator can engage with teams and individuals to bring about positive change, whether it is within a school, local council, charitable organisation, or business. 

"Congratulations to all that graduated from the latest ISEP course! Well done and thank you to RN Employment Services, NIAA and Balanced Choice for bringing such a valuable and inspiring program to Tennant Creek."

The Hon Steven Edgington MLA - Member for Barkley

Youth Leadership

Youth participation is a powerful community engagement tool that delivers positive outcomes for both your organisation and the wider community. Establishing effective participation does not rely on finding ‘the right young people’. It involves establishing processes and positive relationships that ensure all young people have the confidence, connections and support required to engage, feel valued and heard. Balanced Choice facilitators can work with you to establish effective youth advisory and/or leadership programs to enhance young people’s connection with your organisation. This can include:

  • Induction programs to establish trust, teamwork and collaboration between young people from different backgrounds, ages and experiences.

  • Building a framework to allow for the meaningful exchange of ideas between community leaders and young people.

  • Working with young people to develop processes for broader youth-lead consultation and goal setting specific to your community.

  • Ensuring that the recognition and celebration of outcomes and achievements is part of your youth engagement DNA. 

We will help you empower young people to feel seen and heard within your organisation and community. 

"My experience learning from Balanced Choice through the NT Youth Round Table was transformative, helping me deeply reflect on my values, grow as a community leader and build the confidence to uplift others. This made me aspire to lead with the same integrity, care and impact they modelled."

Shanae Kuo - participant of the NT Youth Roundtable

Employment

For many people in the community that have lived in environments of poverty, violence, alcohol or drug dependency, disengagement from education and/or conflict with the justice system, there is a process of healing and personal growth that needs to be undertaken to prepare for employment. Maintaining a job requires qualities that are hard to develop in many environments. Attributes such as Courage, Respect, Endurance, Patience, Discipline and Growth form the basis of any form of responsibility.

In 2025, Balanced Choice entered a four-year agreement with RN Employment and the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory. This pioneering program sees a Balanced Choice facilitator embedded in the community for sixteen weeks a year, working alongside groups of young people considered at risk of becoming long-term unemployed. 

The Principles guiding this process

  • We focus on wellbeing: As the first step towards future pathways.

  • We aim for impact: Through action, we use teachable moments to engage participants in activities such as fitness, healthy eating, connection to country and values-based education, following the PERMA framework.

  • We measure outcomes: Tracking the difference we’re making. Not just our activities but assessing processes through creative expression.

  • We collaborate: We help each other and share learnings with our partners, employers and community. Our participants have agency in the process, discussing how their feedback can be communicated to others to improve the program's impact.

  • We behave ethically and inclusively: We ask for permission to use people's information and we respect their privacy. Everyone’s voices must be heard and we follow Indigenous Data Sovereignty. We behave ethically and inclusively on a values-based model through PERMA.

  • We tailor our approach: We change our activities, methods and tools to match different needs and situations. This includes ensuring at all times we are person-centred and culturally safe.

  • We use stories and numbers: We combine numbers and stories to tell the full story about our work.

  • We try to answer the big questions: We use the evaluation framework to consider the big picture questions around social, financial, personal and community impact and efficiency.

Partnerships

The most common obstacle for high-quality service support in regional Australia is the cost of bringing specialists to town. We know it's expensive, so we’ll work with you to share the cost.  Balanced Choice can work with you to engage potential partners in your community to reduce the burden of going it alone. We specialise in collaboration and delivering multiple programs within the one visit. Our programs include:

  • Leadership and Team Building by enhancing the capacity of your workforce.

  • Youth Engagement and Motivation by establishing youth advisory groups with processes for consultation and implementing positive change.

  • Employment by providing physical and mental health support to job seekers and long-term unemployed as they transition to employment.

  • Education by partnering with primary and secondary schools to embed The Anchor values to improve engagement, learning and employment pathways.

  • Wellbeing and Goal Setting for teams that could use a boost of positivity. 


Talk to us about a Balanced Choice residency in your community. 

Motivation & Goal Setting

Wellbeing and positive emotions are a key consideration for businesses, schools and support services across Australia. All workplaces experienced periods where company culture is impacted by internal and external events. This can leave staff feeling disconnected from personal and company values or lacking confidence in the capacity for positive change.

Programs such as those delivered by Balanced Choice connect people with positive emotions and provide a safe environment to build trust and collaboration. Nominated for the Northern Territory’s Australian of the Year in 2019, founder of Balanced Choice, Adam Drake, has an exceptional ability to bring people together to identify common values that empower us to envision and enact positive change.

Balanced Choice programs are founded in Hope Theory, a principle derived from Positive Psychology and developed in 1989. Hope Theory is the ‘perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways’ as explored in C. R. Snyder’s, Rainbows in the Mind.

Balanced Choice can deliver a one-off program that instills principles of positive psychology for motivation, connection, collaboration and community building, or longer-term programs working alongside those that require more detailed support. Balanced Choice can tailor a program for:

  • Leadership teams and staff operating in complex social environments;

  • Young people disengaged from school or struggling to find employment; and

  • Teachers and school staffrooms. 

"I personally come out of the session energised and reconnected. The sessions always allow me to sit in a positive space and be able to openly speak about things. Which I think is very important for young mob especially in this generation." 

Tasha Cole - Menzies School of Health Research

Contact

If Balanced Choice could make a difference where you are, we’d love to hear from you.

Enquire