Dr Perrie Ballantyne
Director, Collaboration and Systems Change
Perrie is an innovation strategist, practitioner and researcher who has worked with leading social innovators, agencies and teams in Europe and Australia for the past 20 years. She is a trusted partner for ambitious initiatives that support diverse partners to work together across communities, services, philanthropy, universities and government.
A Director at ThirdStory (formerly known as Innovation Unit), Perrie leads the East Coast Australian team out of Melbourne/Narrm. Bringing deep expertise in collaborative and participatory practices, Perrie loves helping groups to connect with each other across vantage points to develop shared insights and ideas, consider difficult realities and future possibilities, and take forward new actions together. Through her career, she has developed specialism in facilitating networks and learning communities to grow place-based and ecosystemic solutions to complex social challenges, working with government, university and philanthropic partners (see, for example, her work as a Learning Partner to Paul Ramsay Foundation’s Open Grant Round for DFV).
Perrie works across various contexts where innovation and systemic change is needed to ensure justice and equity, including education and early years, health and wellbeing, and community and care. Whether re-imagining support at end of life or developing stronger place-based responses to disability inclusion, Perrie brings empathy, energy, creativity and high ambition for better and different to everything she does.
Perrie was previously Project Director for Social Innovation at RMIT University in Melbourne, where she led on strategic projects that brought research knowledge together with industry, community and government players. Prior to this, she spent over 15 years based in the UK and Europe in roles that included Director for Research and Engagement at ThePublicOffice, Interim Head of Innovation at Save the Children UK and Head of Learning and Project Development at Innovation Unit UK, and Learning Manager at Nesta (the UK’s Innovation Foundation). She hails from Melbourne/Narrm, where she started her adult life as an academic researcher and lecturer in Australian History and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.