About The Water Well Project
The Water Well Project is an award-winning charity improving health and wellbeing for communities from migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds.
We deliver free, interactive, community-based health education sessions that make health information easier to understand, ask questions about and use in everyday life.
Our sessions are facilitated by volunteer healthcare professionals and delivered in trusted community settings, with interpreters where needed.
Clear goals, community-led work.
Our work is guided by a simple belief: health information should be clear, trusted, culturally responsive and accessible to everyone.
Equitable access to healthcare
A future where people from migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds have equitable access to healthcare and can make informed decisions about their health.
Free, trusted health education
To deliver free, interactive and culturally responsive health education sessions in trusted community settings, facilitated by volunteer healthcare professionals.
Improving health literacy
To promote good health and wellbeing by improving health literacy for communities from migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds in Australia.
Health information is not always easy to access or understand.
For many people from migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds, the Australian healthcare system can be unfamiliar and difficult to navigate.
Language barriers, different cultural understandings of health and disease, unfamiliar systems and limited access to preventative health information can make it harder to seek care early.
The Water Well Project helps create safe, practical spaces where people can ask questions, build confidence and better understand the healthcare system.
Clear information
We make health information easier to understand by using simple language and practical examples.
Safe conversations
We create space for people to ask questions directly to healthcare professionals.
Trusted settings
We deliver sessions through community organisations that already know and support their communities.
The principles that guide our work.
These values shape the way we work with communities, partner organisations, volunteers and supporters.
Collaboration
Working with communities and organisations, not simply delivering to them.
Compassion
Listening with care and recognising the lived experiences people bring.
Respect
Valuing diversity in culture, language, experience and understanding.
Integrity
Providing trusted, evidence-informed information in a responsible way.
Accountability
Learning from feedback and being responsible to communities and partners.
Linny’s parents, Hung and Nguyet, in 1979, their first year in Australia, outside the North Richmond housing commission flats.
Founded from lived experience and care.
The Water Well Project was founded by Dr Linny Kimly Phuong in 2011, inspired by her experience as the daughter of parents who arrived in Australia as refugees from Vietnam in the late 1970s.
Growing up, Linny watched her parents navigate the healthcare system and often acted as the child interpreter during their medical appointments.
Now a doctor herself, Linny understands the barriers many communities face when accessing healthcare, including language barriers, different cultural beliefs about health and disease, and unfamiliarity with preventative healthcare.
The Water Well Project was created to help communities better understand health, common conditions and the Australian healthcare system.
A place to gather, share and learn.
Our name and logo reflect the idea of people coming together to share knowledge, build trust and create practical solutions.
Our name
In many traditional communities, a river, water pump or water well is a place where people gather — not only to collect water, but to share stories, knowledge and experience.
We aim to create that same kind of space: a place for open conversation between healthcare professionals and community groups.
Our logo
Designed by a friend of the project, Dr Raf Ratinam, our logo represents people of diverse backgrounds and cultures coming together to solve local problems and create working solutions.
The interlocking arms flow towards a coordinated centre, symbolising collaboration and the idea of a water well.
Help more communities access trusted health information.
Community organisations can request a free session, healthcare professionals can volunteer their skills, and supporters can help keep this work free and accessible.