Dear Rotary Club of Warrnambool,

We talk a lot about impact, and we should. But I've come to believe impact is a downstream thing. It starts much earlier, and much more quietly, with one person deciding a question is worth years of their life, long before anyone can tell them it will lead somewhere.

That fragile early moment, before the proof exists, is where Australian Rotary Health chooses to stand.

I think about Dr Elizabeth Scarr. Years ago, when it was little more than a promising idea, we backed her research into the brain's muscarinic receptors. Patient, unglamorous science, with no guarantee attached.

In 2024 that work reached the world as Cobenfy, the first new-generation schizophrenia treatment in decades that works without targeting dopamine, approved in the United States. A generation of people living with schizophrenia now has a genuinely new option, because someone backed the question long before there was an answer.

That is what an early yes can become. Not a slogan. A medicine. Transformative for the people who need it most.

It almost never looks like a sure thing at the start. It looks like a researcher with more curiosity than certainty, and a community willing to believe in them anyway. For more than 45 years, that community has been you.

It's why we back people early, and why we now put so much of that belief behind the mental health of children aged nought to twelve, where half of all lifetime mental illness begins and where an early yes changes the most.

And it's happening right now. One example is through the work of Dr Talia Carl. The question she is seeking to answer could change how we reach the children who need help most. I invite you to read about her work just below.

To every one of you who supports ARH to back a researcher before the world is convinced, thank you. You make the earliest, hardest, most important yes possible.

Kindest,

Yvonne Keane AM

Chief Executive Officer, Australian Rotary Health