Participatory Democracy
Purple Sage Project
From the wisdom of the people — action for our times.
A grassroots listening project that became a model for democratic change.
Where VWT's Kitchen Table Conversations began
Civic Engagement & Participatory Democracy
In 1998, the Victorian Women’s Trust launched the Purple Sage Project — a bold experiment in participatory democracy at a moment when many Victorians felt shut out of the decisions shaping their lives. Frustrated by years of privatisation and government inaction on pressing community needs, VWT set out to do something radical: listen.
Purple Sage was the inaugural use of VWT’s Kitchen Table Conversations model, a structured process of facilitated small-group discussion, designed to give ordinary people a genuine voice on the issues that mattered to them. Groups of four to ten people gathered in homes across Victoria, guided by a host, to share their experiences, question what they’d been told, and imagine something better. Their notes came back to VWT, and their collective wisdom shaped the advocacy that followed.
1998
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The idea at the centre of it
The project captured something real. As Paul Heinrichs wrote in The Sunday Age in October 1999: “They called it the Purple Sage Project, an attempt to tap the inchoate unease they believed Victoria was experiencing about the Kennett Revolution… While the Kennett Government scored on economic grounds, it appears to have been brought undone by the development of resistance to threats to communities, especially in the country.”
Purple Sage was built on a conviction that listening is not passive, it is political. At a time when public discourse was increasingly dominated by noise, VWT made deep, reciprocal conversation the basis of civic action.
What it made possible
“It was beartening to bear our shared concerns. It starts with each of us. We have power as individuals and as a group to make change. We must not give over that power, but use it.” – Purple Sage participants Forest Hill
Purple Sage didn’t just produce a report, it proved a model. The Kitchen Table Conversations process VWT developed in 1998 has since been deployed more than a dozen times by communities, electorates and organisations across the country, from environmental campaigns like Our Watermark (2001) to the independent political movement that became Voices for Indi (2012), which helped unseat a longstanding Coalition incumbent and elect the first female independent member for north-east Victoria.
In 2023, the model became the engine of Together, Yes — VWT’s national grassroots campaign for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament, which mobilised more than 3,000 conversation hosts across Australia.
"In the seminal 1998 Purple Sage Project, the art and practice of listening was the central pillar of the Kitchen Table Conversations process designed by VWT. Listening can and does change the world."
Former VWT Chair Alana Johnson AM, 2023
Purple Sage was made possible thanks to strong community partnerships involving the Victorian Women’s Trust, The Stegley Foundation, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the People Together Project, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the YWCA Victoria.
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