Social Impact Assessment · NSW State Significant Projects
Prosia is a specialist practice. I work with planning and EIS teams on the social impact components of an assessment — research, analysis and drafting, delivered within your assessment and sign-off.
Engaged by planning and EIS teams as specialist capacity on the social impact components of an assessment.
Assessment of the impact category covering physical and mental health, psychological stress, and people exposed to social exclusion or substantial change.
Social baseline, primary research and impact analysis across the categories in scope, drafted for inclusion in your team's SIA.
Shorter-form social impact work for planning proposals, rezonings and development applications where a full assessment isn't warranted.
Social Impact Management Plan drafting, monitoring frameworks, and indicators that make conditions of consent workable rather than aspirational.
Focus
The Guideline's health and wellbeing category covers physical and mental health, psychological stress from financial or other pressures, and the position of people vulnerable to social exclusion or substantial change. It is the category my training and practice speak to most directly, and the work I am best placed to do.
Aligned to the DPHI Social Impact Assessment Guideline and the July 2025 Technical Supplement, and scaled by the Guideline's proportionality principle. Evidence over assertion, method over expedience.
Reading the SEARs against the project to establish what the assessment actually has to answer. Identifying affected groups and the study area, testing which of the Guideline's impact categories are genuinely in play, and setting the level of effort each one warrants.
Building the social baseline from statistical, documentary and primary sources, then predicting and evaluating impacts against the Guideline's likelihood and severity framework. Distributional effects and vulnerable groups treated as findings in their own right rather than a closing paragraph.
Mitigation and enhancement measures tied to the mechanism that produces each impact — because a measure that doesn't address the cause won't survive a condition of consent. Social Impact Management Plans and monitoring frameworks where the project warrants them.
Prosia is my practice. The person you brief is the person who does the research and writes the analysis. Nothing is handed down to an analyst.
I qualified as a psychologist in 1997 and have practised across New South Wales since. In 2007 I completed a doctorate. In 2015 I completed a postgraduate qualification through the UNSW School of Public Health in leadership and management, with a focus on ethics.
For more than a decade I have worked as a health and governance consultant and trainer in healthcare, alongside my own practice. That work is concerned with how organisations make decisions, where those decisions carry ethical weight, and how they affect the people subject to them.
Social impact assessment applies the same research and analytical expertise at the level of a community rather than an individual. The Guideline's health and wellbeing category covers physical and mental health, psychological stress, and the position of people vulnerable to social exclusion or substantial change. That is the material I have worked with throughout my career.
The research effort is defined and priced before it starts, so the social impact line in your budget doesn't move. Variations only when the scope itself changes.
On enquiries, and on questions during a live project. You should never be waiting on a specialist input to find out where something stands.
Your templates, your programme, your review. The work is prepared to fit what your team already has running rather than alongside it.
If the SEARs and the project don't warrant a full assessment, I'll say so at scoping rather than sell you one.
Tell me about the project and where it sits in the assessment pathway. I reply within one business day.
I'll reply within one business day.