A Decade of Impact, A Future of Possibility: ISSUP at 10 Pt. 3
Building the Future Together: Joanna Travis-Roberts on 10 Years of ISSUP
In the final episode of the series, Associate Professor Goodman Sibeko sits down once again with ISSUP Chief Executive Joanna Travis-Roberts to look back on a decade of growth and forward to what’s next. Joanna reflects on how ISSUP has evolved through moments of change, from a small idea to a global network, and what it takes to stay flexible, humble, and connected in a complex field. Together, they explore the lessons, turning points, and future priorities that will shape ISSUP’s next chapter.
Featured Voices
Host – A/Prof. Goodman Sibeko
ISSUP Global Scientific Advisor.
Head of Addiction Psychiatry, University of Cape Town.
LinkedIn: goodmansibeko
Twitter/X: @profgsibeko
Guest – Joanna Travis-Roberts
Chief Executive of ISSUP
Learn more about Joanna on issup.net
Time Stamps
Professor Goodman Sibeko (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the third and final episode of our special podcast series, celebrating a decade of ISSUP. We've met the driving force behind the organisation and we've traced ISSUP's evolution from just the concept to a community and a global force. Now we turn our attention to celebration and vision. What has ISSUP achieved in these 10 years that we should pause to honor? What lessons have we learned? And most importantly, what comes next for a network that continues to grow in size, scope and impact? Join us as Joanna reflects key accomplishments, lifts up the stories that matters most and shares her hopes and strategies for ISSUP's next chapters. Joanna, as we continue our conversation, what does the 10 year milestone mean to you personally and for ISSUP.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (00:45)
Hi, Good man Thanks again for having me back. 10 years is huge. It's a real amazing moment to take stock, to celebrate and to say, right, what have we done well? What have we done badly? What can we learn from? And what do we want to achieve in the next 10 years? So it feels like a wonderful moment to have that reflection.
For me personally, it's just blows me away how much ISSUP has changed and evolved and how many people we now are. What a big group ISSUP now is and I'm delighted and really very moved by the membership endorsing what we try and do by joining us and being part of the community. So yeah, 10 years feels fantastic.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (01:36)
Sure. And I think, you know, it's wonderful to see something grow from just an idea and a thought and, you know, a conceived vision actually being a community that contributes to how it evolves and grows. So that's really exciting. And so what sort of feedback are you receiving from the ISSUP community?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (01:54)
So it's wonderful. The ISSUP community gives us great feedback and often guidance in terms of what they need more or less of, ideas, offerings of contributions to collaborate. So we talk to our community all the time, but we asked the staff to have a little look at more recent feedback that we've had and we've had some amazing ones just.
Recently, someone emailed us and said, I can't believe you are such a blessing that was hidden from me. I owe you it all. And somebody else said, thank you for the effort and diligence that you put into making our mission a reality to the work our members as impactful, accessible and effective as possible. Together we make a difference. I mean, what an amazing line to read.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (02:43)
Absolutely. Yeah and I think that, you know, it's really great that people find that they're able to provide input and hopefully the feedback that they give, the guidance they give, the ideas that they come up with for working together. Hopefully they see them panning out in how ISSUP takes forward discussions in this podcast in future. And also in our webinar and knowledge share platforms, in terms of the lessons that we've learned in how ISSUP has evolved, we probably touched on some of these themes in the second episode, but what leadership or organisational lessons would you say have emerged about building a global professional community?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (03:22)
A couple of things spring to mind when you ask me that One is about humility and meeting people with what we can offer. So I think often when we start out a relationship with anyone, an individual or a huge partner organisation, I try to go with this is what we can do. How can we help, in what you're already doing because I would never want to assume that we know better than anyone else how to do something ? So I think that that is something that is a very ISSUP ethos and I think is something that we keep learning from and hopefully offering to people.
And I think it really has helped us build the relationships and the community that we have. The second thing that jumps to mind is about flexibility. And actually what's interesting in how we've developed over the last 10 years is that we've become more structured and more flexible. So we've learned when it's important to have some structure and when the structure is important is to help people do their work. working with the national chapters, for example, we have a very structured central operation.
The processes, the agreements, the wording, et cetera, is very structured and that's constantly evolving based on what the national chapters need and how we can improve how we work with them. But at the same time, every national chapter is completely different. So we don't apply a structure to them in terms of you have to do this, this and this.
We try and scaffold them with some structures that can help them do their work and us to operate with them. But then we embrace the differences. So I think we are learning when it's important to be structured, when it's important to be flexible and learning from our mistakes. I'm sure that we will continue to get things wrong and need to tweak things always in all of our SIPs operations.
But I think that for me is something that we've really become more organised around.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (05:35)
You know, the idea about humility and making sure that you start with what you have to offer and learning from mistakes could really actually serve as general relationship advice. So maybe we're also ready to be married.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (05:47)
It's a sideline we haven't thought about.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (05:50)
I think, know, what you've mentioned about recognising and enhancing what members and partners already have to offer is really part so key to us transferring that messaging that we are collaborative, but also making sure that people feel valued and that they feel that what they have to offer actually matters and makes a difference. And that element of flexibility amidst the streamlined, impactful, but responsive structure, which I think ISSUP Global definitely is.
And importantly, allowing the local chapters to be able to adapt for local relevance. And they really get to shine when it comes to the global event, don't they? We really get to see and taste and experience and feel the local chapter, the local culture.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (06:31)
Absolutely, and we hope that they all shine in their local context and that we give enough spotlight to them because they really do shine and are incredibly important. And as we've said many times, just do things in their own way to their own strengths and to their own country's and membership's needs. So they are such an asset. It's really incredible.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (06:54)
So in terms of, you know, ISSUP, we discussed now about flexibility and about having a structure, but one that's responsive. How would you say ISSUP has adapted to evolving trends or crises? For example, you know, the virtual convening during COVID, the rise in synthetic drugs, emerging prevention needs. How is ISSUP adapted to these?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (07:18)
So all of those things have had a huge impact on ISSUP. And if I start with the pandemic, I think that was huge for ISSUP, in part because we were already online. We already existed digitally. So it wasn't much of a pivot for us to embrace that side of things.
When we went in, I'll give you one example. When we went into the pandemic, ISSUP was delivering one webinar a month. So we would spend time developing the content, the relationships, the speakers, and we were delivering one webinar a month to a couple of hundred people. And then when the pandemic started, we thought, okay, then we're not holding in-person events. Let's really focus on this and we started to deliver sometimes three or four webinars a week. And that channel was there already. So we hugely changed during the pandemic, but we could just build on what we already had. We didn't have to build new systems, new structures. And so that was, we were at a real advantage. mean, everyone started to work from home and the ISSUP team had as always worked from home.
So we could build upon a lot of practices that we already had in place. And our webinars are the perfect example then of those other elements that you talk about, whether it's synthetic drugs trends or emerging needs of the workforce, we can package and have a webinar online within three weeks of something emerging. And the team are amazing at doing that based on what is out there. And I have to say our speakers do that for us for free. Consistently, they show up and they are willing to share their knowledge, their know-how with the team, know, with the community that is ISSUP.
And that's the perfect example of how we can be very flexible and pivot to whatever the needs are of our community. And it's very refreshing to see that that is then well received. In other elements, know, perhaps other things that are not so digital, we have to be more considered. Like we talked at the end of the last episode about training, you know, we can't just launch that. We're trying to be very careful in how we develop and expand our training provision.
But we are always listening and trying our best to be responsive. And I hope that for the most part, we are managing to do
Professor Goodman Sibeko (09:52)
That's great, Joanna. you know, definitely the increased frequency of the webinars, I think, has been really very successful. We've seen an amazing turnout and a great response and really meaningful engagement. And we really appreciate the ISSUP community for that.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (10:08)
And when the pandemic stopped, the numbers didn't drop. People still want to receive that information and have it there and watch it back. that was another sort of learning for us that actually we did something in response to people's working conditions. But when their conditions changed again, it was still useful. So we've carried on.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (10:28)
Fantastic. So having developed this platform, we now, you we've just demonstrated how it was also able to evolve responsively. Where do you see ISSUP headed over the next, say, 10 years? What are the new challenges and opportunities that you're seeing?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (10:43)
So we're seeing a real opportunity to broaden our community that there are elements of the workforce that can be brought into the ISSUP community that we're not currently trying to serve. So I think, for example, some of the supply control professions, they benefit from what we're doing, but we don't directly produce things that could be useful to them and I think that we can expand to think about a broader community of ISSUP membership when we are producing and developing our own work. So that will be really interesting to see how we can expand that community.
I've said it on this podcast, I say it every time I present, but ISSUP really is for everyone that is interested in or working in relation to this field and most of our ISSUP members don't wake up in the morning and think I am only going to do a substance use related job today. Many of them do thousands of other things, but still have an impact upon substance use in what they are doing. So I think having that broader community in our minds will hopefully make what we're doing more useful to more people.
I think carrying on the maximisation of our national chapters potential for impact is really important. See the growth of membership through them because there is only so much we can do to tell people we're here. We rely greatly on the national chapters having those local relationships.
And we can't be of use to anyone if people don't know that we exist and that we're free and that they can contribute and gain from the ISSUP community. So I think that that is going to be really important to help us not only deliver through our national chapters, but grow our membership so that the audience that can benefit is significant and that it's worth doing what we're doing.
We've talked about training and how important that is and I've said it came from the members saying this when training is available, this is really useful. We would like more. would like this type. We would like it delivered in this way and trying to respond to that is a huge job, but we want to do so. We already deliver some training, particularly at our events and through our national chapters.
But to be able to grow that to support what our members are asking for is going to be a huge achievement, I think, and something that's very important for our next 10 years. And to keep building partnerships. Who are the other people, the people that we should be working with, that we should be highlighting, that we should be amplifying what they're doing? Who are those people?
How can we keep meeting them? How can we keep being of benefit to them? To then ultimately benefit our members, to then ultimately benefit the clients, the target group, the communities, the countries, the societies that are ultimately our end user, our end goal.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (13:53)
That's awesome. And I think, you know, it's really about in terms of maximising national chapter impact. I think what we certainly can do is encourage our ISSUP membership to engage with their national chapter to find out what locally appropriate resources they might have and to find ways to participate and contribute and access sort of offerings that are offered through the national chapter. So I think we can certainly suggest to the ISSUP community that they do that.
And in terms of training offers, I think it's wonderful to see the interest amongst the ISSUP community for self advancement, because people reach out to us all the time. They want to know, you know, what's required for me to achieve an ICAP certification? What's required for me to be, you know, a reliable provider in prevention? know, our former leader Jeff Lee was really at pains to impress about the importance of receiving appropriate training and prevention before you can go out and deliver those interventions. So that's really encouraging.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (14:50)
Yeah, absolutely. again, because ISSUP wants to be flexible and meet the needs of people out there. When we look at something like training, we're not trying to only look at it in the traditional sort of long approach. You know, I also, I'm always mindful that one of our most popular webinar series is the motivational interviewing one, which is three or four hour long, hour and a half webinars.
So it's about saying, okay, this training is here. If you want to do everything from A to B, you know, to Z in this particular topic, but also maybe we're going to spend half a day on one small element so that there is that flexibility so that everybody can take the training, whether their employer lets them take eight weeks of professional development or eight hours.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (15:43)
Absolutely. So some flexibility and hopefully some impactful skills transfer in the process. And hopefully we can extend that to, you know, this broader community that we're targeting. You mentioned, you know, the supply reduction professionals. How in your view or in your vision rather, will ISSUP deepen the impact, whether it's by broadening the membership or by strengthening the partnerships or by evolving the training model. So what's the strategy for deepening impact?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (16:12)
And I answer all three.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (16:13)
Of course you can.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (16:16)
It is all three that's the easy way of answering it, but they all do very different things. Like I talked about the national chapters helping us grow your membership. There might be a provision on ISSUP that we started 10 years ago that we are not new. It's not, you know, it's, it's constantly there and we're working on it, but it's not like a new flashy thing that we're talking about all the time.
That might be the really important thing, the piece of somebody's professionalisation puzzle. And so it's about making sure people know we're here, people know what we have, and they are using those resources that are hopefully easily accessible to them. So the broadening membership is just about making what we are doing, but also have done over the years, as useful as possible. So that I think is really important to continue to grow the membership, to continue to hear from our membership and consult with them to listen to what they need. Because in some places maybe there isn't anyone else that they can ask for tools or direction for their career development.
So that's is very important and it's not just a marketing goal, it's a really important part of making us worthwhile. Then I think the strengthening partnerships ties in again because what we do is provide people signposting to what's already out there. If something emerges that their members need, say a certain amount of knowledge on synthetic drugs and how they're moving around the globe, for example.
ISSUP wouldn't necessarily have to do that piece of research ourselves. We would connect with the person who is already doing it and is already doing it well. So those partnerships benefit our membership, but also we hope we can amplify for our partners what they're already doing. So that continues to be really important.
As well as admitting we don't know everything and we're not the experts in everything, but this is the person that maybe would be. And yes, the training models that are evolving, as we've said, this is something that we're really focusing on now because we've listened to our members and we're doing that. But who knows what will be around the corner and having that ear open to what's needed.
And trying to maximise the resources that ISSUP has to respond to that is probably the most important thing that we have to keep in mind over the next 10 years so that we don't get stuck in our ways or in our beliefs of what's important and what's best and actually can be as responsive as possible.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (18:56)
I think what's great is that ISSUP already has evidence of how ISSUP can be responsive and how ISSUP can evolve to meet the challenge. And so we have clear evidence of what works in that space and what achieve success and supports the ISSUP membership. In your mind though, what are strategic priorities that are perhaps top of mind for you?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (19:15)
The priorities at this point definitely focus consolidating where we are. So I feel like we've done so much growth and we have expanded to a point that it's now about making sure we reinforce what we have. As I said, there's some things that are old that we might not be talking about all the time that can be useful to people.
So just consolidating our messaging. Digital is always been a priority and I think will always continue to be because that's how our voice comes through. So I think having that in our minds, the digital reach as a priority with the, I don't know how to say it. I think I'm being repetitive, but with that promotion of what there is so that people really understand what tools there are that can be useful to them in their day-to-day work.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (20:11)
That's great. And I think, you know, a lot of folks will be hearing the story, Joanna, and they'll be inspired. So for professionals who are inspired by your journey, by ISSUP's journey, how can they get involved in this space? How can they contribute to their local national chapters? How can they access training, ICAP certification? How do they go about submitting resources for knowledge sharing? So how do they get involved? They want to get involved.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (20:35)
I really hope people do hear this and want to get involved. And I would say the best starting point is our website, isop.net. And there, those digital tools that you've listed are all available. People can submit, they can showcase themselves and their own work. People want to learn from each other. So hearing those stories of we tried this and it failed, or we tried this and it was brilliant. It's so useful for somebody else.
So I would say look at the knowledge there, learn from it, but also share to it so that what you're doing can help your fellow professional in whatever the realm of our community you might work in. Go back through our library of webinars because there are so many topics covered in there and they are short bite-sized ways to consume the information in this wonderful podcast, follow and listen to that. I think people can really enjoy that in consuming the knowledge in a different way. Tell their networks, their colleagues, their community that ISSUP exists so that we can keep having that benefit to people as the workforce grows, changes, evolves, and keeps telling us what you need. So we're on social platforms were pretty extensive there in our communications on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn in particular and X. So people can talk to us on those. They can email us, come to the events and talk to us. So there's lots of ways that people can share in this community and we hope that they continue to be of use.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (22:16)
Awesome. Joanna, you're nearly off the hook. You're nearly off the hook. One final question for you. What message would you like to send to the global community of ISSUP as ISSUP enters its second decade?
Joanna Travis-Roberts (22:27)
That they are fantastic to be very British. They are brilliant at what they are doing. That the fact that they've joined ISSUP just shows so much commitment to wanting to learn and continue their own growth. We could not do what we do without our members, without our partners. We're a community of volunteers, basically. There's so many people contributing things out of the goodness of their own hearts. And I think I'm so grateful and want to say thank you on behalf of all of the ISSUP team. It's not just me, obviously that's very important that we are a group that believe very strongly in what we're doing and love what we do and want to carry on being useful. So I think that is my message that you're doing such a good job and it's so important the job that you are doing, that we recognise that, we appreciate it and we hope that we can enhance it and continue to do so.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (23:28)
Yeah, Joanna, thank you for your time. It's been so much fun. Thank you. And so everyone that brings us to the end of this special three part series celebrating a decade of ISSUP. We've had the privilege of learning about Joanna Travis-Roberts journey, the founding and evolution of ISSUP, the vision shaping its future. Across every episode, one message has come through clearly that this is a community built on collaboration.
Joanna Travis-Roberts (23:33)
I loved it.
Professor Goodman Sibeko (23:55)
Guided by evidence and driven by the belief that together we can build better responses to substance use around the world, whether you're a practitioner, policymaker, researcher or advocate, there's a place for you in this global movement. Visit issup.net to join, connect and contribute. Thank you for listening and for being a part of ISSUP's journey into the next decade of impact.
[END]
About the ISSUP Exchange
The ISSUP Exchange podcast series explores the evolution of responses to the challenges of substance use—from research and training to ethics, quality standards and evidence-based practice. We connect the dots so you can see the big picture.
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About ISSUP
ISSUP is a global network that unites, connects, and shares knowledge across the substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery support workforce. Our mission is to make our members’ work as effective as possible—by providing access to training, resources, and a vibrant professional community.
