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Vi Tran started The Middle Bridge Project in 2024 to make it easier to talk about mental health and wellbeing in communities where it’s still hard to say out loud. We bring culturally responsive practice together with evidence-based psychology through group coaching, workshops, tools and resources and use both in-person and online spaces so the work can reach further nation-wide and internationally. Our group coaching programs were among the first in Australia developed by a psychologist of colour.
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To make culturally responsive psychology and wellbeing support easier to reach for people living between cultures, including those from racially marginalised and diaspora communities and the practitioners who sit with them. We do this through group coaching, workshops, resources and consultation that hold lived experience and evidence-based practice side by side.
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Four values guide everything we make.
Respect. We honour your story, your family, your pace and what you already know from living it.
Diversity. Our work is made by and for multicultural, diaspora and racially marginalised communities from the start.
Empowerment. You are the expert in your own life. We bring the tools and you decide what fits.
Compassion. We extend kindness to ourselves, to those who came before us and to the parts of the journey still unfinished.
Our work draws on Schema Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), adapted through a culturally responsive lens. We help people make sense of the patterns passed down through families and reinforced by systems, and choose which ones to carry forward.
We start with what you already carry and build from there, shaped by what community tells us it needs.
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The name comes from the middle path in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: holding two truths at once and finding a way through the grey. The bridge is the crossing between where you come from and who you’re becoming, and the connection and community that carry us along the way.
Many of us learned to treat the in-between as somewhere to hurry through. We think the middle is a place too.
In practice, it sounds like this:
You’re doing the best you can, and you also want to grow.
You love and respect your family, and you’re making peace with parts of the past.
You honour your culture and you’re learning to set your own boundaries.
Meet Our ‘Middle Bridge Project’ Team
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Vi is a clinical psychologist and coach with more than 12 years in mental health. She has worked across private practice, hospital and community mental health services, universities, schools and the justice system. She is a Psychology Board of Australia approved supervisor for provisional psychologists and registrars, and also supervises counsellors and practitioners.
When she first sought therapy herself, it wasn’t culturally informed. The Middle Bridge Project grew from that gap.
Today she runs group coaching programs, develops workshops and tools, and works with organisations on systemic change. Her work brings evidence-based therapy together with cultural understanding, helping people and communities work with the patterns passed down through families and reinforced by systems.
Outside work you’ll find her baking, trying new cuisines, and reading and collecting books.
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Phuong is the Product and Engagement Strategist at The Middle Bridge Project and a first-generation migrant who has spent her life moving between cultures. Behind the scenes, she shapes our strategy and products, designs and illustrates our visuals and leads our marketing, so that everything we make is inclusive and culturally affirming.
She creates resources and experiences that make space for self-reflection and works to make our messaging clear and easy to connect with. Whether she’s refining product strategy, illustrating or designing visuals, her focus is on making our work matter to the community it’s for.
Outside The Middle Bridge Project, you’ll find her jogging with her corgi or wrangling her two kids.