11 AUG 2023 · Peter Pecotić is an entrepreneur, campaigner, and emerging film maker, Australian born of Croatian/ Dalmatian decent. As an entrepreneur he started a communications agency in Sydney specialising in business, cultural, and political communications which expanded into operations in China, Singapore and across the Indo-Pacific. For many years he was based in China and was on the Board of Austcham Shanghai. As a campaigner he worked on the successful Albanese and Chris Minns campaigns along with numerous election campaigns in the UK. As a film maker Peter’s fascinated with the human condition transcending across cultures and has embarked on making documentaries to explore these themes.

23 APR 2023 · Dr Gen Ford is a single, happily childfree woman living in Melbourne. She has a PhD in international relations and has spent her career loitering around universities in various capacities, holding strong beliefs in the power of education to change people's lives. Gen started Solo Advocacy Australia in early 2022 in recognition of the way people doing life solo are still largely unrecognised and disadvantaged in society and as a love letter to the role that friendship and her community of solo friends has played in her own life. When she's not trying to survive on a single income or working on Solo, you'll likely find her browsing a garden or an op shop, hiking, or deep in a book. In mid 2020 Gen gave a large piece of her heart to her little cat Evie and has no regrets. Donna Ward established the micro-press Inkerman & Blunt Publishers in 2013, and indigo, the journal of Western Australian creative writing in 2007. From 2011–2012 she edited the online poetry magazine, Sotto, for Poetry Australia. She has past lives as a psychotherapist, social worker, and organizational consultant. Her prose has appeared in Griffith Review, Southerly Magazine, Island Magazine, Huffington Post, and Westerly Magazine. Her hybrid memoir, She I Dare Not Name, A Spinster’s Meditations on Life, was published by Allen & Unwin 2020.

7 MAR 2023 · When life suddenly changes, so do your dreams and aspirations. Shaun never imagined becoming a Paralympian or a disability advocate. Shaun shares his incredible life story; how he overcame expectations and how you can create a more meaningful life despite all life’s curveballs. Every day he helps people living with disability and disadvantage to find meaningful and sustainable employment through Employment Services, as well as helping spread the word of the power of a diverse workforce.

7 FEB 2023 · Dr Sophie-May Kerr is a Research Associate at City Futures Research Centre UNSW. With experience across the University and non-profit sectors, Sophie-May has worked on contemporary urban challenges including planning for diversity in high-density housing, transportion and neighbourhood amenity; refugee settlement and workplace inclusion. She is an advocate for city design, governance, and practices that are informed by diverse, material, and emotional complexities of residents' everyday lives. Her PhD research examining the experiences of families raising children in apartments in Sydney, Australia, revealed the need for shifts in design, regulation, and cultural norms for families to be included within compact city agendas.

24 JAN 2023 · Dr Scott Avery is a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Disability at Western Sydney University and the research partner of First Peoples Disability Network (Australia). He is a descendant from the Worimi people and is profoundly deaf. His research area on the intersection of Indigenous and disability rights and social policy. He has authored the research monograph Culture is Inclusion: A narrative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People with disability and is the lead investigator in the ‘Living our ways’ research program that established a community-based disability research agenda from Australia’s Indigenous people.

25 OCT 2022 · Melissa Cooke has worked in the community services sector for over 18 years completing a bachelor’s degree in community and human services. Melissa has worked across disability, aged care, young adults in a mental health setting, leaving care, youth, crisis work, residential care, homelessness, family, and children work and community during her career to date. Melissa believes that how we engage with others has a huge impact on people’s lives which drives long-term outcomes and change. She believes that when we connect genuinely, we build self-resilience and resilience of a community which is the driver for change and belonging, if we don’t belong, we don’t connect.

18 SEP 2022 · Dr Kathleen McPhillips is a sociologist of religion and gender and teaches at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Kathleen employs feminist, psychoanalytic and sociological frameworks to issues around gender and religion and explores women's status and participation in religious traditions and the institutional child sexual abuse crisis in religious organisations. Kathleen has extensive experience in attending, reporting on and analysing the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse and has held numerous research grants. Her most recent publications are in Child Abuse and Neglect, Feminist Theology, Journal of Australian Studies, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Journal for the Academic Study of Religion.

21 AUG 2022 · Dr Rachael Jacobs who is a lecturer in Creative Arts Education at Western Sydney University and a former secondary arts teacher (Dance, Drama and Music). Her research interests include creativity and assessment, language acquisition through the arts and decolonised approaches to embodied learning. Rachael has facilitated art projects in community settings all over Australia, including in refugee communities, in prisons and in women’s refuges. She has consulted for the OECD in the development of the Sustainable Development Goals and to UNESCO’s International Commission on Futures of Learning. She is also a community activist, a freelance writer, aerial artist, South Asian dancer, and choreographer and runs her own intercultural dance company.

20 JUL 2022 · Karen Loon is a Non-Executive Director and a former Financial Services Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She is a 4th generation Asian-Australian; she has been based in Singapore for nearly 30 years. Karen led numerous audit and financial due diligence assignments with many of the world’s leading banks, funds and capital markets players operating in the Asia-Pacific. Further, she was their Asia-Pacific and Singapore Diversity Leader and a Global Diversity Leadership Team member. Karen is a passionate diversity advocate, thought leader and speaker on diversity and inclusion. Her upcoming book, Fostering Culturally Diverse Leadership in Organisations: Lessons from Those Who Smashed the Bamboo Ceiling, will be released in August 2022.

1 MAY 2022 · Mark is a youth researcher through the Explore program, run jointly by the Centre for Multicultural Youth and the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies. He completed an Honours in Criminology at the University of Melbourne in 2021 while working casually across the youth and community sectors. He has a migrant background, having been born in China, and came to Australia aged 4.