This is the TL:DR behind me and my work, which hopefully also gives you more of an idea of who I am as a person, as well as a professional.

From childhood I knew I wanted to work in the family and gender-based violence space. It’s a weird thing for a kid to know, but it was something I felt viscerally whenever I was confronted with scenes of gendered abuse on screen or in a book. I am grateful every day that this was a dream I had the opportunity to follow. But I digress.

After studying at Melbourne University and a short stint as a marriage celebrant in the Civil Registry Office, I officially began my career in family and gender-based violence at Refuge in London.

There I worked full-time as a database administrator, and volunteered on evenings and weekends on the National Domestic Violence Helpline. This experience of frontline service delivery is to this day, the single most valuable thing I have done in my career. To say I have respect for frontline workers would be a feeble understatement.

From there I moved to the international development space with a focus on maternal, newborn and child health, before returning to Melbourne and starting in my first gender-based violence prevention role at Women with Disabilities Victoria, focussing on the intersection of ableism and gender inequality, and the very high rates of violence experienced by women with disabilities.

This role and my incredible colleagues in this organisation began my passion for meaningful consultation and co-design with lived experience and marginalised voices, which remains a key pillar of my work today.

For the next many years and through Covid I worked in a number of prevention capacity-building roles, having the amazing opportunity to work within Melbourne’s highly evolved and well-funded prevention sector, building the evidence-base and setting a rolling standard for best practice in prevention work.

It was also during Covid that I had my own lived experience of intimate partner violence; a situation that was exacerbated by the isolation of a global pandemic. As the violence in my relationship wasn’t physical, I spent many years minimising it, but through my work I have now grown to understand that there is space, and need, for all kinds of lived experience voices.

In 2023 I took a partial career-break to follow a different dream altogether – to open a vegan restaurant. What followed was the most incredible, rewarding, and challenging two years of my life – but that’s a story to be shared over a cuppa (or maybe a pint).

After this experience as a small business-owner, moving into freelance work was the only logical leap, and I am absolutely loving working with diverse clients and projects, travelling, and getting to do the work I love so much.