Penny is an arts professional with over 25 years’ experience in senior roles in the performing arts, executive leadership, reform and transformational projects, strategic planning, and design of organisation culture, governance and structures.

 

Penny career spans industry roles and working for all tiers of government including the Australia Council for the Arts and a variety of NSW Government departments managing the major performing arts portfolio, sport infrastructure programs, gambling regulation and health services.

 

Penny is recognised as an expert in audience and community development and in her role as Chair for the Night-time Economy was responsible for helping guide the recovery of engagement and participation for Melbourne after dark.

 

Penny’s strategic skills and expertise have been sought after to lead the development of foundational work such as the inaugural Arts and Cultural Plan for the City of Parramatta, the first precinct program framework for the City of Gold Coast and the Audience Experience Program for regional galleries and performing arts centres.

 

Penny is currently the Senior Associate for the top arts and culture consulting firm Tony Grybowski and Associates and the Executive Officer for the Betty Amsden Foundation.

Leanne Mitchell is a government worker, writer and anthropologist convinced that we can all do better to make the world a fairer place.

 

Her work and study over the last two decades – in government, the UN and the not-for-profit sector – has allowed her to respond to homelessness in many different forms.

 

Managing homelessness programs for the City of Melbourne and Brimbank City Council exposed Leanne to the scope and many limitations that local government faces in responding to street sleeping.

 

In 2022, Leanne undertook a Churchill Fellowship investigating how councils can respond to homelessness while balancing responsibilities to the wider community. She met with more than 90 government workers and sector partners in the UK, US and Canada.

 

Her report, Everybody’s Business, focuses on the contribution local government can make towards ending homelessness and provides practical guidelines and case studies to assist Councils in taking action.

Jonathan O’Brien is the lead organizer of YIMBY Melbourne, a writer, and a software developer. He is also a pledge member of Giving What We Can.

 

In 2023, Jonathan founded YIMBY Melbourne, a group advocating for planning reform and housing abundance. He is an inaugural Fundraise For Australia Fellow.

 

He co-created The Beige Index in 2022, a data communication project that garnered coverage from the Australian Financial Review and other publications, and founded the artist residency space, House Conspiracy, and edited the organisation’s arts anthology, The Conspirator, in 2018.

 

Jonathan’s writing has been published widely and has earned a Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship (2020), the State Library of Queensland Young Writers Award (2017), and the QUT Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize (2014).

Verity is a 19-year-old who’s experienced homelessness first-hand. She is a part of the LGBTQ+ community and neurodivergent with a personal closeness to mental health issues. Verity wants to shed light on the intersectionality of people facing homelessness, bust stigma and move away from damaging stereotypes.

 

She is from a broken home and grew up around substance abuse and conflict, taking on a supportive carer role in her early teen years. When paired with undiagnosed autism and ADHD, fitting in at school and elsewhere became incomprehensibly difficult and she developed significant mental health issues.

 

After an intense family breakdown that left her feeling unsafe, she was forced to drop out of school, was turned away from many people, and didn’t have a stable home. Verity eventually moved into a mental health rehabilitation facility which supported her, but due to underfunding and gaps in the program also created further trauma.

 

She’s been living at Launch Housing’s Education First Youth Foyer for 9 months now, where she has engaged with various advocacy programs and activities. Verity is now studying further education for a career in science.