It is our season finale! Can you believe? Thank you for joining us once again. We were so excited to have the opportunity to speak with the self-professed iced latte afficionado and fantastic human, Trent Wallace. Trent is a Wongaibon person raised on Darkinjung Country, and has a background working in the community legal sector, government and education.

Combining both legal and First Nations lived experience, Trent drives First Nations initiatives across the firm and provides thought leadership and education around cultural safety and awareness. Working across the social justice sector and corporate Australia, Trent seeks to embed key cultural considerations to create meaningful change for First Nations Peoples. In this work, Trent collaborates with a wide variety of clients to develop and execute First Nations initiatives.

Trent offers cultural awareness education and advice on how to work effectively with clients and also collaborates with People & Culture on programmes of attraction and retention to First Nations employees. As a lawyer, Trent is able to identify and mitigate risks to reputation through building a strong foundation of strategies to support cultural awareness.

Trent is Co-Chair of the Legal Profession Reconciliation Network and is on the Executive Committee of Just Reinvest NSW. In addition to these roles, Trent is also a Director of Metro Arts (QLD), Editorial Board Member for LexisNexis, Advisor to the Starlight Children's Foundation, Advisor to the Board of ActionAid Australia and is a lecturer in law and First Nations Peoples.

In this episode, we sit down with the indelible Rachel G. Barnard - our first non-lawyer guest, but a beautiful human with a heart for justice and equity. Rachel is a speaker and facilitator who has designed 100s of sessions for 1,000s of people to step into their greatness and contribute powerfully to the world around them.

As the founder of Young New Yorkers (YNY) she created the first arts-based Alternative-To-Incarceration program in NYC and assisted over 1,400 young people to exit the criminal legal system without an adult criminal record. In this role she partnered with—and created programs for—multiple criminal legal agencies including the Center of Court Innovation, Kings County DA's Office, NYC Department of Probation, and the New York Police Department. Over the decade Rachel led YNY she took it from a one-off project, to building it to be a go-to restorative sentencing option in NYC with a $1 million annual budget.

Rachel has been acknowledged in the media and received awards and fellowships. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University.

Digressions in this episode include the role of public art as a dialogue, ego, Rachel's favourite kind of jokes, and many insights into the power of partnership and collaboration with diverse communities to make social justice a reality. We are so grateful for the opportunity to meet with Rachel and to have the opportunity to hear from her practice wisdom and heart.

In this episode, we meet with emerging leader, and lawyer, Elizabeth Aisi (Liz). Liz was admitted as a lawyer in December 2022 after completing her Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Arts at the University of Queensland. In this episode, she shares about how she has worked towards building a career focussed on human rights. She was a co-founder of the ⁠University of Queensland's Human Rights Case Law Project⁠, a resource that collates 'case notes' for case law that mention Queensland's Human Rights Act. She has then paved a career for herself at Caxton Legal Centre, initially as a paralegal within Caxton's Bail Service, and later the family law service, to eventually being promoted to a solicitor within Caxton's Seniors Legal and Support Service.

Digressions in this episode include Liz's impersonation of a line from her favourite movie, Liz's open-mindedness framework, what it was like growing up in New York, and the impact of "micro-aggressions".

With nearly one year post admission experience under her belt, the sky is the limit for Liz, and we think she is a lawyer to keep an eye on! We definitely left this meeting feeling energised, and we know you will too!