Jade Lane

Research and Technical Advisor

Working groups

jade.lane@burnet.edu.au

Background

Jade is an antiviolence activist, organiser, and transformative justice practitioner with extensive experience working alongside communities impacted by structural and systemic violence. Over the past decade, Jade has led innovative local and international programs in sexual and gender-based violence prevention, disaster management, and public health. Jade’s work emphasises community-led interventions that promote harm reduction and decarceration.

Jade’s professional practice is underpinned by lived experience of violence, criminalisation, and drug use, and is grounded in the generative possibilities of abolition and transformative justice. Jade is passionate about disrupting existing ways of working by centring people with lived experience in the production of new knowledge and practice. Jade’s research interests include the use of co-design and feminist participatory action research to explore non-carceral violence prevention and response, with a particular focus on community-led alternatives.

Jade coordinates planning and implementation of The Forest, Burnet’s lived experience co-design program to end cycles of reincarceration for people who use drugs. She is also the Principal Investigator on Burnet’s first ANROWS-funded research project ‘We Keep Us Safe: Co-designing community-led responses to domestic, family, and sexual violence among people with a history of drug use and criminalisation’.

Qualifications

2021: Master of Disaster, Design and Development, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
2016: Bachelor of Arts Double Degree, International Aid and Development, and Politics and International Studies

Positions

2024–present: Research and Technical Advisor, Burnet Institute
2023–2024: Implementation and Engagement Planning Coordinator, The Forest, Burnet Institute
2021–2023: Lived Experience Practice Lead, Fitzroy Legal Service
2019–2021: Regional Violence Prevention Coordinator, Women’s Health Goulburn North East
2018–2019: Technical Advisor – Gender, Marie Stopes International

Awards

Mark Robinson Scholarship for Rural Health

Reports and other work

The Forest proposal

Explains how we developed The Forest - a model to address underlying causes of incarceration.
The Forest proposal
The Forest co-design report (Burnet Institute and Paper Giant)

Describes the process and evidence behind The Forest - a model to address underlying causes of incarceration.
The Forest co-design report (Burnet Institute and Paper Giant)
Economic and health cost benefit impacts of The Forest (Insight Economics)

Describes the economic and social benefits of The Forest - a model to address underlying causes of incarceration.
Economic and health cost benefit impacts of The Forest (Insight Economics)

Current projects

We keep us safe: working with communities to end domestic, family and sexual violence

We're working with criminalised communities to help end domestic, family and sexual violence.

The Torch co-design and evaluation collaboration

We’re working closely with staff and artists at The Torch, a not-for-profit First Nations-led arts organisation, to improve program engagement and effectiveness.