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