Hedy Chang is the founder and executive director of the non-profit initiative, Attendance Works (www.attendanceworks.org) which advances student success and narrows equity gaps by addressing chronic absence. Since its founding in 2010, Attendance Works successfully moved chronic absence from a little-known term to a required reporting and optional school accountability metric in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).  A skilled presenter, facilitator, researcher and writer, Hedy co-authored the seminal report, Present, Engaged and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, as well as numerous other articles about student attendance.

Deeply committed to promoting two-generation solutions to achieving a more just and equitable society, Hedy has spent over three decades working in the fields of family support, family economic success, education and child development. She served as a senior program officer at the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and as co-director of California Tomorrow, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a just and inclusive multiracial, multicultural and multilingual society. In February 2013, Hedy was named by the White House as a Champion of Change for her commitment to furthering African American Education. She has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and B.A. from Occidental College.

Megan Gilmour is a social innovator who has worked on complex social and economic development operations across 24 countries. She’s skilled in conceptualising and raising funding for dynamic innovation projects, and a leader in governance and systems, research and advocacy for students missing school because of serious illness.

In 2015, Megan co-authored an Australian-first report on school connection for sick students which received a Prime Minister’s statement of support, and triggered widespread interest. She then led action for a corresponding Australian government report, and designed the governance framework that shaped its findings. In 2017, Megan created the Australian-first national telepresence robot initiative connecting students with serious illness to their classrooms.

She’s a Churchill Fellow, a media spokesperson and TEDx Speaker, and was nominated as a finalist for the ACT Australian of the Year award in 2018. In 2019 she was ACT winner and national finalist in the Telstra Business Women’s Awards in the For Purpose and Social Enterprise category, named on the Financial Review list of 100 Women of Influence in Australia, and received the CWB Innovation Award. Her work is passionately driven by her experience as a mother to a young son who survived a two-year battle for life.

David Heyne is co-founder of the International Network for School Attendance (INSA) and the Dutch Expertise Team for School Refusal. He obtained a post-graduate diploma in educational psychology, a master’s degree in counselling psychology, and a PhD in clinical child and adolescent psychology. He was clinical services manager for the treatment outcome program in the Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology at Monash University in Australia, and held a post as Senior Lecturer in the postgraduate child psychiatry training program at the University of Melbourne. In 2003 he joined Leiden University in the Netherlands as Associate Professor in Developmental and Educational Psychology. There he is engaged in teaching (CBT with Young People; Developmental Psychology) and research. His research addresses risk profiles for school attendance problems and the development and evaluation of assessment instruments and interventions for these problems.

Chris Varney is Founder and Chief Enabling Officer of I CAN Network. Growing up with Asperger’s, Chris was inspired to start I CAN from the support his family, schools and mentors gave him, which he shared in his TEDx ‘Autism – How My Unstoppable Mother Proved the Experts Wrong’.  In the past year alone, I CAN Network has mentored 1,052 Autistic kids, teenagers and adults nationwide through schools, TAFEs, workplaces, camps and online programs. Since inception in 2013, I CAN Network has employed 34 Autistic people to deliver mentoring programs. Chris has a background in children’s rights. Chris spent 11 years with World Vision Australia and World Vision International where his roles included Youth Ambassador, VGen Co-Director and Manager of Youth Supporters. VGen was instrumental in achieving commitments to fair-trade from big chocolate companies.

In 2009 Chris was Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations. In this role Chris successfully campaigned for the closure of the Magill Training Centre and created Dear Kevin: a book of 789 handwritten letters by children and young people given to then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Chris’ efforts as Youth Representative were recognised in this letter from then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Chris used the stories from Dear Kevin to inform his work on the steering committee of the Australian Child Rights NGO Taskforce. The Taskforce successfully influenced the creation of Australia’s national Children’s Commission.

In addition to I CAN, Chris is currently an advisor on Autism to the Queensland Government and is Patron of the Australian Association for Special Education.