Events

Danni Hunter is the Founder and Principal of Hunter Collective, a strategic advisory firm working with diverse global and Australian organisations to solve complex problems, achieve growth and expand their impact. With an extensive executive career spanning government and the private sector, Danni uses her knowledge, skills and experience to work with organisations who want to make a difference in their industry or sector.

Beth Hall is the Founder and Director of Culture Edge. Culture Edge was founded on the belief that people are at the heart of every successful business. It designs culture and capability systems that enable organisations to grow without losing performance, clarity or their people.

Beth brings 25+ years of experience across People and Culture, organisational development and leadership. She has led large-scale culture, capability and change programs across diverse industries where she helped shape Australia’s benchmark for HR standards and certification. She is known for:

• Designing culture that enables performance through expectations, repeatable rituals and operating rhythms that maintain alignment
• Building capability for scale by strengthening leadership judgement, decision making and execution under pressure
• Designing high performing teams through trust, role clarity and ways of working that lift pace and follow through

Converting insight into action through listening and evidence based diagnostics that directly inform priorities and decisions

Venessa is a passionate environmental science professional working in site evaluation and remediation. She has over five years of multidisciplinary experience, including in municipal waste, construction environmental management, and contaminated land consulting. She is known to approach her work with a multidisciplinary lens, supported by extensive fieldwork experience and a love for data. Venessa is an emerging leader in contaminated land and an active advocate for engaging youth from primary to university aged women and girls in the uptake of STEM studies, and particularly those from underrepresented demographics. Her advocacy work has included collaboration with Monash University, RMIT University, and over 30 underrepresented secondary and primary schools in Victoria.

Cheryl Swann is currently a Team Leader in the Permitting Unit at EPA Victoria. She has over 2 decades of experience spanning multiple sectors and countries. Originally from the UK she spent the first part of her career as a Remediation Engineer focussed on turnkey remediation solutions for brownfield sites. Following a move to Australia in 2011 she spent over ten years as an environmental consultant and was recognised for her technical knowledge in site characterisation and remediation design. In this field she rose to Principal Environmental Scientist before taking the next step in her career into state government.

Over the past five years, Cheryl has held multiple roles in the Permissioning Unit at EPA Victoria, most recently as Acting Manager for the Permitting Unit. Her team assess all manner of permitting and waste designation applications and she has a particular interest in developing internal improvements to enable her team to work smarter, and not harder. She is an authentic leader who focusses on communicating with her team to provide shared value and purpose.

As a mum of two young girls she strives to model diversity and balance in her professional and personal life. She juggles motherhood with a passion for triathlon and multisport training and was lucky enough to represent Australia at the Multisport World Championships in Pontevedra, Spain in 2025.

Jeremy Newstead is General Manager for Helia EHS and is a senior environmental leader with over 20 years’ experience delivering complex contaminated land and environmental risk projects across Australia, the Pacific Islands, and Europe. His background spans environmental site assessment, remediation, water management, and human health and ecological risk assessment across government, industrial, waste, and property sectors.

Now working primarily at a leadership and strategic level, Jeremy focuses on how workplace design, decision-making systems, and leadership behaviours shape outcomes for people as much as projects. He is particularly interested in how technical and project-based workplaces can better support fairness, retention, wellbeing, and long-term career sustainability.

Jeremy brings a practical, reflective perspective to discussions on balance, drawing on both professional experience and lessons learned over time about flexibility, inclusion, and the unintended consequences of “always-on” cultures in STEM and consulting environments.