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Standing with women entrepreneurs navigating tough times so their businesses can continue.
Our Board of Directors
The Held+Free Foundation is a not-for-profit entity currently pursuing ACNC registration and DGR endorsement. Our founding board has been deliberately and carefully constructed, drawing together leaders across law, finance, healthcare, technology, and social enterprise who share a common conviction: that women in business deserve real support when crisis arrives.
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Stacey Barrass knows what it takes to combine purpose, passion and profit.
Stacey has over thirty years in commercial leadership, and fifteen of those as the Founder and Managing Director of Goddess Cleaning Group, a Social Traders accredited social enterprise holding triple ISO certification and preferred provider status under the NDIS.
In that time, she has created meaningful employment for more than five hundred people who faced significant barriers to finding it including domestic and family violence. Stacey does not just understand social enterprise in theory. She has lived its operational weight, its compliance demands, and its quiet, accumulating impact.
Stacey has served at the Vice Chair of St Kilda Mums for five years and brings exactly the kind of grounded, experienced presence our work calls for.
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Sally Carson has built her career at the intersection of product, strategy, and the people those products serve.
From leading wealth digital teams across ANZ to spearheading customer insight and digital strategy at Commonwealth Bank, she has consistently chosen the work that asks harder questions about who financial services is actually designed for.
That commitment is reflected in her involvement with CommBank Next Chapter, a bank-wide initiative to help end financial abuse, where Sally contributes not because it sits in her job description, but because it matters to her.
Financial abuse sits at the heart of the crisis many Held+Free women are navigating. Having Sally on our board means we are building with someone who understands that dynamic structurally, not just philosophically, and who has spent a career proving that the way we design products is also a choice about who we decide matters.
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Lisa Walker knows that financial rigour and human outcomes are not competing priorities. They are the same work.
A Fellow of the Certified Practising Accountants, Lisa has built her career across government, accounting, retail, and healthcare, seeing how organisations of very different shapes and sizes actually function.
She is also Co-Founder of National Community Care, a Canberra-based provider of complex home health care services whose ethos is direct: not afraid of speaking up for the vulnerable, fighting for the forgotten, and insisting that every person deserves access to equal care.
That work has been recognised at the highest levels. In 2023, Lisa received the Telstra Best of Business Championing Health Award. As Treasurer, Lisa brings both the discipline that makes that possible and a deep, proven commitment to the people that work is for.
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Vision Lewis understands that behind every family law matter is someone trying to find safe ground when the ground has already shifted.
Vision came to law with intention. A double major in Criminology and Politics at the University of Melbourne, followed by a Juris Doctor at UNSW, working throughout her studies and moving across practice areas until she chose family law.
She stepped into it first as a paralegal, learning the terrain from the ground up. Admitted in December 2025, she now practises in the Family Law team at Chamberlains Law Firm.
As Board Secretary, Vision brings a lawyer's understanding of where systems fail, a practitioner's knowledge of how crisis and legal process collide, and a long-held belief that access to justice is not a privilege to be earned. It is something worth building toward.
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Maryanne Atkins has spent nearly two decades helping organisations translate complexity into clarity, and clarity into action that reaches real people.
Through her work at Telstra Health, Maryanne contributes to services and infrastructure that support some of Australia's most vulnerable communities, including national programs such as 1800RESPECT and the Leaving Violence Program. That proximity brings both perspective and accountability to everything she does.
She brings to this board strategic marketing expertise, deep experience in B2B partnerships and alliances, and a demonstrated ability to lead teams through complexity with purpose.
She understands how to build awareness where it matters, how to nurture relationships that last, and how to translate mission into momentum.
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Katy Garner understands what is at stake for the women Held+Free serves.
Not as an observer. As someone with her own experience of how quickly a thriving life can shift when crisis arrives, and how little exists to catch you when it does.
For more than twenty years, Katy has produced conferences and educational programs as the Co-Founder of AusMumpreneur and the Women Changing the World, designing and delivering at a scale few can match. Her work reaches audiences across ninety-three countries.
Katy knows that safety and livelihood are not separate concerns. She has built a career creating spaces where women can learn, connect, and grow.
She joins our board to help ensure those spaces exist for the women who need them most.
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Susan Pearse has spent nearly three decades studying how people lead under pressure, and helping them do it better.
She is a bestselling author of five books, creator of the award-winning Conscious Leadership program, and one of Australia's most respected voices on what it takes to lead with clarity and purpose. Her latest book, Winning the Second Half, explores mindset, emotional growth, and what it means to redefine success at the midpoint of a life well lived.
Across her career, Susan has advised leaders in finance, health, energy, mining, and government, co-founded two companies in Reinvention and Mind Gardener, and lectured at universities and the Women's Business School.
She brings to this board postgraduate qualifications in business, significant experience as a board member and chair including as Former Chair of Share the Dignity, and a practitioner's understanding of how organisations grow through complexity.
Kathy Rhodes knows what it costs when a system fails to catch you. She has sat with that knowledge personally, navigating cancer while running a business.
That experience did not start Held+Free. But it sharpened it.
For two decades, Kathy built strategy and communications inside some of Australia's largest institutions, including ANZ, ING, Zurich and The Cancer Council NSW. She went on to help thought leaders turn hard-won expertise into influence and income through her consultancy, The Thought Alchemist.
Held+Free is where she has turned that same craft toward a problem she could not ignore. The women who build businesses, then risk losing everything to a crisis no system catches. She founded both the social enterprise and the Foundation, and leads them today as CEO.
She is also an appointed NSW Justice of the Peace and the winner of the 2026 Heart of Women Awards Big Idea category.
Our Values
We believe that how you help matters as much as whether you help. That belief sits underneath everything we do, across both the Held+Free Foundation and our social enterprise.
Independence
Our ultimate goal is freedom for the women we serve emotionally, financially, and professionally. To be held when needed, and free to rise again.
Practicality
We turn compassion into action. Guidance, tools, and pathways that help women move forward in real and tangible ways. We always aim to simplify the complex.
Warmth
We lead with humanity. Every woman who enters our world is met with care, respect, and emotional safety. We define women as all who experience the world through the lens of womanhood. We proudly stand as LGBTQ+ allies.
Collaboration
We go further together. Lawyers, health professionals, financial experts, business leaders and community working as one circle of care. Our trauma-informed partnerships are built on mutual respect, trust and transparency.
Stewardship
We are here for a short time, and so we choose to tread gently. We make sustainable, considered choices because a future where women thrive also requires a planet that does too.
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