The Family Inclusion Network of Australia is made up of:
Committee
Chair – Nadia Bergineti is Chair of Family Inclusion Network Australia and CEO of The Reily Foundation Inc. She is a recognised leader in child protection reform, family inclusion, and lived experience–led systems change. Nadia brings extensive experience working across government, community, and advocacy sectors, with a strong focus on disability inclusion, early intervention, and trauma‑informed practice. As Chair, she champions the voices of parents and families, promoting respectful partnership with systems and policy reform that strengthens family participation, inclusion, and outcomes for children.
Professor Ros Thorpe - Emeritus Professor of Social Work at James Cook University, and, since her retirement at the end of 2010, she has been Secretary of and a volunteer community social worker with Family Inclusion Network Townsville, a service user support and advocacy organisation in which families and supportive professionals work together to achieve greater social justice for children and families caught up in the child protection system.
Ros qualified as a social worker in 1967 in the UK and migrated to Australia in 1978. She has had significant practice experience in family casework and group work in child welfare. She has an international reputation for her research with children in out-of-home care, their parents, and their foster carers.
Secretary – Natasha Tucker is a dedicated community leader with 30 years’ service in health, education disability and child protection in Australia and the UK. Passionate about the rights of children and families, her journey to becoming CEO with Family Inclusion Network of Western Australia began with the simple belief that every child deserves a safe place to learn, grow and be connected to family and kin. Natasha’s career spans clinical roles in perinatal, children, youth and adults. Natasha’s passion for Family Inclusion stems from her own experiences growing up in a migrant family, as new Australians. She knows the impact that dedicated nonprofits can have.
Dr. Kate Fitt – Kate is a lecturer at RMIT University who has a strong passion for research into child protection and people living with a disability, particularly parents. Kate is a member of FIN Vic.
Jessica Cocks: I am a social worker and researcher with a lot of experience in child protection and out-of-home care. I am also a mum to two young men. They were both primary school aged boys when I began working with other social workers and with parents with lived experience to form FISH in 2014. We were increasingly distressed about the way parents and families were treated and how damaging this was for them and their children. We felt parents and families needed to organise together to make change and to address the underlying causes of child removal. As time has passed, I have become even more committed to supporting parent and family leadership in the child welfare system here and around the world.
Debbie Henderson, was the inaugural CEO of the Family Inclusion Network of WA (Fin WA) from 2008 to 2021. Debbie has worked in the community welfare sector for over 30 years with a focus on vulnerable children, women and families. Debbie was the chairperson of the Family Inclusion Network of Australia (FINA) from 2013 to 2021 and remains a board member in her retirement. Over the years Debbie has been an active board member of the Child and Family Alliance of WA, the Ministerial Advisory Council for Child Protection (WA), the state-wide Community Sector Roundtable and various state-wide task groups focused on the safety and wellbeing of children and their families. Debbie continues to be involved in supervision of staff, including peers with lived experience of the child protection system, and is a member of the Care Plan Review Panel - a ministerial appointment. She is also a co-founder and member of the Protection and Care Advocacy Network (PCAN) which advocates for a fair and equitable system, and promotes the rights of parents to quality legal representation when involved in protection and care proceedings.
Treasurer - Jenny Whitworth - Jenny is the Coordinator for Family Inclusion Network (FIN) Southeast Queensland. Jenny has a passion for true early intervention that empowers people, and holds them strongly away from harmful crisis-focused systems. She also has a strong focus on advocacy and human rights. In 2019, Jenny was instrumental in helping parents form the Queensland Parent Advisory Committee with the Minister of the day. Jenny has worked in and around human services’ social policy and service systems for over 30 years. She has worked in policy, training, and project implementation roles in government and non-government organisations: including 15 years in the Queensland department responsible for child protection. She also held statewide social policy manager roles at QCOSS, and at the Crèche and Kindergarten (C&K) Assoc of Queensland.
Leanne Claussen: Leanne is a parent of kids in care. Leanne created Leanne’s Gift because she wanted to help other parents who are involved in Child Protection in Queensland. The information she shared with parents she gathered after being in the system for more than eleven years.
We do our best to keep the site up-to-date however we are a small, volunteer group.
Committee members and allies will not always have their names and bios published on this website. If you have questions about Committee membership please contact us.