In The Game Podcast - Social Innovation through powerful narrative with Megan Gilmour

Link to Episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/238055/1062566

Megan is a social innovator, global change-maker, tech entrepreneur and champion for human-centred solutions to complex social problems.

In 2010, after a 25-year career in government, publishing, and international aid and development, Megan’s son was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Through her experience in addressing system-wide change she took on the glaring inequity facing children with serious illness — isolation due to time away from school. She co-founded MissingSchool, a now internationally-recognised not-for-profit.

Working inside of the Australian Government, she designed a world-first education innovation that connects seriously ill students to their classrooms through “tele-presence robots”!

She has authored publications on issues of Australian national interest and co-wrote an Australian-first report on school connection for sick kids, generating a PM’s statement of support and 160+ media articles. She instigated the first Australian government report on the issue and guided its governance methodology. Megan then moved to designing a world-first education innovation that connects seriously-ill students to their classrooms through telepresence robots.

Megan’s experience has forged a strong sense of social justice, she began her career in government and rose through the ranks to become the NSW Finance Minister’s youngest staffer. Her later work in international development saw her spearheading multi-million dollar initiatives to address complex social and development issues across 24 countries. She is an expert on raising funding for large and dynamic innovation projects.

Megan now teaches and mentors changemakers to build enterprises for social good, and has co-founded tech startups in the global development and the assistive robot sector. Megan is a Churchill Fellow, a media spokesperson, and a keynote and TEDx Speaker. She was a 2019 finalist for the ACT Australian of the Year and won 2019 ACT For Purpose and Social Enterprise Telstra Business Women’s Award.

Megan pursues lasting social change at scale and, through the power of human connection, shifts people from passive observers to active changemakers.

Sarah Maxwell

My name is Sarah Maxwell and I grew up in Montreal, Canada wanting to solve the problems of the world in my earliest memory. I went from climbing all over my Mom’s furniture to trying every sport and wanting to be the best at everything I did. We were a family of 4 kids and I would be the one out in the backyard perfecting back flips off the picnic table or kicking the soccer ball over and over and over again until I got it right! Yes, it was that obsessive gene!

I chose to get on a 6-hour plane right across the country to do my BioPsychology degree at the University of British Columbia. It was the top tier volleyball program that really drew me in and getting my first taste of representing my country in sport was honed there.

It was the sandy beaches that eventually drew me in and I became a Professional Beach Volleyball Player for for 10yrs. This brought me to Australia where I would eventually meet my life partner Nat Cook and reside here for the past 20 years.

Retiring from sport in 2008, I studied Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP) to give structure to what I had been growing through in terms of team work, goals, purpose, and relationship building.

This led me to engineer specific GAMES (now called Gamification) to bring forth more experiential learning for Corporate Team Building (for companies such as Qantas); Couple Relationship Workshops (PG-rated GAME PLAY); and even Mindset coaching with Olympians on their way to London 2012.

These days, I have created a program called FOCUS coaching for high impact women CEOs and Managing Directors; Corporate Wellness and Nutritional Cleansing (with a team of over 13,000 people); and finally demonstrating my Eastern Philosophy Slant with my MindShift Meditations (offered free as a taster on this site)

Overall, I create communities that uplift and inspire people to dust off their dreams and start playing IN THE GAME of life once again!