Lisa Croxford and her co-founder Angela Rutter have started an organisation, The Meeting Point, which aims to inform Australia's non-Indigenous community about the rights of First Nations peoples and how better to work together to advance those rights. Lisa draws her inspiration from First Nations leaders and a deep sense of social justice, perhaps best summed up by Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist, who said: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.'
In 2017, a group of First Nations peoples of Australia issued The Uluru Statement From the Heart. This followed meetings of thousands of First Nations peoples across the country, culminating in a National Constitutional Convention at Uluru. The final sentence in the Statement reads: "We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future." For Lisa Croxford and her friend and co-founder, Angela Rutter, working as in leadership development and coaching, this was a call to action for non-Indigenous Australians. "The Statement didn't say 'in front of', it said 'with'. That was the spur for Angela and me to create The Meeting Point," Lisa says.
Lisa and Angela thought about what they could do to respond to that invitation. How did that invitation bear upon the issue of justice and equality – and knowledge of history? As Lisa says, most people in Australia don't really know their history, even though this is taught in schools. "We talk about Melbourne being 200 years old, when First Nations peoples have been here for 60,000 years, yet non-Indigenous people make up 97 per cent of the population," Lisa notes. "What I was taught at school, and what most Australians of my generation were taught, was that Aboriginal people were one group of people who lived far away from us. There was clearly an imperative to see what we could do to address that misperception."
For Lisa, greater awareness of the disparity and the injustice experienced by First Nations peoples came during her first year at law school in 1993 – although, thinking back, she refers to one of her family's values as being justice and the belief that you can make a difference. During a foundation course on Australia's legal system, she learned about the Mabo case, a significant decision by Australia's highest court which recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights and overturned the concept that Australia was 'terra nullius' (or 'nobody's land') at the time of British settlement. The High Court of Australia ruled that First Nations Australians hold rights to their traditional lands based on their longstanding connection and customs, paving the way for Australia's native title laws.
Lisa's journey with the firm
As Lisa trained and qualified as a lawyer, she had an opportunity to contribute in her own way to advancing the rights of First Nations people. She gravitated towards employment law, and, more specifically, equality and rights-based law. She joined Freehills (as the firm then was) and got involved in the well-developed pro bono practice supporting many not for profits, including First Nations organisations.
Among various projects, Lisa advised and assisted Djirra (as it is now known), a charity that supports Aboriginal women in Victoria, particularly those experiencing family violence. She also learned about building cultural awareness from Shelley Reys AO, a highly respected First Nations business leader who founded Arrilla Indigenous Consulting.
Lisa came back to Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer for support - this time as a client - when she and Angela incorporated The Meeting Point in 2025. Alice MacDougall and Laura Irving from the firm's Melbourne-based Charity Law team advised on the setting up of The Meeting Point as a charity, "and, of course, they did a great job!" Lisa says, smiling.
In fact, Lisa first came into contact with the firm when it was Freehill Hollingdale & Page, while a university student in 1995. Her favourite subject was industrial relations, and she entered a prize sponsored by the firm for the top student in that course. She won (earning a welcome two hundred dollars) and applied to the firm for a vacation clerkship. Before that clerkship started, she was invited into the firm to help with rewriting precedents into plain language.
She joined the firm as an articled clerk (trainee) in 1998. She is sure she chose the right firm for her legal career. "It was a high-pressure but high-achieving environment from which I learned so much," she says. "It was intense, formative and rich with learning." She also gained personally, too, meeting her future husband, who was also a trainee!
Lisa actually had two stints at Freehills, returning to the firm after time she and her husband spent working in Hong Kong and Switzerland. By then, she had a small child, and negotiated a job share with fellow lawyer Trish Low. "The firm was very supportive," Lisa says. "I needed to be able to work part-time in order to grow my family and that practice, and they wanted to be at the vanguard of supporting people to have children and a career in the law. They were very forward-thinking."
The last legal role she had with the firm was as the national leader of the Equal Opportunity and Training practice, where the focus was on relationships between employers and employees with a particular focus on diversity. By the time she left the law to concentrate on her consultancy, Lisa had become a well-known equality law practitioner. While her children were young, she studied psychology and then decided she wanted to move into coaching and leadership development.
Lisa was inspired to move into leadership work, in part from her time at HSF Kramer, because she is attracted to how we create change in our lives and the systems around us. The law is one way of doing that, so too is effective leadership. She is clear that leadership is not about individuals, it is an activity or practice that anyone can do and doesn't necessarily need positional power. "It's about how you work with others to think about what thriving is for the society we live in, how we negotiate that between us, and how we adapt to bring that to life," she explains.
Spreading the word
It was while working with Angela in leadership development that the two came up with the idea of the The Meeting Point. The Meeting Point is a leadership development programme based in Australia that helps non-Indigenous people - particularly those in positions of influence - become stronger allies in the journey toward justice and equity. For Lisa and Angela, "allyship" is about standing beside those whose voices need to be heard and those who are seeking to take action for their own benefit.
The organisation, which is a social enterprise, is supported by enrolment fees and, if they make any profit, this money is contributed towards First Nations-led organisations. Guided by an Advisory Group comprised of First Nations peoples, and non-Indigenous peoples who have deep experience in the allyship space, the programme is co-designed with input from First Nations contributors, centring First Nations voice, content and practices wherever appropriate.
Our work is grounded in insights generously shared by First Nations thinkers, artists, and leaders, including Ambelin Kwaymullina, whose writing helped shape our core approach"
Lisa Croxford
"Our work is grounded in insights generously shared by First Nations thinkers, artists, and leaders, including Ambelin Kwaymullina, whose writing helped shape our core approach," Lisa shares. Each cohort runs over several months, combining face-to-face and online learning, with an annual gathering to connect participants across cohorts. At its core, The Meeting Point is about helping people use their influence to shift systems - so they work better for everyone.
Lisa adds: "A frequent criticism of non-Indigenous peoples and the ways in which we engage with First Nations peoples is that our relationships are transactional - based on a role that we need to fill or a thing we need to do for our job, on the timeframe that we want it. And these 'things' are decided by us or our organisations without genuine co-design or consideration for whether these things are in fact useful or a priority for First Nations peoples. The Meeting Point provokes its non-Indigenous participants to think about their own cultural frames and ways of doing things, to develop ongoing meaningful (vs transactional) relationships."
Lisa and Angela work with a wide range of people, from schools to businesses to government organisations. It is what you might call a trickle-up effect: those attending the courses are encouraged to spread the word among their colleagues.
There is a legal dimension, too, Lisa notes. "We have to move away from the thinking that our common law legal systems are always appropriate for First Nations peoples. We should not expect and demand that things be done on our terms."
The objective is sustained change, not just on significant occasions such as NAIDOC Week, which is a week a celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and culture. As Lisa explains it, "We want people to respond and reconcile every day. We want people to think, 'How can I support First Nations-led businesses to build their capacity over the long term and build their social and economic mobility? How can that be done as part of day-to-day business instead of this special thing that you might think about one day of the year?'"
They are very happy with the impact they have achieved so far, and Lisa and Angela are keen that the organisation starts local, grows organically and does not fall into the trap of some other organisations that have become too big, too quickly and then collapsed. "What we had observed, particularly in the social leadership space, is that there can be a pressure to grow. That then leads to an organisation getting to a size where it finds that it's unsustainable and then it collapses in on itself. We've chosen to prioritise impact over scale."
Part of that approach is down to the fact that both Lisa and Angela have full-time roles as leadership consultants on top of their work developing The Meeting Point.
Outside of work, Lisa tries to be as involved as she can with local community groups, including one that is working on regenerating local bushland and lobbying local councils and other community groups around what are they doing to try and increase social mobility and economic mobility for First Nations people. She reads widely, meditates, gardens and walks: "that keeps me grounded and connects me to the place I live in."
What would they like alumni to do?
"Join us!" says Lisa. "Sign up for a programme or refer a colleague. The Meeting Point provides a community of allies who support each other in this work, which is essential because allyship can't be done in isolation. More broadly, she believes that HSF Kramer alumni hold significant positional power in their roles around the world and are motivated by justice and wanting to make a difference. They can use that power to help bring about inclusion in society, particularly between non-Indigenous and First Nations peoples. "The Meeting Point changes how people see their responsibility and think about the actions they can take."
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