Good Food, Old Friends, and Work That Matters

Yesterday I caught up with my beautiful friend Judy Saba CF Churchill Fellow FRSA MAAPi over lunch, which was every bit as lovely as it sounds.

Judy and I both love food, so lunch was never going to be just a practical arrangement. It was part of the joy of it. We talked about what to order, the food we’ve been enjoying recently, compared notes on what we loved, and let the conversation wander in the way it does when you are sitting across from someone you have known for a very long time.

We first met more than twenty years ago, during training for what was then known as the Gay & Lesbian Liaison Officer program with the NSW Police Force. Judy was presenting on diversity and inclusion, and I remember vividly how instantly we just clicked.

There was a depth to the way she spoke about people that stayed with me. It wasn’t the polished, corporate, tick-a-box version of diversity work that organisations can sometimes settle for. Judy brought something much more human and much more useful. She understood culture, power, identity and belonging in a way that made people think differently about the communities they were serving and the assumptions they carried into that work. She spent more than two decades doing that work in and around policing, and I have so much love and respect for the way she continues to show up in this space with such care, courage and integrity.

Catching up yesterday was joyful for all the ordinary reasons: good food, good company, laughter, memory, and the kind of conversation that somehow moves from family to work to belonging to kindness to justice without ever feeling forced. But it was also a reminder of how much Judy contributes, and how deeply her work continues to matter.

Judy is heavily involved with Insight Exchange, an extraordinary Australian initiative that centres the lived expertise of people who have experienced domestic, family and sexualised violence. Their work supports better social, service and system responses by helping people listen more carefully, think more deeply, and respond with greater dignity and understanding.

One of the things I appreciate most about Insight Exchange is that lived experience isn’t treated as an add-on or a personal story placed beside professional knowledge. It’s treated as essential knowledge in its own right, as it absolutely should be.

Their incredible range of resources are freely available and are being used across communities, services, organisations, industries and responder systems, including with people working in law enforcement. The materials offer practical tools and reflections that help people move beyond assumption, judgement and surface-level responses, which matters enormously when the quality of a response can either protect someone’s dignity or add another layer of harm.

Judy also contributed a chapter to Inge Lie's It’s a Kind of Magic: A selection of short stories about the magic of kindness, belonging and inclusion, which feels so perfectly Judy to me 😊Of course she would be part of a book about kindness and belonging! Not because those words sound nice, but because she has spent so much of her life doing the patient, complicated, and necessary work of helping people and systems understand what they actually mean.

Yesterday reminded me how grateful I am for friendships that hold continuity. There’s something very special about sitting across from someone you met in a completely different chapter of your life and realising that, despite all the years and all the changes, you retain such beautifully aligned core beliefs. The conversation may be wider now, and the work may have taken different forms, but the care underneath it is familiar.

For Judy and me, that thread has always included inclusion, kindness, belonging, and the stubborn belief that people and systems can do better by one another.

Sometimes that belief is carried through formal work, resources, training, writing and advocacy, and sometimes it’s carried in a much quieter way, over a delicious lunch between two old friends who are still asking big questions, still laughing at shared interests, and still trying, in our own ways, to make things better 💖