WHAT WE DO: Citizen Tasmania is a cultural organisation that partners with people from migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds to tackle human rights challenges facing their communities and overcome them through education, economic empowerment and social connection.
Our mission
Citizen Tasmania creates successful resettlement outcomes for refugees by helping them shift from surviving to thriving. Citizen mobilises community efforts to overcome human rights challenges for refugee, migrant, and asylum-seeking individuals in Australia by providing access to education, employment, and social connection.
Grace Akosua Williams is the Director of Citizen Tasmania and an award winning social entrepreneur shaping grassroots capacity across Australian communities. She founded Citizen Tasmania to provide people from refugee backgrounds with strong advocacy and creative tools to strengthen human rights in their local communities.
Grace developed the Ethic of Thriving, a new and innovative model for refugee resettlement from her lived experience of forced displacement, to create successful settlement outcome by elevating the agency of refugees and providing stronger pathways between skills and meaningful employment.
A graduate of Law and Political Economy from the University of Tasmania, she was awarded the VC award for global leadership and is internationally recognised for her advocacy work as a 2022 Echoing Green Global Fellow.
Pratiti Amin, Deputy Director
Pratiti Amin
Pratiti is a business administration specialist and a passionate human rights advocate who migrated to Australia in 2015. Pratiti combines her lived experience of migration, passion for arts and a background of scientific research in biotechnology, human services and project management to co-design and lead community projects which support people from culturally linguistically diverse backgrounds to thrive. She spearheads Moonah Bazaar, a monthly multicultural market empowering the microbusinesses of Tasmanians from migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking backgrounds which enables the stated-wide launch of Harmony Week and Refugee Week. In 2021, she was engaged as a project manager for the None a Week campaign, a primary prevention family violence initiative which established Tasmania’s first Health Justice Partnership. Pratiti recently produced an episode on refugee resettlement and culture for the Citizen Power Podcast which featured the migration stories of two young women from Nepal who re-settled in Tasmania.
Fiona Nelson, Chairperson
Fiona Nelson
Fiona is a human rights advocate with a decade of experience in human rights and movement lawyering. She graduated from Trinity College Dublin with an undergraduate degree in Law and German and completed her master’s degree in international law at Humboldt University in Berlin. She has researched and taught international law and worked for several years as a legal advisor at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. She is currently Acting Executive Director at the Australian Centre for International Justice, a non-profit organisation which works with survivor communities to help find pathways to justice for survivors of serious human rights violations such as torture and war crimes. At Citizen Tasmania she helps to find links between the organisation’s local work and human rights movements in other parts of the world. Fiona is interested in the intersecting roles of literature, art and law in human rights movements.
Kerns Juan, Treasurer
Kerns Juan
Kerns is a certified public accountant, who has over ten years of experience both in finance and auditing work in the Philippines and Australia. Kerns is currently employed at Findex as an external auditor. Kerns is passionate about helping businesses and entrepreneurs maintain a healthy cash flow and long-term growth through effective accounting systems and procedures. She enjoys participating in the Tasmanian Filipino community cultural events and bushwalking in nature.
Trisha Joanne Striker, Public Officer
Trisha Striker
Trisha is a passionate social justice advocate who has worked in ethical supply chains over the last eight years, with a focus on community-led activism. Her advocacy is underpinned by the core belief that all human beings have the right to freely choose a life that they consider flourishing. She is currently working with universities and primary schools to identify and mitigate the risk of slavery and exploitation of people in textile supply chains. Trisha is also keenly interested in how the structure of work and life can be changed to bring more delight and joy into the way we live. Her business and economics background gives her the framework to question the structures and systems in place that perpetuate inequality and injustice. Watch Trisha’s TEDx Talk.
