The power to persuade: a tribute to Professor Gemma Carey
Professor Gemma Carey passed away in November 2024 after a long illness. Alongside her distinguished academic career, she co-founded Power to Persuade in 2011 and was its co-director until 2018. She built a collaborative, volunteer-run and genuinely co-produced enterprise with extensive reach and influence that continues to promote understanding and communication across four key groups of stakeholders involved in designing, implementing, studying and navigating social policy – government, academics, the community sector, and people whose lives are directly affected by it. In founding Power to Persuade, Gemma made a notable and lasting contribution to research and practice in social policy in Australia and internationally. Here, five people who were part of that journey – Kathy Landvogt, Susan Maury, Sue Olney, Sophie Yates and Tanya Corrie - reflect on her legacy.
She had the power to persuade – Kathy Landvogt
Gemma Carey was Power to Persuade’s instigator, dreamer and powerhouse. Her recent untimely death has brought into focus how grateful we are for her brilliance, passion, generosity and friendship. It wasn’t in Gemma’s nature to accept the state of things if they were unjust. She was above all a warrior for others, who also had to fight at times for her own story, health and dignity.
With her prodigious intelligence and astonishing output, Gemma was smart enough to run things on her own but chose otherwise. She searched out people with similar values and collaborative ways of working and was not threatened by others’ sharp minds.
Power to Persuade began with a conversation in 2011 between Gemma and me , when I was a social policy researcher in Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand. We were both concerned about the challenges for community sector organisations in influencing social policy. We agreed that bringing together people from different sectors to share their knowledge in open-ended but rigorous discussions, outside the usual bureaucratic context, might create more powerful policy solutions.
Gemma invited Good Shepherd’s small social policy team to form a partnership. We had the energy, capacity and scope to take on the challenge and saw in it an innovative opportunity to further Good Shepherd’s mission of advocating for genuine social change. Our embrace of feminism as a woman-founded organization may also have attracted Gem: as a young and physically slight woman she felt keenly the gender and age-based prejudice emanating from established and historically patriarchal institutions.
When Gemma obtained funding for the first one-day Power to Persuade symposium in 2012 it was the beginning of a series of annual symposia, continuing until 2019, that prioritised dialogue, relationships and shared values. In PtP Gemma genuinely shared the leadership with Good Shepherd, and indeed continually extended it outwards to secure further sponsorship from like-minded organisations.
Gemma was a connector as well as a highly original thinker: her instincts were democratic despite her strong, even charismatic, leadership. Each year the Symposium program was developed by an evolving group of community advocates whose knowledge and networks fed the vision. This ability to galvanise others into collaboration is her enduring legacy in Power to Persuade. She knew that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and was able to create a dynamic but lasting culture of mutuality. She talent-scouted for other generous and analytic thinkers and brought them together whether as presenters, on planning committees or in audiences. This fluid structure and collegiality allowed PtP to pivot annually to reflect the zeitgeist of the social policy world without being weighed down by institutional agendas.
Gemma was a bright star. Her energy and conviction drew us willingly into her orbit. She handed the Power to Persuade mantle over in 2018, but her presence is felt in all its work. Her partnership with Good Shepherd gave the organisation visibility and voice to pursue its policy advocacy, and it gave policy workers such as myself an enormous amount of agency, opportunity and learning.
A force to be reckoned with - Susan Maury
I first met Gemma in 2011/12 when she was making regular visits to the Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand social policy unit (where I was then employed) to shape up her idea for the Power to Persuade with Kathy Landvogt. My initial impression of her was that she was deeply shy and protective of her privacy. Indicative of this, her social media image was often of the back of her head. And yet… she had a driving force and focus that was undeniable.
Gemma saw that one of the biggest barriers to effecting meaningful policy change was the completely different world views of the people who legislated policy, those who advocated for policy change, and those who studied the effects of policy. Her vision for the Power to Persuade was to address this seemingly intractable problem of people within different sectors talking past one another. How do you get cut-through? How do you move from conflict to collaboration? How do you find the points of agreement? After receiving a small amount of funding from the University of Melbourne to run a seminar, Gemma thought the best way to keep the conversation going was with a blog.
The blog featured (and still does!) policy critique and commentary on policy influence from academics, policy experts and people with lived experience of policy effects. It quickly became important reading for people in the policy space.
Good Shepherd has always focused on policy change, and we were happy to help out. In those early years we hosted the blog site and helped with the logistics and organization of the events. But these things were time-consuming and the topics were not really hitting the mark for an agency that focused on women and girls. Gemma proposed that we start a division of the Power to Persuade that focused specifically on how policy impacts on women in unique ways. But what to call it? We came up with the Women’s Policy Think Tank. No, said Gemma: ACTION Tank. Thinking isn’t enough; we do this for change. This was how she saw the world. You put yourself out there to make a change.
Gemma moved out of her comfort zone for this principle. She focused on shining a light on the problem places, calling out injustice and holding power to account. It often made people uncomfortable, but she did it on principle. Her diminutive frame held a mighty force. She is a loss to the world.
Passing the baton - Sue Olney
Gemma handed the reins of Power to Persuade to me in 2018. Her academic career was soaring, and she was juggling the heavy demands of her work with health issues. Without a hint of vanity, she entrusted me with her vision for Power to Persuade and the community she had built.
From the outset, Gemma’s energy and commitment to building respectful and constructive connections between people with different views of the social policy landscape was inspiring. I attended my first Power to Persuade symposium in Melbourne in 2014, and I joined its moderating team in 2015. Having worked in government, the not-for-profit sector and as an academic, Power to Persuade felt like a natural fit for me. It shed light on spaces and connections between research, policy, practice and lived experience that were often unspoken. It was designed to evolve, to push shifting boundaries, and to challenge accepted wisdom and ways of working, driven by a dynamic team of volunteer moderators with diverse perspectives and networks and skin in the game. Its activity shifted over time between in-person events and written content – including the blog - but it was always timely, challenging, thoughtful and underpinned by an astonishing wealth of evidence and experience.
Through Power to Persuade, Gemma intentionally brought widely-acknowledged experts and people who weren’t dominant voices in social policy research and practice - early career researchers, frontline workers, and people and communities affected by policy decisions – together as equal partners. The fundamental premise behind Power to Persuade’s creation and longevity is that no single person, organisation or institution can solve complex policy problems. Gemma understood the value of collective wisdom and built a platform to support it. Those of us continuing that work thank her for her vision and trust.
Showing us what we could be - Sophie Yates
When Gemma first approached me to become a Power to Persuade moderator in 2014, I didn’t know I could do anything – which is to say, I didn’t think I knew anything worth knowing, or that anyone would be interested in what I had to say. I hadn’t even enrolled in a PhD yet, and while I did work in research management at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, it didn’t occur to me that my work connected to the mission of Power to Persuade. But this was one of Gemma’s superpowers: she saw in people the potential to achieve, and then made it happen purely through the power of her belief and how it changed them. You started thinking “hmmm maybe I could try…” and then ended up going through with it because you didn’t want to let her down. Then later, you realised that perhaps she was right all along.
So I agreed, and with trepidation (over)prepared for my first week of moderating the blog. Soon I realised that yes I could do this, that through my networks and the research I came across in my job, I could easily find enough content to share, and that it was a rewarding challenge to source and edit content in a way that could reach a more general audience. A decade later I have my PhD, I am Vice President of the newly incorporated Power to Persuade (now led by the wonderful Associate Professor Sue Olney), and I have written or moderated dozens of posts for the blog. But I’ve never forgotten what it meant at that time to have someone in a relatively senior position assume that I could.
I’ve spoken to many people who have been similarly galvanised by the power of her networking, her encouragement, her belief and her refusal to let things be otherwise than according to her vision. Her commitment to extending opportunities and networks to early career researchers was particularly valuable, as so much academic work happens organically through people we already know. If Gemma knew you and liked you, she wanted you to know other people she knew and liked, and for everyone to write a paper together if possible. She was a big believer in the ‘circle of niceness’ (coined by the Thesis Whisperer), and had a vision of academics supporting each other and increasing their impact through effective collaboration. I try to think about this now when I recruit new generations of moderators for the blog, so that this small part of her long legacy can be continued.
Bringing everyone along to realise the potential - Tanya Corrie
I first met Gemma when I was a researcher at Good Shepherd. She was a PhD student who - as we all know now - was absolutely destined to Do Big Things.
Her bringing Good Shepherd into the Power to Persuade was emblematic of the type of human she was - generous, expansive, and always thinking several steps ahead.
With Gemma, this was not just tactical, it was how her mind worked. I likened watching her think to visualising seemingly random things floating in the ether to which she could find some kind of seamless connection that I am sure nobody else could make. It brought academics, community services, and government together in a space where they had rarely played before, unpacking the nuances of policy making with the reality of lived experience and with the rigour of scholarship.
All was done with a staunchly held goal - to create better policy, and improve outcomes for people who were too often marginalised by it.
The partnership’s strength was in its flexibility, and in a genuine respect for each contribution. And as the ideas became more expansive, so too did the amazing network of contributors and moderators for the Power to Persuade. She created a movement that is durable in her sizable and very sad absence.
I will miss Gem, and her ability to bring everyone along on the journey. Aside from her academic brilliance, she was a very funny and sometimes brutally honest truth teller. She perfected the bold lip literally and figuratively. Her contribution to social policy, and to the people who loved her, is immeasurable. Thank you Gemma, for allowing me to be a tiny part of that journey.