When Fouz Fatima lost her mother, it prompted her to think deeply about her life, which made her realise she was on the wrong path and needed to make some big changes. Fouz, the 227th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, had a corporate job that gave her a good [...]
Leanne Shelton, the 226th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, turned an inconvenience into a life-changing opportunity. After Leanne had the first of her two children, she found it hard to find a job that gave her the flexibility to juggle work with parenting. So, in the end, she solved [...]
Joanne Matthews, the 225th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, has had a wonderfully diverse and rich career journey. To begin with, Jo worked as a high school teacher. She enjoyed the job, but never saw it as something she would do for the long-term. So Jo, who had been [...]
Rebecca Pierce, the 224th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, has an artistic heart and a commercial brain. Bec has been an artist for the past four decades – fashion, design and licensing for the first half of her career and painting for the second. At the same time, Bec [...]
Tony Jose, the 223rd person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, is a citizen of the world with a cosmopolitan outlook on life. Tony was born in India; attended school in Saudi Arabia; went to university in India; worked in India, Qatar and the UAE; and then moved to Australia in [...]
Sometimes, when Mark Whybro drives past a particular building or through a particular intersection, it will trigger a sad or unpleasant memory. Mark, the 222nd person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, spent four decades in Fire and Rescue NSW, which sometimes involved responding to horrible fires and accidents. Mark says [...]
I was shocked to discover John Pasztor is going to turn 70 this year, because he’s got the energy and appearance of someone much younger. John, the 220th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, is one of those people with an endless supply of stories. In the early days of [...]
When Cheryl Kuipers was 21, she set off on an adventure, travelling from the small town of Launceston to the big city of Sydney to do a one-year nursing course. More than half a century later, Cheryl still hasn’t left. Cheryl, the 219th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, ended [...]
David Burns, the 218th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, runs one of the most meaningful businesses I’ve heard of in a long time. Collective Leisure, which David co-founded in 2019, is Australia’s first social enterprise leisure management company. Its mission is to reduce physical inactivity and improve population health, [...]
Jorida Zeneli, the 217th person I've met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, experienced a turbulent teenagehood that ultimately sparked a globetrotting life. When Jori was born, her homeland, Albania, was a communist autocracy that was described as “the most isolated country in the world”; then it became a fragile democracy; and then [...]
