Dr Judy Tang has joined the Board of Aurum Foundation, succeeding Maria Dimopoulos AM, who has stepped down after serving as a founding director since August 2024.
Thank you, Maria
Maria Dimopoulos AM is one of the most consequential figures in Australian multicultural policy of the last three decades. Her work on access to justice, on the intersections of gender, culture and disadvantage, and on the design of institutions that actually serve the communities they were built for, has shaped practice well beyond the organisations she has led.
She brought that judgement to the Aurum Foundation Board at the point where it mattered most: the establishment years, when the decisions are structural and largely invisible from the outside. The Foundation is a more rigorous organisation for her involvement, and its framework is more honest about intersectionality than it would have been without her. We thank her, and we expect to keep learning from her work.
Welcome, Judy
Dr Judy Tang OAM is a clinical neuropsychologist and a nationally recognised voice on ageing, brain health and mental health advocacy. As Director and Clinical Neuropsychologist at Invictus Health she delivers specialised assessment and brain wellbeing services across legal, government and community settings, with a practice spanning medico legal, aged care and multicultural mental health. She is a Victorian Multicultural Commissioner.
She is not new to the work. Judy is the clinical authority behind The Autistic Standard, the behavioural safety framework the Foundation publishes and teaches, and she delivered the opening address at the Think Autism conference in Melbourne this year.
Her appointment strengthens the Board in the area where our work carries the most risk. We make claims about psychological harm, about masking, about distress and about what organisations should do differently. Those claims need clinical governance, not only good intentions, and Judy has been providing it in practice for some time. Bringing that into the Board formalises what was already true.
What this means
The Board now comprises Kyriakos Gold, Dr Judy Tang OAM and Georgia Prattis, spanning legal and social enterprise governance, clinical neuropsychology, and intersectional analysis and adult education. Between them they hold the three disciplines the Foundation's work depends on.
Board composition is not a symbolic matter for an organisation that publishes frameworks other people apply to real situations. The people who govern the work should be capable of interrogating it. This Board is.