Dana Shen

Dana has 20 years’ experience working across the public and not-for-profit sectors in the areas of health, families and child protection.

Dana is Aboriginal/Chinese and a descendant of the Ngarrindjeri people in South Australia and has a passion for working with Aboriginal people and communities. She commenced her career as a youth community development officer in both the Adelaide Hills and the Murray Lands. In this role she worked with young people, many of who were at risk, in order to create better environments for young people in their communities.

Dana went on to work in a number of senior roles with the SA public sector in which she was responsible for program management, service delivery, policy development and strategic planning.

Dana’s most recent experience has been with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) where she held the role of Principal, Social Services, Systems & Aboriginal Policy. In this role she was responsible for implementing projects and supporting team members to apply innovative techniques and develop solutions to complex social and service problems. Before this, Dana was the Director of the Family by Family Program, a peer-to-peer model where families are matched together to create behaviour change.

Dana has extensive experience working with Aboriginal communities and brings a unique skill set in facilitation, Aboriginal cultural consultancy, mainstream service delivery and systems change. Dana’s current work includes supporting organisations to plan for the future and improve service delivery, particularly with Aboriginal people and communities.

Dana is currently undertaking the MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice with the Open University, United Kingdom.