About Anchor Collective
Ada Conroy and Kelly Finch are family violence training, framework, and groupwork specialists with over 20 years’ experience each in the family violence response and training sectors.
Together, they bring passion and specialist knowledge and skill from across the continuum of family violence response, including crisis support, case management, and recovery-focused work with victim-survivors, alongside extensive experience as Men’s Behaviour Change Facilitators.
Ada and Kelly are committed to creating engaging, reflective, and safe learning environments for practitioners across the sector. Their work draws on strong foundations in workforce development and family violence framework training, supporting practitioners to build confidence, strengthen accountability, and deepen ethical practice.
Their work is supported by Kester Naismith, who provides essential administrative support and ensures the smooth coordination of training and operations behind the scenes.
Ada Conroy
she/her/they
Ada first developed the Resisting Collusion training while working at Women’s Health In the North. After leaving her role, she went on to redevelop and expand the training in partnership with Kelly, bringing their combined practice experience and insights to the program.
Ada has more than 25 years of experience in the family violence sector in Victoria. Over this time, she has worked across a wide range of roles including family violence case management, crisis response, counselling, outreach, court support, intake, refuge, and workforce training. She also spent 10 years leading a family violence workforce development team in Melbourne’s northern metropolitan region and is an experienced men’s behaviour change facilitator.
Through her private practice, Ada specialises in reflective practice supervision (individual and group), training, consultation, facilitation, and sector capacity building for practitioners working with adult victim-survivors and men who use violence. She provides consultation and support to services across Australia seeking to strengthen their family violence practice, embed their ethics and politics into their work, enhance accountability, and reflect on their collective values.
Ada is a queer woman living in Naarm.
Kelly Finch
she/her
Kelly brings more than 23 years of experience working across the social justice sectors in Australia and Scotland, with a strong focus on crisis response and refuge support for adult victim-survivors, as well as specialist support for children and young people. Kelly is a trained facilitator of the Ow My Life groupwork program, which seeks to empower and support survivors of Family Violence through consciousness-raising and psycho-education, and piloted this program for the first time in Australia in 2024.
As a family violence training and content specialist, Kelly designs and facilitates tailor-made workshops for organisations seeking to enhance their workers’ confidence, skills, and practice responses. Through both her private practice and previous roles with specialist family violence training organisations, she has supported services to build workforce capability and deepen their understanding of family violence dynamics.
Kelly is also a Principal Men’s Behaviour Change Facilitator, delivering intervention programs that support behaviour change for men who use violence. Drawing on this first-hand experience, she partnered with Ada Conroy to co-create the Resisting Collusion with Men who Use Intimate Partner Violence training. This program supports organisations and practitioners to strengthen their practice and promote greater perpetrator accountability in their work. They then went to co-create and develop the Walk Alongside Me training together, which focuses on safe and respectful ways to engage with survivors of coercive control.