Emily Dwyer | Co-Founder, Board Director and Head of Strategy

Emily Dwyer is a trans woman and activist, a humanitarian and development worker, and a former radio journalist. After going through gender transition in the years leading up to 2014 she feared that her humanitarian and development career was over. Instead she co-founded Edge Effect.

After graduating in Philosophy from the University of Adelaide Emily found herself unemployed, and joined the campus radio station (now Radio Adelaide). Over the following ten years she volunteered and worked in community radio stations in Australia, she was a broadcaster and producer with the Radio National network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and worked as a freelance foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia (filing for the ABC, BBC, CNN and other broadcasters).

In 2004 she took a 3 month job in Herat, Afghanistan, to help start-up a campus radio station Saday-e-Jawan. Four years later she left Afghanistan, after managing the USAID-funded national journalism training program for Sayara and establishing a national humanitarian radio service for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.  Emily moved to Bangkok in 2008 as South Asia Regional Manager for the US INGO Internews, managing media development and humanitarian information projects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India and elsewhere. Another move took her to Washington DC with Internews in 2011 and as Vice President of Afghanistan Programs, she oversaw a major increase in program size. She subsequently worked as a Senior Program Officer at the United States Institute of Peace, also in Washington DC, before returning to Australia in 2014 with her tail between her legs. 

Alongside postgraduate study at the University of Melbourne Emily  worked with Melbourne’s LGBTIQ+ community radio station JOY94.9 as the Specialist Program Director.  She returned to the humanitarian and development sectors through Oxfam Australia (thanks Katie!) as a Youth Engagement Advisor for their International Programs.

At Oxfam she risked becoming that annoying person at the back of the room always asking ‘and so this women-focused program, which women are we talking about?’ From there is was a short leap to co-founding Edge Effect in early 2017. Starting a new organisation from a blank piece of paper and an empty bank account was not easy. But she is now having the time of her life.