Rika Asaoka
Rika Asaoka is an intercultural diversity consultant and facilitator. She specialises in intercultural diversity and inclusion management and leadership, delivering workshops, trainings, consultancy, facilitation and coaching.
Rika brings three decades of cross-cultural professional experience and has assisted individuals and organisations to empower their existing diversity to achieve positive outcomes.
Over 1,000 participants from a wide range of industries and sectors, including oil and gas, engineering, not-for-profit, environmental, education and government attend her sessions annually. The past five years has seen Rika extending her expertise to community service providers through the program she designed “See Me See You” with Multicultural Futures. Her facilitation style is highly interactive, providing insights and skills that harmonise and unify diverse people in the workplace and communities. Her sessions set about activating the power of diversity by promoting understanding, collaboration, communication, and effective leadership for diverse teams.
Rika is a certified licensee of Intercultural Readiness Check (IRC), a powerful internationally recognised assessment tool, that captures the levels of competencies on four core intercultural competences. It is used for improving intercultural readiness and effectiveness. She is the founder of Language and Culture Pty Ltd, a representative of IRC-Australia/Asia Centre, Japan Intercultural Consulting, and a certified Brain-based Coach from the NeuroLeadership Institute.
Catia Malaquias
Cátia Malaquias OAM is a lawyer, Board director, and human rights and inclusion expert in disability. She co-founded All Means All – The Australian Alliance for Inclusive Education and helped establish the Australian Coalition for Inclusive Education (ACIE).
A PhD candidate at Curtin University, Catia is also an External Affiliate at QUT’s Centre for Inclusive Education. She has received multiple awards in recognition of her work for the human rights of people with disability, including an Australian Human Rights Award.
Catia was also recognised as one of the Most Influential Lawyers of 2021 by Australasian Lawyer. Catia has three children and lives in Western Australia.
