Yvonne Allen has a background in education and information services. Her activism began with opposition to the Vietnam War and the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was the first coordinator of Adelaide's Women's Studies Resource Centre in 1975, and was involved in the women's health movement. Now retired from the paid workforce, she works with the Kaurna people in her local community and is convenor of a small Adelaide-based NGO working in western Myanmar (Burma), India and Malaysia to improve health outcomes, particularly in relation to HIV/AIDS, and support education for refugee children.
Joy Noble has worked as a social worker and administrator in South Australia, and as a community worker with women in New Guinea. She was the first woman to be appointed, in the early 1970s, to the position of regional director in South Australia’s Department for Community Welfare. Her books relating in particular to volunteering have sold widely throughout Australia. In 2002, she was awarded an AM for ‘services to the development of the principles and practice of volunteering and as a contributor to the academic body of knowledge in the field of volunteering’.