Famin is a UQ Law alumni and a John Monash Scholar at the Blavatnick School of Government at the University of Oxford. After finishing her law degree, Famin worked as an Associate to an Australian High Court Justice before working as a corporate lawyer at MinterEllison. Famin then worked as a full time pro bono lawyer role in the firm for two years. Famin runs a social enterprise, Famin Makes, where she sews and sells hats, donating the proceeds to the Women’s Legal Service Queensland. She has raised over $75,000 so far! JATL spoke with back in 2020 (read that interview here: https://www.jatl.org/blog/2020/6/6/in-conversation-with-uq-alumna-famin-ahmed-domestic-violence-the-famin-makes-project-and-pro-bono-work). This conversation catches up on her journey since then.
Interview conducted by Sophie James and transcript lightly edited by James Arthur.
Thank you very much for meeting with me to chat today.
No worries, thank you.
For those who don't know you or your work, would you be able to give us a brief overview of ‘Famin Makes’, and the motivation behind it?
Yeah, so I graduated UQ law in mid-2019, and I had a judge's associateship lined up for January 2020. I had a planned 6 months off and in that time a lot of my friends were traveling, including in Europe.
But I could not do that because I had quite a lot going on in terms of my family situation and domestic violence happening at home. I was trying to think of what I could do in that 6 months especially because I already had a job lined up, so I didn't need to hustle in terms of finding jobs. And I had always sewn.
So basically, I started a social enterprise called ‘Famin Makes’, where I sewed bucket hats, sold them, and donated the proceeds to Women's Legal Service. I chose Women's Legal Service as the relevant charity because I had gone there myself earlier that year to try and get free legal advice. They provide free legal advice for domestic violence survivors, and I went for my own to try and get some advice for my own family. But I got turned away because of underfunding, and so I realized that they are critically underfunded.
So I thought, I'll just start this little project to raise a bit of money—thinking it would just be a small six-month initiative. But it ended up being quite popular, and I ended up keeping it up. It’s still something I do on the side now. After that six months, I just continued it alongside work. Now, it’s not just about raising money—it’s also about raising awareness and starting conversations about domestic violence. It’s raised $75,000, which is much, much more than I ever expected. But yeah, that’s a bit of the background on Famin Makes.
Congratulations. That’s amazing. JATL last spoke to you five years ago and at that point I think you had just started working full time. Can you tell us a bit about what you’ve been up to between 2020 and now, and your journey to get there?
Yeah, so in 2020 when I did the first JATL interview I was working as Associate to Justice Keane in the High Court. That was an amazing year. I did that thinking I might one day go on to be a barrister, because I just loved advocacy, loved mooting—I loved all that sort of stuff at uni.
I had my grad offer at Minters lined up, and I had already worked in the Dispute Resolution team during my clerkship before the associateship. So after that year, I went to Minters, started the grad program, and went back into Disputes, where I already had a bit of a mentor partner.
I actually really liked the work—a lot more than I expected—in terms of the skills I was using. There was lots of critical thinking. I wasn’t doing grunt work; I was doing high-level work like talking directly to barristers, writing submissions—really exciting stuff.
But I would get to the end of the week basically having a crisis, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, because I always knew I wanted to work in social justice. But I thought, "I’ll just try this commercial gig for a bit—maybe just two years for the training—and then do something else." Which I think is quite common for people pursuing social justice careers.
I guess I was placing all this pressure on myself about whether I wanted a social justice career full-time, or if I was happy just incorporating elements of it.
At the same time, I feel like I’m quite an authentic person—I don’t really put up pretences. And because I already had a really good relationship with the partner in the Disputes team, I was upfront that I probably didn’t want to be a commercial lawyer in the long term.
I understand not everyone feels like they can do that. Some people have job insecurity or may not have the right relationship with their boss. But I have a lower threshold for just being myself than other people.
So I was quite upfront from the get-go. Every time I went into my partner’s office he’d ask, “Have you come to tell me you’re quitting?” and I’d be like, “No!” At the same time, I was performing really well in my role—I wasn’t slacking off—but I just knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do long term.
And I listened to a podcast—might be useful for JATL readers—called 80,000 Hours. It’s run by an effective altruism organisation, and the whole concept is that you have 80,000 hours in your career. If you want to make an impact, how best do you do it? The founder was saying a mistake a lot of people make is thinking they have to jump straight into an “impact” career. But your career is long—you have time to play with. If you want to make a really effective impact in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, there’s time to build up skills, financial capital, reputation, networks. That made me realise—wow—it makes sense to take a few years for corporate training first, and then go into something more social justice-y later.
After my year as an associate, I also realised that even though I would love advocacy and being a barrister, in Australia—with the separation of powers—being a barrister doesn’t frequently allow for social justice outcomes. The courts just aren’t the avenue for social change here like they are in the US or Europe. There are definitely important human rights cases, but for systemic change, the law and policy creation framework is more impactful. So I decided to just do this corporate stint for a couple of years for the training.
But because I had been so upfront, Minters offered me a full-time role in the Pro Bono team. It started as a grad rotation, which many firms offer, but they kind of created a full-time role for me.
So I did that for about three years—running my own casework, and more importantly, running and scaling pro bono programs where the impact extended beyond me. Hundreds of lawyers were contributing to social issues, and I was managing relationships with community legal centres and non-profits across Queensland.
Then I got the John Monash Scholarship to come to Oxford to study a Master of Public Policy. So that’s what I’m doing now!
Could you tell us a little bit about your study focus, and also how you've continued ‘Famin Makes’ and your other pro bono work while you've been studying?
When I was thinking about whether I would want to do postgraduate studies in law versus policy, I thought for me personally—again, thinking back to like my kind of goal is big tectonic shifts and systemic shifts in social change—I felt like I didn’t need to know more of the law to be able to achieve that in the Australian context, and what I wanted was kind of a broader skill set of how to kind of achieve change and public leadership in achieving change. And the Master of Public Policy program was more suited to that than a law program was.
So the program that I’m studying now is really broad. It’s basically just a lot of different subjects and a lot of different guest lectures which are about acquiring a really broad public policy skill set, and the goal for me is to kind of combine that with the law—you know, the analytical, detailed law skill set—combining that with a broad change-making policy skill set to be able to actually achieve the change that I want to achieve.
Because my course is so generalist in terms of public policy, it’s basically a whole lot of different courses. I’m studying some economics, some law, some philosophy, some deep dives into specific electives. The electives that I’m doing this term are about social policy and diversity, and new economic theories. I’m attending a course about going into politics, public budgeting, etc.
It essentially provides a really broad skill set, and the idea of this program is that you could go into a meeting with any minister, and you haven’t done a whole degree in finance, for example, but you’ve done enough of the degree in finance, and like kind of a crash course in it, that you can understand what the minister’s talking about. And you can kind of add these different areas of public policy to your tool belt to be able to kind of put together an effective strategy.
So that’s kind of the content side of things. And then the non-content side of things, which is just as important, is actually just the cohort. So I have 150 colleagues in my course, all who have done amazing things. I feel like I have achieved nothing when I’m talking to my colleagues. They have founded NGOs, worked really high up in government, implemented massive social change campaigns. They’ve done really, really impressive things. And the amount that I’m learning from just speaking to my classmates who have different experiences from all around the world—it’s just as much as I’m learning from the actual course itself.
How have you continued your pro bono work while studying? How has Famin Males changed since you've relocated?
Yeah, so while I have been over here, Famin Makes has obviously changed quite a bit because for many years the whole crux of it was that I was physically sewing hats and physically selling them in Australia, which obviously I can’t do over here.
Also, if I brought my sewing machine over here and made hats, maybe I could have raised an extra $5,000–$10,000 in this particular year, but I would have really been hindering my learning and my experience at Oxford, which then hinders my impact long term.
So I’m really trying to think about my career as a long-term thing and being happy to kind of take ebbs and flows with specific projects for specific roles. And this year, for me, is more about me learning and rejuvenating than it is about producing pro bono work and impact. In terms of pure pro bono work, I’m actually not doing any this year.
In terms of Famin Makes, I’ve shifted it a bit to selling T-shirts, which I can get printed from afar, working with a couple of my friends who are artists to design T-shirts and selling those, and also focusing on the education side of domestic violence through my social media.
But to be completely honest, I think Famin Makes has taken a bit more of a back seat this year than it has in any other year.
Because I was working on Famin Makes for about five years before I got here, I am pretty confident in the base that I’ve created with it in the sense that if I were to go back to Australia later this year and were to make a bunch of hats, I would have no concerns that they’ll sell. And so I have enough of a foundation there to just leave it on the backburner for a little bit and pick it back up when I’m ready. But I just didn’t want to hinder my experience while I’ve been over here.
But yeah, to summarise how it’s changed—I’ve focused more on T-shirt production and the education side of things which I can do from afar.
Yeah. And also allowing yourself this time to learn and invest in yourself is obviously important.
Exactly. The reason I’m here is very aligned with Famin Makes. But if I were to just go head down on Famin Makes for the rest of my career, I could raise, you know, tens of thousands of dollars—maybe even millions, who knows—but I wouldn’t be able to, I guess, instigate the broad, systemic changes that I’m wanting to instigate.
It’s where my skill set lies. My superpower is storytelling and advocacy, and Famin Makes is one way that I can utilise that, but it doesn’t tick my boxes in terms of satisfaction of what I want to achieve in my entire career. And so, this year is about investing in those other skills so that I can complement Famin Makes with the other systemic changes that I want to achieve with my skills.
Now, you talked a little bit about this already, about your work at Minters in the Pro Bono lawyer role. Did your study and your participation with UQ Pro Bono Centre and your extracurricular activities during your study motivate you or prepare you for that sort of work?
In terms of motivations, I’ve always been very social justice-oriented, even before UQ Law. But UQ Law definitely helped me foster that sense of, “OK, what can I do with my legal skills in terms of contributing to social justice?”
And yeah, I really highly commend the UQ Pro Bono Centre. It’s just amazing that we have that opportunity at UQ.
In terms of whether I think it prepared me, I wasn’t really aware when I was studying that there were pro bono roles within corporate law firms. And I still think those roles are quite few and far between, so I think it’s very hard or unrealistic at this stage for students to plan to have a career in pro bono. If that sort of role comes up, absolutely snatch it.
But I actually classify my career not just as pro bono in corporate, but just a broad social justice career, and there’s lots of different roles that can fit that category, and pro bono law, if it does come up, is one of them you can snatch. But there’s community legal centre roles. There’s policy roles. And all of these kind of fit within the broad bucket of social justice careers, especially in Queensland.
I think my UQ pro bono work, and the extracurricular work I did—I tutored refugees and a bunch of other things—allowed me to see concretely, “How can I use my skills to make the most impact?” And what type of projects can I work on?
And also just learning how social justice is not achieved just through one person winning a case, for example, but through collaboration with a lot of different types of organisations and matchmaking.
So with the UQ Pro Bono Centre projects, you are always working alongside an organisation or a community legal centre, and you’re kind of uplifting the work that they already do, leveraging their expertise. You’re contributing your skills.
Also, when I ran the Refugee Tutoring Club, it’s all about matching spare time and expertise of uni students who can tutor with partnerships with high school students that need tutoring. So it’s all kind of about matchmaking and jigsaw puzzling in terms of who has the right skills, where, and how can we match those up to create a bigger impact overall?
So I think that is the main thing that UQ really taught me in terms of how that carried through to my pro bono career. Because pro bono as well—being a pro bono lawyer—it’s all about partnerships.
Being in a top tier, you’re not having vulnerable clients walk through your door. You’re not actually in and amongst the community. You need to really rely on the expertise and knowledge and networks of community legal centres and not-for-profits, who are the subject matter experts in their particular social issue, and all you’re doing is amplifying their stuff.
In your opinion, how can Australian public policy be improved when it comes to addressing domestic violence?
I think domestic violence is an area where a lot of the research on what works exists already. There’s a lot of detailed academic and evaluative work on what type of approaches actually work to stop and then prevent domestic violence.
I think right now, the biggest issue is funding. There’s a lot of organisations that have the expertise that are giving amazing services that are helping survivors, and right now they’re just not being funded. People are being turned away from these services.
Our inability to actually just help and service people who are already experiencing violence is then hindering our ability to prevent future violence and to rehabilitate those involved.
Our national policy framework on domestic violence in Australia is built into four categories: it’s prevention of domestic violence; early intervention once it occurs; response once it really occurs; and healing and recovery once it has occurred for someone to move on and become secure.
So if you think about those categories, if there are people dying and suffering right now, response is the first priority. We need to service those people, otherwise we cannot deal with the problem at large.
And those people are not currently being serviced. And the organisations that service people who are experiencing violence are also the organisations that have expertise on how to solve the bigger problem. And right now, there’s just a lot of underfunding and lack of capacity.
I think there’s lots of success stories in Australia in terms of domestic violence kind of being a bipartisan issue that both sides of politics care about, and we have quite an amazing national policy framework. It’s quite detailed.
But I think we can’t achieve any of these outcomes without increasing the funding and making sure the funding is going to the right places.
I did a bit of work at Minters on a report about how the funding is not transparent at all at the moment, so you basically can’t track where the funding is going, and therefore how can you assess that the funding is going to the right places? So my biggest priority in terms of what needs to change right now is funding amounts and funding models in Australia.
How do you view the relationship between pro bono work and justice, and what would be your advice for law students and early career lawyers who have a heart for justice but don't really know where to start?
I’ll start with the first bit. Pro bono work, by definition, is basically free work that is given to people that can’t afford legal assistance. It’s essentially free legal work in the public interest. You can divide pro bono work into individual pro bono work and broader public interest pro bono work. It doesn’t always have to be for individual clients who can’t afford legal assistance.
But I think generally, because of the nature of pro bono work being free work in the public interest, it is always there to plug a gap.
If there’s some sort of gap in the community and gap in justice, pro bono work is trying to identify what the gap is and contribute to the public interest by working within that gap—whether it’s towards clients that are suffering that particular type of disadvantage, or trying to change law or policy that is addressed at that particular gap.
There’s a broader justice system that we have that includes not just courts, but law and policy that affects people’s lives. Take social security frameworks for example—small changes in those laws and policies, especially for disadvantaged people in our community, can significantly affect their livelihood and their well-being in everyday life.
Justice is made up of a lot of different things in our society, and frameworks and systems in our society that affect justice for individuals in an everyday well-being sense. Pro bono work is about identifying gaps and deficiencies in the broader justice system, and how those deficiencies can be addressed through legal skills, I guess.
But it’s not constitutive of the broader justice system—that’s how I think of the relationship.
OK, the second question about advice for law students and early career lawyers who have a heart for justice but don’t know where to start: I think my overriding advice would be similar to what I said before. Think of your career as a long-term thing. Just because you want to do justice stuff doesn’t mean you have to stress about getting the perfect justice role to start with.
Think about how you can best build your skills, build your learning, build your financial security as well. That’s a huge thing. If you don’t have a massive safety net, it’s not so realistic to go and work for an NGO for really bad pay when you first leave law school.
Look into a lot of the issues that you’re interested in. Look into what organisations work on those issues. Because even if you go into a non-social justice role to start with, you might still be able to create connections and contribute to those organisations that align with your passions while you’re doing other roles.
But don’t be so worried if you don’t get a justice role that you like straight away. In terms of what sort of roles are out there: obviously there’s kind of the classic corporate law path, which I think most UQ law students are aware of because they really push it.
But also, be aware that that’s not the only path. There’s also heaps of government roles—government policy roles as well. There’s small firms. There’s community legal centres. There’s international organisations. There’s charities.
There’s so many different roles which are broadly aligned with justice. And, as I said, even if they’re not directly aligned with justice to start with, you’re at least building skills that you can use to create justice in the long term.
So think about what you’re most passionate about. Think about what roles are out there, and what best aligns with you, and what will allow you to create justice or contribute to justice in the long term.
What is your most positive memory with from Famin Makes, or pro bono work more generally? What are you most proud of?
I get a lot of satisfaction from talking to people in real life and hearing people’s... I think what I’m most proud of is when I speak about Famin Makes, and my story and my work, I see people’s perceptions of domestic violence literally change in front of my eyes.
For example, a couple of years ago I spoke at a Pub Choir event in City Hall, probably to about 3,000 people. It was only like a speech that was a few minutes, and after that, going backstage, we would watch the donations to Women’s Legal Service go up by literally like thousands of dollars—within the few minutes after speaking.
I think it went up by like $8,000 in the space of 10 minutes.
And that really just speaks to the power of storytelling. We have so much information given to us all the time, and we know that there are so many terrible things happening in the world all the time.
But the change that you can make, and that you feel you’re making, when you’re literally with someone in person, talking to them, telling a story—I think that’s unmatched.
And also, in terms of feelings of pride—I’ve raised $75,000, but sometimes that number doesn’t feel like it means much when you’re just looking at the number. And it’s only when you’re talking to people in real life that you’re really seeing and understanding how that is making an impact.
Well you should be very proud! Last question. How can we follow your work and support your initiatives, and keep up to date with what you're doing?
Follow me on Famin Makes on Instagram. That’s the best way. I’ve been a bit slack with posting recently, but that is my way of communicating. And also LinkedIn, I guess. People follow me on LinkedIn, which I find really bizarre, because I barely post on LinkedIn. But sometimes I post.
Thanks very much!