Our Team

Lauren founded Local Government Alliance and leads it as CEO. She has spent a large portion of her career inside local government, not delivering services to it, having held senior roles across three Australian local government organisations. That means she understands the workforce pressures the sector faces from the inside, not from a case study.

She built the firm to close a gap she had seen firsthand. Local government has long been served by recruitment specialists, but not by an integrated workforce partner: one that covers the full people picture, from recruitment and industrial relations through to investigations, workforce planning, organisational change and governance, delivered by senior specialists who work only in this sector. For Lauren, that is not a wider service list but a different way of standing with the sector.

Lauren holds a Master of Business Psychology (Industrial and Organisational) from the University of Newcastle, an Executive MBA from the University of Sydney, and a Bachelor of Psychology from the University of Adelaide.

Brigitte helps lead Local Government Alliance, shaping the firm's direction, growth and relationships across the sector. She brings more than a decade in workforce, people and organisational roles across NSW state government, having worked at the heart of public sector organisations and progressed from advisory roles into senior HR business partnering and then management, leading through workforce change, capability development and employee relations in exactly the high-expectation, stretched-resource environments the sector knows well.

She leads how the Alliance builds and holds its relationships, working closely with councils and public sector leaders to understand their priorities and connect them with the right specialist support across workforce advisory, recruitment, workplace investigations, governance and organisational change.

Brigitte holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (Human Resource Management) from Southern Cross University and is a certified HR practitioner through the Australian HR Institute (AHRI).

Penny helps lead Local Government Alliance, bringing senior legal and advisory judgement to how the firm is run, as well as to the matters it handles. She is an employment and workplace relations lawyer whose career has centred on helping organisations navigate their most complex people issues in a way that is practical, fair and aligned with their broader goals, drawing on senior legal counsel experience across the Victorian public sector and more than a decade in specialist workplace relations practice.

She works with councils, public sector organisations and executive leaders on employment law, industrial relations, workplace investigations, executive employment matters, governance, organisational change and workforce risk. Her focus is strategic legal advice that addresses compliance obligations while supporting sustainable organisational outcomes, because in her experience workplace matters rarely sit in isolation from governance, culture, leadership and performance.

Penny holds a Master of Laws (LLM) in employment and workplace relations from the University of Melbourne and is an Accredited Specialist in Workplace Relations Law with the Law Institute of Victoria.