Mark Francis was the Project Director from 2020 for the Defence Moral Injury Project which trained ADF chaplains in Moral Injury, and in particular certified them in Pastoral Narrative Disclosure. He joined the Army Reserve at university and became an Infantry officer, training soldiers from varied backgrounds in almost every role in an infantry battalion. He rose to command Sydney University Regiment which focussed on training both soldiers and commissioning officers in tactics and leadership. He then instructed at the Army Command and Staff College, Queenscliff in tactics and military history, and on further promotion became a senior staff officer in Army HQ in Personnel dealing with leadership and emerging issues. Concurrently, he is a Chartered Accountant (but please don’t hold that against him!) and a company director with extensive experience in the Not-For-Profit finance and project sector. He has held various senior corporate roles including CEO, CFO, COO, strategic planning, and strategic change management, with over 40 years’ experience in these fields. Mark is married to Hazel, and together they have two daughters.

Dean Yates is the author of Line in the Sand, a memoir published in June 2023 that has been acclaimed by mental health and moral injury experts around the world. Dean was a longtime journalist and bureau chief for the international news agency Reuters. He covered some of the most traumatic events of the past 25 years, leading teams of journalists that covered the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia’s Aceh province and the Iraq War. He was bureau chief in Iraq when a U.S. Apache gunship killed two Reuters journalists in Baghdad in 2007. Julian Assange later published footage of that attack, shocking millions of people. Dean’s last role at Reuters was to create and roll out a mental health strategy for the company’s 2,500 journalists. Dean is currently a peer worker (part-time) at the Head to Health mental health clinic in Launceston, a workplace mental health trainer and a public speaker. Praise for Line in the Sand: “Dean Yates bares his still healing heart and the depths of his humanity by providing a raw and utterly unguarded first-person account of the horrific losses and moral injuries he incurred … He reveals an essential truth about recovery from trauma and moral injury, namely that it is a lifelong challenge, and it is never one thing, like good psychotherapy”. Professor Brett Litz, co-author of Adaptive Disclosure: A New Treatment for Military Trauma, Loss, and Moral Injury.