Tara Hannon, the 284th person I’ve met on my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers, is a force of nature.

Tara is a big-picture thinker with an incredible ability to generate ideas and connect dots. 

At the same time, she’s wonderfully ebullient and irreverent – the only thing she does more enthusiastically than brainstorming is laughing.

Tara had a nomadic childhood that took her from New York to South Africa to Beirut to Greece to Sydney and back to New York. Maybe being exposed to so many different cultures and people explains why Tara is both very creative and personable.

Tara has enjoyed a very successful career in the tech industry, doing everything from sales and marketing to project management and digital transformation.

She’s also founded an online community forum, M2M North Shore, for people with disabilities and their carers.

Lately, those two worlds – being a tech veteran and the carer of a daughter with a disability – have been coming together.

In Tara’s experience, the complexity, unpredictability and limited scope of the National Disability Insurance Scheme does a poor job of serving all people with a disability. The NDIS supports roughly 10% of people with disability. So she’s working on developing person-centric, life-journey, data-driven and standards-based solutions to create better, more sustainable outcomes for all people with disability at lower costs, and where they become valued and included members of their local communities.

It’s a bold goal. But Tara’s more than just an ideas factory – she’s also got the drive, discipline and networking skills to turn visions into outcomes. So I’m betting she’ll find a way to make it happen.