Marisa Vecchio AM

Marisa Vecchio AM donates every fee from this speech to Women's Legal Service QLD. She talks about what happens after everything burns down, and she means that literally. A national CEO and the 2004 Queensland Telstra Businesswoman of the Year, she left the corporate world and in 2012 took on the restoration of Hanworth House, one of Brisbane's oldest properties, bought and restored in honour of her mother, who died that same year of ovarian cancer. Weeks out from opening in 2013, an arson attack destroyed 80 per cent of it. She rebuilt. Hanworth now houses 22 people at a time and has raised more than $900,000 for Brisbane charities. Resilience, philanthropy and women in business, told by someone who has lived all three.