Georgette Mulheir is CEO of the award-winning international children’s rights organisation Lumos. For 28 years, Georgette has worked in 31 countries around the world, leading large-scale programmes to transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged children. She pioneered a model of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ now followed by many governments, preventing the separation of children from families, returning children from institutions and so-called ‘orphanages’ to families, and shifting finances from institutions to community services that support children in families. She provides advice to colleagues at the European Commission on using EU funds for reforming children’s services, and has published four books on children’s and women’s rights. She has trained policy makers and senior government practitioners from 44 countries in transforming children’s services. She has led ground breaking work to ensure full inclusion in society of children with disabilities, through the development of inclusive education and award-winning projects to support children and young people with intellectual disabilities to become powerful self-advocates, influencing policy at the highest level. She is leading a new approach to ensuring unaccompanied and separated Eritrean child refugees are not kept in detention in Ethiopia, but rather in family care. In 2014, she was named in the US as ‘one of the world’s 30 most influential social workers’ by socialworkdegreeguide.com. In 2015, also in the US, she was honoured in the prestigious 6th Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards for her work.