Women to Watch 2022: Jessica Billimoria, CultureVerse

Jessica Billimoria

Head of CultureVerse
CultureVerse by Think HQ
Australia

Having previously worked as a communications and campaign manager at the Australian Taxation Office, Jessica Billimoria co-founded CultureVerse in 2015 with a mission to authentically engage with diverse communities to ensure they are included and represented in campaigns and communications.

Providing marketing communication, community engagement and research services nationally for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) audiences, CultureVerse rapidly built a wide network of community leaders and ethnic media contacts, allowing them to connect clients with people, viewpoints and markets that are otherwise unavailable.

Projects have included providing rolling translation services for the Victorian government throughout the pandemic, and providing life-saving information—often overnight—across more than 50 languages.

Thanks largely to Billimoria's efforts in growing the business, when full service communications agency Think HQ sought to acquire a multicultural communications agency to drive inclusion in 2019, CultureVerse was the obvious frontrunner.

Since then, Billimoria has been a key driver in the rapid, significant growth of Think HQ, and CultureVerse in particular. In the last financial year, she significantly grew her team’s revenue as well as expanded her team from two members in 2019 to 12 today.  That team has recruited a statewide network of translators to provide timely creation of in-language materials, providing employment for local CALD communities on top of everything else.

A naturally inclusive leader, Billimoria's instinct is to work with people from diverse backgrounds and approaches and gives a platform to all. Under her leadership, the diversity of the entire agency has grown. Today, the agency boasts 55 staff from 14 different countries, speaking 20 different languages.

Through her work with CultureVerse, Billimoria has driven a fundamental shake-up of the nature of communications in Australia, enabling inclusive communications work that would not have happened otherwise. That means Australians who speak a language other than English at home are receiving vital information they deserve, but currently don’t always get.