When did you join ELBA?
June 2025.

What is your role and what does it involve?
I am on sabbatical/secondment from my company Euromonitor International for six months, supporting the ELBA Leadership team. Initially I helped Kerry, who runs BIG Alliance, to review some of their major programmes such as CoRE, looking at how they were run (generally very well) and suggesting a few improvements, before analysing the data on volunteers for the same programmes and then of corporate client activities.

Leadership team support has included providing additional resource to carry out key research and analytic tasks to help develop their Learning & Development provision and providing easy to read overviews on each borough’s employment, education and demographics, as well as the make-up of the local charity/voluntary organisation sector.

Three words to describe yourself
Collaborative, Organised, Inquisitive.

Tell us one thing that people may not know about you
I co-founded and chair the board of trustees of the Castle Studies Trust, a grant giving charity that awards up to £14,000 per grant to advance our understanding of castles. We set up it up in 2012 due to the shrinking of traditional funding sources and we are entirely reliant on public donations. We are run by volunteer trustees and since its foundation we’ve awarded grants worth over £300,000 and nearly tripled our maximum grant award from £5,000.

Our funding has transformed our understanding of various sites and, more importantly, lead to much greater local community knowledge and interest in sites, such as at Crookston and Shrewsbury, as well as being a basis for applicants to gain greater funding from bigger sources that they probably wouldn’t have got without our initial support.

Tell us the best thing about working for ELBA
The people – friendly, passionate and committed.

Name your favourite place in east London and why
Don’t suppose the Tower of London counts?! It’s a castle – see above. If not, I would say the Museum of London Docklands – really excellent in the way it tells the story of the development of the docks in a frank and fair way.

Complete this sentence: ‘The absolute best thing about volunteering is…’
…learning new things and meeting new people.