Recent Work from the community navigator

Led innovation across Shelter’s Community Services function transforming advice hubs away from purely centres of advice who met demand to platforms for partnerships delivering local campaigning participation. Harnessing the power partnerships to campaign for systemic change for local communities, using this evidence and insight to change and influence housing practice and policy nationally and locally

The shift meant Shelter could campaign alongside people locally with lived experience, to lobby the Government to unfreeze housing benefit, to help people cope with rising costs, move out of temporary accommodation, and avoid the threat of homelessness. In 2023, after 2 years of campaigning  the Chancellor responded by unfreezing housing allowance for millions of people  across the UK

Led the creation and development of the strategic planning approach for London Women's Centre. The Centre had a strong  and rich history for providing inclusive and high quality counselling services for women suffering domestic abuse but wanted to refresh their strategy to ensure their impact could be maximised

Working with the Chair of Trustees and core staff team developed a session that centred around completing a simple SWOT analysis which allowed them to assess their current service delivery model against potential opportunities

At the end of the half day session the Organisation had a set of refreshed strategic goals and SMART objectives to develop in operational plans

At the RNLI I devised a new volunteering strategy to grow income placing the RNLI at the heart of communities across the UK and Republic of Ireland. 

The strategy focused on collaborating with members of communities that had ‘lived experience’ of RNLI services. Piloting this approach in Scarborough, a group of friends of family had been left bereft by a recent drowning. It was important to listen to their story, understand their motivations and provide opportunities to collaborate that were meaningful and added value to their community.  

The legacy fund created focused on providing a funded prevention programme, “SwimSafe” which provided basic sea survival skills for 7 -14-year-olds. 

The new model generated an extra £1M and 50 new volunteer fundraising groups in 12 months

Created an iterative support function, improving volunteer connection with IT systems. At the heart of the function was volunteer participation, ensuring the environment remained human, honest, and transparent. 

When implementing the new Material Planning System, the organisation did not involve volunteers in the design or testing of the new system resulting in high levels of mistrust and low levels of engagement. 

When leading new system development, I created new processes internally that ensured that volunteer input, testing and sign off was required before a new system could go into the live environment. 

 On implementation the adoption rate was 92% in 2 months. compared to 38% for the Material Planning System