Alastair Parvin, Open Systems Lab
Alastair is a designer with 00 (‘zero zero’), London. Although he trained and practices in architecture, his work extends outside its traditional framework, looking at the economic, social and technological systems behind it. He is a co-inventor of WikiHouse, an open source construction platform which aims to use digital manufacturing to radically democratise the production of cities. He leads ‘A Right to Build’, an ongoing project addressing the economics of housing crisis, and the future of democratic city planning and citizen-led development for resilient housing, infrastructure, neighbourhoods and cities. Aside from his design projects, we has written for numerous architectural, design & policy journals, lectures & speaks widely and advises on issues around cities, housing policy, democracy, technology strategy and the 'third industrial revolution'.
Ali Torabi, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
Ali joined the Trust in 2021 and leads the Rights and Justice Programme. Ali has previously worked as the Brexit Lead for the Trades Union Congress (TUC). He has a decade of experience as a campaigns and policy strategist in Whitehall with the Cabinet Office, with tech startup Look After My Bills, and with campaigning organisation 38 Degrees. Outside of the day job, he was the founding chair of human rights charity EachOther (formerly RightsInfo), a trustee of Safe Passage International, and a grants committee member for Justice Together Initiative. Ali came to the UK as an asylum seeker in 2005.
Alisha Pomells, London Funders/2027
Alisha joined London Funders in October 2021 is taking part in the 2027 Programme alongside being a part of the London Funders team. Prior to joining, she has worked and volunteered for various charities, including Oxfam and Marie Curie. After graduating in International Development and International Politics in 2019 she has continued to work within the charity sector, most recently she worked for the British Heart Foundation.
Amahra Spence, MAIA Group
Amahra Spence is an artist, organiser and designer for social justice movements. Her work, including MAIA, The Black Land + Spatial Justice Project and Architectures of Abolition is invested in the relationships between imagination and liberation, through spatial practice, Blackness as technology, the role of culture and the decentralisation of resources.
Amir Rizwan, Big Society Capital
Amir currently works as a Relationship Director at Big Society Capital where he works with catalytic investors that are looking to enter the social impact investment space. His role sees him supporting social ventures to grow their business and impact by connecting them with support and capital, building the social impact investment market through relationships with mission-aligned investors and networks and establishing development partnerships to tackle social issues. He also co-leads Big Society Capital’s work on supporting early-stage impact fund managers that are looking to design, build and launch new impact funds aiming to tackle social issues in new ways. Alongside his current role at Big Society Capital. Amir is the Chair of the Diversity Forum, which was setup to improve diversity, equality and inclusion within the social investment sector and is a Governor at Cripplegate Foundation, a place-based foundation in Islington, where he supports the management and board on decisions relating to grants, strategy, planning and decision making; helping and supporting the organisation to grow and develop. In 2022 he was appointed onto the Impact Advisory Board for the Growth Impact Fund, a specialist fund setup by Big Issue Invest and UnLtd that is looking to support underserved entrepreneurs, minority-led social enterprises and social enterprises led by people with disabilities with access to funding and investment. Prior to joining Big Society Capital Amir has been working in the social investment sector for 8 years having led on Comic Relief’s social investment strategy and the development of its new social investment fund Red Shed and prior to that he managed a community housing investment fund for CAF Venturesome as well as a portfolio of social investments to a range of social purpose organisations.
Anasuya Sengupta, Whose Knowledge
Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 20 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman.
She is the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS).
Anasuya holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.
Annette Dhami, Dark Matter Labs
Annette spent a decade building civic and social initiatives across the UK, exploring how we organise, finance, occupy space, build networks and create economies for shared and public benefit; including through Impact Hubs in Brixton and Islington and social and civic enterprise networks in Plymouth. Experiencing the thick tar of the systems that this work moved within (inc economic, land, governance and financial systems), Annette joined Dark Matter Labs in 2020 to focus more deeply on how we can shift this 'dark matter' to transition towards a thriving, balanced, civic economy. She focuses in particular on organising, finance and governance infrastructures. She holds the organisational development work of the international Dark Matter Labs ecosystem (read more about that here), gets stuck in as a Director (steward) of the Dark Matter Labs Group, and explores these governance questions more deeply in the multi-partner #BeyondtheRules project.
Callum Pethick, Blagrave Trust
Callum currently works at the Blagrave Trust, a small independent charitable trust that is modelling a progressive vision of philanthropy driven by what the young people they serve prioritise. Callum co-leads on Blagrave’s youth-led change work, with a specific focus on convening young campaigners and the infrastructure organisations that support them, working in partnership with other funders to collectively grow and scale the UK's youth-led change landscape. Callum has a strong belief in valuing lived experience as expertise and the need to democratise ways of working, and challenge extractive and harmful practice in the sector. As a queer young person, he especially sees a lack of representation of people who think and act like him at decision making levels in the sector and is passionate about changing this. Callum is interested in the role intergenerational learning, redistributing power and wealth, and community organising can play in creating a more just and equitable society.
Dame Caroline Mason, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
Before joining Esmée, Caroline was Chief Operating Officer at Big Society Capital and preceding that, Charity Bank. Caroline was also the co-founder of Investing for Good, a social investment advisory firm and one of the first Community Interest Companies. Before joining the social sector, Caroline had an eighteen-year track record of creative and innovative product development in the financial services sector. With Reuters, she managed the global development of real-time news and television services and then pioneered the introduction of web technology products. She also had her own consulting company, working with several financial institutions to develop new business and products including an electronic brokering service and a global wealth management business for a private bank.
Caroline is a Board Member of the Environment Agency, a Board Member of the Impact Investing Institute, and Chair of the Foundations Forum,
Caroline is also a member of TNL Community Fund Climate Action Fund Advisory Panel, and a member of the Inclusive Economy Partnership Champions Board.
Catherine Howarth, Shareaction
Catherine Howarth OBE joined ShareAction as Chief Executive in 2008. ShareAction coordinates civil society to promote responsible investment across Europe, with a focus on mobilising mainstream institutional investors to drive accelerated action by companies on climate change, loss of biodiversity, gender issues, precarious work, public health and food system risks. She is a member of the UK Treasury’s asset management taskforce, where she has co-chaired a programme of work on investor stewardship of companies. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian Media Group, serving on the Scott Trust’s investment committee. She is a member of the Business Commission to Tackle Inequality.
Colin Melvin, Arkadiko Partners
Colin Melvin is a thought leader and agent for positive change, who has been at the forefront of global developments in corporate leadership, stewardship and sustainability and responsible asset management for over twenty years. He has international experience from the investor and corporate perspectives in developing and challenging strategy, promoting effective risk management and corporate governance and creating well-aligned incentives.
He is Founder and Managing Director of Arkadiko Partners and External Lecturer at Copenhagen Business School and a Fellow member of the Royal Society of Arts. Previously he was Non-Executive Chair of InfluenceMap until April 2022 and member of the InfluenceMap Advisory Board and Advisory Council at The Inclusive Capitalism Programme on Purposeful Ownership, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
Until November 2016 he was Global Head of Stewardship at Hermes Investment Management and between 2004 and January 2016 Chief Executive of Hermes EOS, the world’s largest stewardship service, which he founded. He was formerly Head of Responsible Investment at Baillie Gifford, a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, a Board Member and Chair of the Principles for Responsible Investment, Chair of Social Stock Exchange, Chair of Future-Fit Foundation, a Member of the Corporate Advisory Group at The Future of the Corporation, British Academy and a Member of the 30% Club Investor Group. Between 2008 and 2013 he was a non-executive director and Chair of the Remuneration Committee at Aedas, an architectural firm.
He has a strong network of contacts at the most senior levels within the world's largest investment institutions and listed companies. He is an expert in building trust and adding value to boards in industries with stakeholder challenges having worked with many companies to improve their relationships and performance. He has a strong ability to steer complex and sensitive situations to positive action.
Colin qualified as a fund manager in 1996 and is and member of the CFA Institute. He holds an MA from Aberdeen University and an MPhil from Cambridge University, both in History, and Diplomas in Investment Analysis from Stirling University and Company Directorship from the Institute of Directors.
Daze Aghaji, Earthrise Studios and Blagrave Trust
Daze Aghaji is a London based Youth Climate Justice Activist who centres on Regenerative Cultures, Intersectionality, Radical Social Justice and Youth Political Engagement in her work. Described by The Guardian as “a ball of energy, conviction and warmth”, Daze's advocacy for racial systemic change has led her to work with many leading charities, institutions, governments and grassroots change-makers globally.
In 2019, she became the youngest candidate to stand in a European Parliamentary election and ran under the banner of a Climate and Ecological Emergency Independent to bring awareness to the need for political will in addressing the climate crisis. She has strong ties with the climate movement Extinction Rebellion since its early days and she was a founding member of the movement’s youth branch.
Daze is currently a Creative Director at Earthrise Studio, a creative agency dedicated to communicating the climate crisis as well as an Artist in Residence at Phytology, the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve. Daze's work is rooted in deep love, duty and care for all life; she continues to passionately organises with many grassroots campaigns and organisations.
Derek Bardowell, Ten Years' Time
Derek A. Bardowell is a writer, CEO of Ten Years’ Time, and a Knowledge Equity Fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Derek started his career in journalism. He has written for The Times, The Guardian, Time Out, and British GQ, contributed to anthologies such as Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture and The Weeklings: Revolution #1, and appeared regularly on BBC radio. After teaching in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, Derek moved into the non-profit sector. He directed award-winning youth programmes for the Stephen Lawrence Trust and co-founded the Project Subway journalism programme for Children’s Express (now called Headliners). From 2009 to 2019, Derek led funding portfolios for Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Laureus Sport for Good, and the National Lottery Community Fund. He has been responsible for managing over £150 million to good causes in 34 countries. Derek’s first book, No Win Race (Mudlark/HarperCollins 2019), explored race and racism in modern Britain through the lens of sport. It was a Sunday Times and Financial Times Book of the Year in 2019, shortlisted for Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Indie Book Awards and longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. Derek is currently working on a new book on reimagining philanthropy called Outsiders Within for Dialogue Books/Little, Brown Book Group. He hosts the podcast Just Cause, exploring the intersections of race, culture, and social justice and he is a founding member of Future Foundations UK, which supports minoritised racial groups who work in philanthropy. Derek is a Thirty Percy Foundation trustee, a member of the Baobab Foundation advisory group, and a Churchill Fellow.
Eirini Malliaraki
Eirini is a design engineer and entrepreneur and currently the Head of Community at Deep Science Ventures. Since 2014, she has developed new projects, products and programmes across academia, industrial research labs, national research centres and startups. Before DSV, she was the founder of the award-winning, VC backed education tech startup Filisia. More recently, she oversaw project development on AI for Climate Action at the Alan Turing Institute. She has also worked as a researcher at the Morphological Computation Lab at Imperial College, Microsoft Research, and Nesta. Eirini holds a joint MA/MSc in Innovation Design Engineering from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.
Eli Manderson Evans, Social Justice Consultant and Researcher
Eli previously worked at the philanthropy advisory and social change organisation Ten Years’ Time where he served as the Head of Social Justice and led on several powerful research reports focused on the need for the British funding landscape to be honest, ambitious, and authentic in their commitments to address racial injustice and the climate crisis among many other publications. He also worked to connect a new generation of philanthropists to ambitious changemakers transforming the world.
Eli has over 10 years’ experience in policy, research and strategy roles covering connecting issue areas such as the empowerment of young campaigners, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate justice, racial justice and much more. A running commitment in all of Eli’s work is to listen deeply to people with experience of an issue and enable them to lead when it comes to decisions on how to address an issue.
He is deeply passionate about disrupting traditional power dynamics between funders and the communities they wish to serve as well as seeking to transform the relationship between charitable giving and the investment practices behind the scenes. Eli is also extremely passionate about how we develop working cultures of care and centre joy in work that can often be hard to sustain ourselves through. He is currently thinking deeply about community wealth building and the ways in which communities can be empowered to lead the investment strategies of funding bodies.
Farah Elahi, Greater London Authority
Farah is the Interim Head of Community Engagement at the Greater London Authority. Whilst at the GLA, she has led on the Civil Society Strategy and City Hall’s work on supporting a thriving sector. Farah’s previous roles include Research and Policy Analyst at the Runnymede Trust, and the Family and Childcare Trust. Her research has focused on ethnic inequality in London, employment and education. Published reports include a number of local Race Equality Scorecards and policy briefings, Islamophobia: Still a challenge for us all, and Nations Divided: How to Teach the History of Partition and Ethnic Inequalities in London: Capital for All.
Farzana Khan, Healing Justice London
Farzana (she/her) is a writer, director, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator. She is the Executive Director and Co-founder of Healing Justice London (HJL). Her practice focuses on building community health, repair, and self-transformation with communities of colour and other marginalised and underrepresented groups.
Her practice is rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice. HJL cultivates public health provisions for collective liberation and dignifying lives made vulnerable. Farzana has over 10 years of background in Youth and Community work with a focus on arts-based education projects both in the UK and internationally.
Farzana is the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake!, bringing together young people, artists, and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. She ran this working at Platform London, a climate and social justice organisation working across arts, education, research and activism. Farzana is a member of the Advisory Board at the International Curatorial Forum. Her recent curatorial practice/art includes launching the Black Cultural Activism Map with the Stuart Hall Foundation and All Water Has Perfect Memory, writing on climate and gender justice, as well as generational trauma and memory.
Gabriella Gomez-Mont, Experimentalista
Gabriella Gómez-Mont is the founder of Laboratorio Para la Ciudad, the experimental arm and creative think tank of the Mexico City government, reporting to the Mayor. The Lab is a place to reflect about all things city and to explore other social scripts and urban futures for the largest megalopolis in the western hemisphere, working across diverse areas, such as urban creativity, mobility, governance, civic tech, and public space. The Lab also searches to create links between civil society and government, insisting on the importance of political and public imagination in the execution of its experiments. Besides her fascination with all things city, Gabriella is also a journalist, visual artist, a director of documentary films, as well as a creative advisor to several cities, universities, and companies. She has been awarded several international recognitions for her work in different fields, such as the first prize in both the Audi Urban Future Award and the Best Art Practice Award given by the Italian government, as well as the TED City 2.0 Prize, among others.
Gemma Mortensen, New Constellations
Gemma is an award-winning social entrepreneur and thinker and practitioner in transformative, systemic change. She is founder and co-creator of New Constellations, which exists to help individuals and communities imagine and begin to create futures of human and planetary flourishing. She is a co-founder and vice-chair of More In Common, and sits on the advisory council of Yale University’s International Leadership Centre. She was previously Chief Global Officer at Change.org, the world’s largest platform for social change, CEO of Crisis Action – an organisation that won the MacArthur Award and Skoll Award for its innovative systems model.
Geraud de Ville de Goyet, Barking + Dagenham Giving
Dr Geraud de Ville de Goyet is Chief Executive of Barking and Dagenham Giving, a local funding platform that develops and promotes new opportunities for collaboration and participation in Barking and Dagenham. As part of this work, he has led the development of several new participatory funding initiatives including a £1+ million investment fund entirely designed by a group of local residents. Prior to this, he worked for 10 years in policy and advocacy, both at the international and local levels, focusing on issues such as conservation, climate change, social justice, and community development. He has a PhD from the Open University in international development and is a keen fiction author, having written and published several graphic novels in Europe.
Gilda Haas, L.A. Co-op Lab
Gilda Haas is an organizer, educator, and urban planner who has been helping grassroots organizations build economies from the ground up for the past forty years.
In 1996, Gilda became the founding director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy which was responsible for creating the nation's first welfare-to-work bank account; forming the coalition that negotiated the “Staples” community benefits agreement; and establishing the land trust now known as Trust South L.A.
She is also a co-founder of the Right to the City Alliance which advances a human rights frame to urban problems and is presently the home of the national Homes for All Campaign.
Gilda taught community economic development courses in UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning for 28 year and is a founder of their Community Scholars Program which has been replicated in various forms at other universities around the country. She also spent five years as full-time faculty in Antioch University’s Urban Sustainability program, where she created their Big Question Lab.
Gilda is a co-founder of the L.A. Co-op Lab which seeks to build L.A.’s capacity for creating and sustaining worker-owned cooperatives,, and currently devotes the bulk of her time towards that endeavor. The L.A. Co-op Lab is a founding member of the Seed Commons financial cooperative and peer network where Gilda also serves as a Board member and a member of their loan committee (Sustainability Committee).
Gilda lives in Los Angeles with her seven-year-old grandson, Silas, and her mystery writer husband, Gary Phillips.