Announcing the Community Tech Fellows in Greater Manchester
Cassie Robinson is one of the people running the Community Tech Fellowship programme, which is supported by the Co-op Foundation through funding from Luminate, part of the Omidyar Group. She introduces us here to the people who are taking part.
We are delighted to announce the first cohort of Community Tech Fellows: nine community leaders from across Greater Manchester, each of them in different ways building stronger and more powerful communities across the region. Thank you to everyone who applied; it was an incredibly strong field.
The programme starts next Thursday, September 24th, and we will be sharing recordings and materials from all the sessions as we go.
Reina Yaidoo
Reina is founder and director at Bassajamba, a social enterprise specialising in inclusion of underserved communities into the knowledge industry. Bassajamba leverages a diverse knowledge base of community, business and research intelligence to develop superior solutions to intractable social and economic challenges eg Covid and chronic illnesses, inclusive digital economies. This work is constantly developed via Sanguine, a bi-monthly radio program intersecting science, tech and community-based opportunities.
The regular investigative series and features examine community links with the knowledge sector through in-depth interviews, discussion and debates with community and industry leaders as well as interactive coverage of games, festivals and literature. Sanguine functions as a consultative arm and collaborative network to Bassajamba’s work. It provides both an accessible avenue to listen to the needs of the community and a platform for responses to occur. Their work with underserved BAME, LGBT, female and disabled people led community organisations has initiated Bassajamba’s work around dentistry and domestic abuse, smart cities and social prescription via radio and apprenticeships for refugee engineers.
Reina’s goal and Bassajamba’s mission is to make inclusion an actionable strategy that any organisation can use to generate business and community value. Reina is currently designing a knowledge-based system for inclusion management. She is school governor at her local primary school, enjoys writing short stories and misses her Afro-Cuban percussion classes.
Jackie McNeish
Jackie works with young care leavers, recruiting and training people to become mentors to young people as they embark on becoming independent. This includes young people with complex needs and asylum seekers.
She is also the CEO of a constituted community group called Women of Worth. This group works with African Caribbean women (not exclusively) who have been through domestic abuse and trauma. Whilst they address and acknowledge what has happened that is not their focus — instead they focus on empowering women, building confidence, self-esteem and encouraging women to utilise the skills they have to create businesses and become independent. In the long term they want to set up a service that offers short stay emergency respite for women fleeing domestic abuse, set up and run by African Caribbean Women.
Jackie is also the chair of The Beacon Centre Community Group in Firswood. Her role there is to connect with the local community in Firswood and surrounding areas and to develop projects that serve and benefit local people such as a soup kitchen, summer clubs, and keep fit groups.
Paul Fairweather
Paul has lived in Manchester since 1978 and been involved in a wide range of community organisations and campaigns. In the 1980s he worked at the Manchester Lesbian and Gay Centre and then as an equal opportunities officer (gay men) for Manchester City Council. In the 1990s he worked on wider equality issues for Rochdale Council and then Liverpool City Council. More recently he has worked for Citizens Advice at a regional level and on an LGBT history project in Burnley.
He has been a volunteer and a management committee member on a range of community groups in the city for over four decades and has a good knowledge of the voluntary sector in the city. He currently manages the Positive Speakers project at the George House Trust which is the main HIV charity in Greater Manchester. He is also a member of the Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus and of a clarinet choir, and for the last ten years has been dancing the Argentinian tango.
Lisa Lingard
Lisa has over 20 years’ experience of managing and delivering climate change and environmental sustainability projects in Manchester. This includes project managing climate change adaptation and mitigation action plans with
business and other organisations. She is a qualified Project Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the environmental and climate change industry across local government and NGO’s.
She is now working closely with a number of Manchester’s diverse communities to understand how civil society can build a movement that will shape how we address the city’s response to the climate emergency, now and in the future. She is excited to be part of the UK’s first Community Tech Fellowship and is particularly interested in how we can accelerate the levels of climate action needed through our use of technology.
Debby Bolding
Debby is a development officer working with the 10 public library services in Greater Manchester, supporting partnership working, obtaining funding and coordinating library projects to support communities across the city region.
As a Mancunian, she is proud of the diversity of the city and is currently working on 2 projects celebrating this: Greater Manchester Libraries of Sanctuary, welcoming refugees and asylum seekers to their local community and; Language in the City, partnering with the University of Manchester’s Multilingual Manchester unit, celebrating language diversity with residents contributing to research and sharing their experience of multilingualism.
Vimla Appadoo
Vimla is the co-founder and director of culture design at Honey Badger, alongside head of experience at Culture-Shift. Over and above everything, Vimla is passionate about embedding fearless change across organisations, to design safe workplaces where everyone can thrive. Vimla is a design thinker, international speaker and advocate for changing the way businesses think: using technology, design and culture to align profit and purpose.
Vimla works across large scale organisations, small businesses and scaling startups, bridging the gap between the public and private sector. She founded Experience Matters, a design-thinking consultancy with clients including the NHS and SheSaysMCR.
Terry Manyeh
Terry is the community development coordinator for Manchester Active. He leads delivery for a new Sport England Pilot at Macc which aims to increase sport and physical activity. Terry’s focus is to increase community engagement in the Manchester Local Pilot of the GM Moving programme but is also very much taking an initial step towards building wider and longer-term collaboration between the voluntary sector and local government.
He has previous experience in the sector having worked at RECLAIM and the Tree of Life Centre as employability and skills manager. He also founded the social enterprise Educating All.
Tom Togher
Tom is the chief executive of Salford Citizens Advice, and has been in post for over twenty years, he is also the chair of Salford Food Share, and a recently retired trustee of Salford’s Credit Union. He is keen to explore how digital approaches can both aid access to advice services, and how the data generated from advice giving can assist in campaigning for change.
Alice Toomer — McAlpine
Alice is a community worker and journalist from Manchester who works across a range of roles including journalism, youth work, community organising and creative documentation of non-profit projects.
Alice is interested in how the stories we create and share shape the world we live in, and how communities can take ownership of their stories and build trust with local independent media to build collective power.
