Meet the New Transformational Governance Learning Cohort 23–24
We’re excited to officially announce the organisations that are part of the new Transformational Governance Learning Cohort 2023 and their current governance challenges.
As part of our Lankelly-Chase funded enquiry exploring how UK organisations and governing bodies can meaningfully and intentionally transition from traditional to liberatory and transformational governance, our intention has always been support a cohort of organisations to explore how these transitions can be supported in practice. The only question was, what is the most equitable and transformational way of holding that process?
As a Stewarding Group, we’ve worked together over the past 18 months to deepen our understandings of the barriers organisations face when introducing transformational governance practices while co-designing a prospective learning journey for other organisations to progress in their transitions. So we’re pleased to announce our first learning cohort made up of representatives from a diverse range of organisations and collectives who are exploring live governance challenges related to shifting or redistributing power in their given contexts.
Background: How We Got Here
In Autumn 2022, we invited expressions of interest from individuals, groups and organisations from across the UK, which informed a common theme for our first cohort to explore; transforming and shifting power. We have since selected 8 organisations with a decent geographical spread, of a range of different sizes, turn-overs and governance structures that we feel we’re able to resource to grapple with and unpick their challenge in a supported space. We’ve asked that 2 representatives from each organisation / group be part of this learning journey to ensure this work is held and that any learning gained can be embedded within their organisation.
🔥 Meet The 2023 Transformational Governance Learning Cohort Organisations:
1. University of Bath (Bath, South West)
University of Bath is one of two universities based in Bath, South West. University of Bath has an international reputation for teaching and research.
Live Governance Challenge: They will be exploring how to effectively establish organisational structures for involving people outside of academia in their research process.
Representatives:
Helen Featherstone, Head of Public Engagement at University of Bath
Helen Featherstone works across the university supporting public groups to be involved with research and creating the conditions for this type of work to flourish. The Public Engagement Unit’s work operates across four areas: Doing Public Engagement, Learning about Public Engagement, Celebrating Public Engagement and Leading on Public Engagement. Prior to this, Helen was doing similar work at the University of Exeter and has also been a post-doc researcher at UWE, Bristol looking at the publics’ roles in public engagement.
Dean Veall, Deputy Head of Public Engagement at the University of Bath
Dean Veall leads on a range of activities that aim to sustain a positive culture of high-quality public engagement with research across the uni. This work includes creating a range of opportunities for staff to develop and deliver impactful public engagement activities as well as develop their capacities and capabilities to effectively engage public groups with their research, with the aim of ensuring Bath remains at the forefront of the national and international public engagement agenda.
2. Landworkers’ Alliance
The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers. Our mission is to improve the livelihoods of our members and create a better food and land-use system for everyone.
Live Governance Challenge: To begin thinking about a wider organisational restructure that nurtures decentralised decision making, collaborative and liberatory ways of working among their 2000 national members.
Representatives:
Hannah Leigh Mackie, Operations Co-ordinator (HR & Governance)
Hannah Leigh Mackie is a food grower from London, and is one of the Operations Coordinators at the Landworkers Alliance, a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers who work to improve the livelihoods of our members and create a better food and land-use system for everyone. Been engaged in the joys and challenges of horizontal organising for a while now, likes learning about different models, ideas and practices of organising collectively.
Emmott Baddeley (they/them), Membership Events Co-ordinator
Emmott Baddeley (they/them) is an organiser and facilitator based in Sheffield. They work with the Landworkers’ Alliance as the membership events coordinator, organising large gatherings of LWA members such as the Organisers’ Assembly and the AGM, as well as supporting members to organise their own gatherings across Scotland, Cymru, England and the North of Ireland. They’re also involved in a new project aiming to bring together organisers working on different aspects of land justice in Sheffield, from food to housing to police resistance. In their spare time they will either be at the allotment or in the Peak District.
3. People’s Newsroom
The People’s Newsroom is an initiative to support the creation and sustainability of community projects that reimagine journalism
Live Governance Challenge: They will be exploring how to shift power in the media towards communities and citizens, shifting to more collective forms of governance.
Representatives:
Shirish Kulkarni, Co-Founder
Shirish Kulkarni is a journalist, researcher and community organiser and work across a range of innovation, inclusion and arts projects. Shirish’s focus is on new forms of storytelling and community engagement, all with the aim of shifting power to build more reflective and inclusive journalism (and societal) systems.
Megan Lucero, Co-Founder
Megan Lucero is a leader, facilitator and practitioner in the emergent change space. As an experienced investigative journalist, editor, director and fundraiser, she’s spent most of her career working to make positive change in the field of journalism. She launched and ran The Bureau Local and is now co-designing The People’s Newsroom, freelancing and contributing to work at the intersection of systems change, community power and journalism.
4. Maokwo (Coventry)
Maokwo is a migrant-led organisation using art as a form of activism to build bridges and bring about positive change. It advocates for better inclusion across the cultural sector, increasing visibility of migrant artists and using its platform to influence policy and generate opportunities for underrepresented creatives working in all art forms.
Governance Challenge: They will be exploring how to get more young people firmly embedded in their governance structures, with a view to build a pipeline of next generation arts-sector leaders from more diverse backgrounds.’
Representatives:
Laura Nyahuye, Artistic Director & CEO
Laura Nyahuye is a Zimbabwean born artist and Creative Director/CEO and Founder of MAOKWO. She is a mother, an artist, storyteller, a curator, producer, writer, performer, tutor, and community worker based in Coventry.
Chrissie Okorie, Creative Associate
Chrissie Okorie is a writer, performer and producer, who loves creating art and organising arts-focuswd events and talks. You’ll usually find Chrissie writing opinion pieces, first-person articles, poems, and theatre works. She is also a Creative Associate at Maokwo.
5. Greater Manchester Live Well Umbrella
Greater Manchester Live Well Umbrella is a group of people from Greater Manchester Integrated Care System, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, VCSE sector and Innovation Unit working together — under the umbrella mission ‘Live Well’ — to strengthen, sustain and increase access to community-led, and place based health and wellbeing activity across Greater Manchester.
Live Governance Challenge: Their challenge is to change governance in their local system, by understanding the extent to which it enables cooperation and to redesign it in order to release power.
Representatives:
Helen (‘Hels’) Chicot, Reform and Prevention Lead, Rochdale Borough Council
Helen Chicot has worked for Rochdale Borough Council for 30 years in a variety of helping, organising and leadership roles in services and communities. She now works in the Council’s Neighbourhoods Team as Reform and Prevention Lead. A proud winner of the Cooperative College Centenary Award for Community Education, Helen’s commitment to participatory and community approaches to learning and development has influenced much of her work.
Helen Walton, Policy Adviser, Rochdale Borough Council
Helen Walton has recently moved into policy work after 30 years working in local government as a Property Lawyer. Their role as a Policy Adviser for Rochdale Borough Council is informed by a wealth of experience gained from working in the public sector, their own experiences as a service user and parent of a profoundly disabled young man. Outside of their role at Rochdale Borough Council, they are a Director of Rochdale Parent Carers Voice CIC — a charity working with Rochdale Childrens’ Services, Adult Care, NHS professionals and parents of children and young people with disabilities in the borough, to improve service provision and equip and upskill parents.
6. Economy
Economy is a charitable incorporated organisation doing long-term work to build power with people experiencing economic injustice through collectively understanding, reimagining and changing the economy.
Live Governance Challenge: They will be exploring how they can transform their governance to shift power away from their trustees and staff towards the communities they work with, particularly in their organisation’s core governance, programme delivery and in their (soon to be launched) Economic Justice Alliance.
Representatives:
Jo Hiley, Head of Community
Jo Hiley is Head of Community at Economy, working on outreach, relationship building and communities of practice. Her background is in community organising, and she’s currently finishing an MA in Education and Social Justice.
Jonah (‘Joe’) Earle, Executive Director
Jonah Earle is Executive Director at Economy, where he recently led on designing a new strategy which focuses on building power among communities experiencing economic injustice. He is co-author of The Econocracy: on the perils of leaving economics to the experts and Reclaiming Economics. He is is Chair of Trustees for Young Identity, and founding co-chair of Trustees for Rethinking Economics.
7. Chisenhale Dance Space
Chisenhale Dance Space (Charity) is East London’s champion of experimentation in dance and performance. They’re an artist and member-led organisation, based in Bow for 40 years. They have a radical, experimental DIY ethos or making things happen in a dynamic and flexible way in response to the needs of their membership.
Live Governance Challenge: They will be exploring how they can shift the balance of power from their trustees back to their artists, back to their members-led roots.
Representatives:
Es Morgan, Artist, Facilitator & Producer
Es Morgan is an artist, facilitator and producer from East Yorkshire, now living in London. She works across multiple artist-led and institutional settings, developing action-research in collective decision making, anti-oppressive practices, and equitable resource sharing. Her performance and film works emerge from interests in poetry, improvised dancing, tarot and drag; funnelled through her shifting experiences of transness, intimacy, desire and longing.
Joseph (‘Jose’) Funnell, Interdisciplinary Artist & Performer
Joseph Funnell is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, performer and activist based in London, who works to support migrant rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, the movement for black lives and the anti-racist struggle. Their research based practice considers the pedagogical potential of embodiment and emancipatory potential of performing agency within contexts of historic negation. Often in collaboration with Carlos Maria Romero, they facilitate somatic workshops in order to empower queer people of colour.
8. Changing Lives (Midlands and North)
Changing Lives is a charity supporting individuals requiring support in relation to homelessness, recovery, contact with the criminal justice system and employability services.
Live Governance Challenge: They want to use their work in Newcastle Upon Tyne to test a route and method from risk-averse centralised structures that hold significant power, in particular in the HR and finance processes, to a position where power is distributed and shared across the charity.
Becky Elton, Leads on Operations and Development
Becky Elton leads Changing Lives operational and development work across our four themes: housing & homelessness; recovery from addiction; women and children; and employment; supporting our talented, multi-disciplinary teams to enable the people we work with to transform their own lives. A keen advocate of collaboration and continuous learning, Becky works within Changing Lives and with external partners to challenge and develop responses to and support for communities experiencing disadvantage. Becky has been with Changing Lives since July 2013, prior to taking up the Deputy CEO role in March 2020, she was Executive Director of Operations. Starting out as a rural community development worker, Becky has worked in the voluntary sector almost all of her working life. Before joining Changing Lives, she was Regional Manager for the North East and Cumbria for national sector representative body Homeless Link. There she helped local authorities and voluntary sector develop services, form partnerships and influence policy locally and nationally.Becky lives with her family in Northumberland, and in her spare time is chair of a Forest School Community Interest Company and is in the final stages of an Open University MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice.
Kelly Cunningham, Leads on Operations and Development (Housing and Homelessness)
Kelly Cunningham provides strategic and operational leadership across Changing Lives’ Housing and Homelessness pillar which delivers on various contracts around the country including design, implementation, delivery, and transformation. Kelly is an experienced leader within the charity homelessness sector and prior to this role Kelly was part of team with Lankelly Chase working on ‘place’ to support system change across the multiple disadvantage agenda in York. Kelly worked to challenge the status quo, celebrate innovation and bring in unheard voices from the margins whilst inspiring others to embrace complexity. Kelly is a School of System Change Alumni, with degrees in Criminology and management and when not striving for social justice finds her joy with her small children and lives in York.
🌱 Moving Forward, Our Hopes for this Cohort
We hope that together we can support this cohort to make meaningful progress on their live challenge and grown capacity, motivation and momentum within their team/s to continue their transitions. While we’re still co-creating this process alongside the cohort, we imagine that by the end of this journey they would have done at least one of the following:
- Developed a clear framework and/or next steps for how they’ll evolve their governance structure or approach
- Communicated and made the case for transforming governance within their organisational context
- Designed an experiment in distributing and shifting power in their governance context
- Expanded their knowledge, skills and confidence in transformational governance
- Exchanged or generated ideas for how to do things differently
We’re looking forward to working closely with this incredible learning cohort and nurturing our wider Transformational Governance Community on Slack. Our longer term ambition is a set of interconnected, resourced learning spaces that catalyse, deepen and sustain transformational governance practice. We aim for this growing network of transformational governance practitioners to make change at all layers of the ecosystem, building collective leverage to shift rules and norms from grassroots through to funding and regulatory bodies in the UK!
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