This is a website that if you have the time to explore, will take you on some different paths….If you don’t have much time then I suggest you go straight to the menu on the right and hopefully you’ll find what you are looking for! The areas I particularly specialise in are here.

January 2012

I am a co-founder and collaborator at The Point People. This is a network of people committed to and active in building, connecting and catalysing the social and cultural innovation system. Do click through to the website to read more about who we are and what we each do.

What I do is constantly emerging and shifting (as it is for many I think!) and I hold a portfolio of social innovation projects. Most recent projects (and my role) can be categorised under the following:

Strategic Design – the analysis, support, scaling and sustaining of  innovation networks for SIX Social Innovation Exchange, The Stone Club, Somerset House

Learning Partner on innovation projects focussed on measuring impact, collaborations and the ” diffusion trail ” of innovation for NESTA, Internews Centre for Innovation & Learning, Social Innovation Camp and The Cultural Leadership Programme

Social Design – designing practical, personalised  tools, content and support for innovation programmes, practitioners and social innovators themselves (LivingWell, Mission Models Money and Participle’s LIFE programme).

Two roles that are ongoing in 2011 and 2012 and that draw on all of the above are: Social Innovator in Residence for the amazing new civic innovation platform at Hub Westmisnter and being on the supporting team of Merism. Merism is a new three year seed fund focused on making equity investments between £50,000 and £200,000 in social businesses that will generate profit and measurable social impact. Merism is now in a partnership with Hub Westminster and together they are delivering a range of investment programmes and accelerators through Hub Venture Labs.

The other main project for me in 2011/2012 is Our Intimate Lives which you can read more about by clicking through to the website. I’m lucky enough to be working with an amazing team and our aim is to facilitate a more sophisticated, honest, healthy and meaningful debate about intimacy. We are currently producing a book, there are 12 authors and the book will be published in March 2012. The book moves through 4 stages: personal intimacy, the intimacy deficit, intimacy beyond us, and scaling up intimacy.

I am an associate at the leading social design agency thinkpublic , at FutureGov, a social innovation incubator and a recent associate of Social Innovation Camp and Somerset House. I’m on the Board of Snook and a Director of Spots of Time. I’m also the UK Ambassador for the Social Innovation Exchange.

In addition to this I am a sessional teacher at Ravensbourne, teaching Innovation & Entrepreneurship across their design disciplines and a guest lecturer at the University of East London on the MAPP course, teaching about the relationship between Social Innovation and Positive Psychology. In 2010 I had chapters published in two books: Hand Made talking about the social potential of people to collaborate for community-lead change and in The World Book of Happiness about the tapestry of sexuality and its connection to eudaimonic well-being.

In the last decade, before I started on the social innovation trail, I was selected and awarded as a NESTA Creative Pioneer, was the Director of a fashion company, worked at Marie Claire magazine in New York, trained as a co-active coach with the CTI and ran voluntary groups for young women developing knowledge of their sexual selves.

I never tire of meeting new people so – my email.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”

Rilke