Advisory Panel for Creative, Confident Communities

We are delighted to be able to call on the support of a brilliant panel of experts to help us deliver our strategy for Creative, Confident Communities.

We have drawn together a group which truly understands what it takes to make a practical, long-term difference in strengthening the bonds in communities across the UK. The panel won't make funding decisions, but will play a vital role in:

Raising awareness of our strategy and our impact goals and supporting our ambition to collaborate.
Identifying new opportunities and giving access to knowledge and expertise from their networks.
Giving high-level, expert, strategic advice to our staff and Trustees.
Reflecting on our progress towards our impact goals.

Who is in our Advisory Panel?

Matt Baker, CEO, The Stove Network
Professor Donna Hall CBE, Non-Executive Director, Mutual Ventures and Chair, PossAbilities
Andy Jackson, CEO, Heely Development Trust
Lela Kogbara, Co-Director, Place Matters
Jennifer van de Merwe, Director, Kindred
Dr Shamim Miah, Senior Lecturer, University of Huddersfield
Thalia Papanicolaou, Involving Young People Collective Alumni  
Betty Pearl, Involving Young People Collective Alumni  
Sam Plum, CEO, Westmoreland and Furness Council
Tracey Sage, Cultural Strategist & Creative Producer, SageCulture
Sara Wajid MBE, Co-CEO, Birmingham Museum’s Trust

Meet our Advisory Members

Matt Baker

Matt Baker is one of the founders and CEO of The Stove – an arts organisation working across SW Scotland to connect communities with creative people and projects - developing wider partnerships for action for places and the people that live in them.

Matt has over 30 years experience as a socially-engaged public artist, predominantly in the regeneration field working with communities experiencing deprivation; leading the arts programme for the rebuilding of the Gorbals 1999-2005 and the re-imagining of Inverness city centre 2006-2011. Matt and The Stove have helped pioneer the contemporary practice of Creative Placemaking in Scotland and he served as co-chair of the National Partnership for Culture 2020-23 supporting the implementation of the national culture strategy.

Lela Kogbara

Lela Kogbara is currently a co-director of Place Matters, which seeks to enable communities to take action within a place, inform a collaborative movement of place-based change, and influence the wider system through evidence, insight and learning.

Lela has spent most of her life trying to shift the needle on inequality and injustice. She was previously a senior leader in local government, advisor to Department of Education and NHS England and co-founder and director of Black Thrive Global. She is currently on the board of Social Finance, a trustee of DFN Project Search and on the advisory board of the British American Project.

Lela’s confidence in people-powered change was built by being an activist in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and on its Executive until apartheid was brought to an end in 1994. 30 years on, with communities across the globe and in the UK facing unprecedented challenges, she is now a trustee of The Liliesleaf Trust UK, which is creating in the London borough of Islington the first public heritage site in Europe to use learning from the anti-apartheid legacy to inspire change for a better world.