New Advisory Council members appointed

Dr Carlene Firmin is a Churchill Fellow and a Professor of Social Work at Durham University. In 2016 she published the Contextual Safeguarding framework, a term coined by Carlene in 2014. This framework has been used to advance policy and research concerned with safeguarding adolescents in the UK and internationally, and has led to changes in social care responses to extra-familial abuse. In 2011 Carlene became the youngest Black woman to receive an MBE, for her seminal work on gang-affected young women in the UK.

Steve Tyler is Director of Assistive Technology and Transformation at the charity Leonard Cheshire. He has a history of developing sustainable and life-changing products around accessibility for disabled people, including leading the team that developed synthetic speech, which led to the voice of Amazon’s Alexa. Steve now collaborates with key players in the technology market as part of the Google Accessibility Strategy Board, the Microsoft accessibility steering group and as a programme lead for the annual M-Enabling Summit held in Washington, DC.

Claire Dove is the Crown Representative for the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise Sector. She is a passionate champion of the social enterprise movement and has served two terms as chair of Social Enterprise UK. Claire previously led the Blackburne House Group in Liverpool, a training centre renowned for its offering of educational and training opportunities for women, which she grew into an award-winning social business. Claire has received many awards for her role within the enterprise sector, including an MBE, OBE, CBE and the Queen’s Lifetime Achievement Award for enterprise promotion.

Lucy Parker, Chair of the Advisory Council says, “I am delighted to welcome Carlene, Steve and Claire to our Advisory Council. Their experience and expertise will contribute greatly to the Churchill Fellowship and to Fellows’ work across the UK, and we are all very much looking forward to working with them.”