The Lankelly Chase Foundation has appointed five new Trustees to its Board of Directors. ‘Each brings an incredible track record of integrating and activating their learned, lived, and practice experience to tackle systems of injustice and oppression’, said the Foundation in a statement.

The new Trustees include:

• Asif Afridi, Deputy CEO at brap (Birmingham Race Action Partnership), a Trustee and former Chair of Equally Ours and a panel member of the Independent Inquiry into the future of Civil Society where he led its report Let’s Talk about Race;
• Amanda Hailles, part of a group of 12 women who came together to form the collective An Untold Story – Voices, to change attitudes to people involved in street sex work in Hull, and a peer-researcher for Ava and Agenda;
• James Keenan, a Mutual Aid Support Worker at Transforming Choice, and a graduate of Transforming Choice’s residential detox and rehabilitation service;
• Marai Larasi, an advocate, community organiser and consultant whose social justice work has centred Black/Global Majority women and girls, as well as Executive Director of Imkaan, and Co-Chair of the End Violence Against Women Coalition;
• and Baljeet Sandhu MBE, a human rights lawyer, educator and pioneer of the global ‘knowledge equity’ movement, and the founding director of the Migrant & Refugee Children’s Legal Unit (MiCLU) and co-founder of the LEx Movement.

The appointment of these new board members marks an important transition for Lankelly Chase, wrote CEO Julian Corner in a blog: ‘Two years ago we acknowledged publicly that we didn’t know what effective governance at Lankelly Chase should look like. In particular, we were struggling to give our Board a clear enough picture of our relationship with – and effect on – complex interconnected systems. This mattered to us because we think the change we seek comes from the behaviour of those systems, not just from individual actions. The result was that our Board didn’t know how to assure itself we were doing a good job.’

He continued to say: ‘Today is a milestone in that process as we announce the appointment of five new Trustees. These appointments, it is important to state, are not simply about diversifying our Board. Each brings an incredible track record of integrating and activating their learned, lived and practice experience to tackle systems of injustice and oppression. This is much more about building a team that can start to put our current wealth, privilege and status at the service of fundamental change.’

The new Trustees join Hil Berg, Morag Burnett, Darren Murinas, Myron Rogers (Chair), Simon Tucker and Robin Tuddenham.