Speaker biographies

Jenny Jones, Green Party

Jenny Jones is the Green Party’s Mayoral candidate and has been a London Assembly Member since its start in 2000. Jenny has played an active role in pushing social and environmental issues into politics including her work to promote cycling and walking in London. She grew up in Brighton, East Sussex, and has lived in Herefordshire, Lesotho in southern Africa, and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, before moving to Camberwell, South London, in 1991.

Jones has been named among London’s 1,000 Most Influential Londoners every year since the award’s inception. She has said that she fell in love with the capital during a visit to London Zoo at the age of five and has described London as the ‘best city in the world’.

Professor Sally Inman, London South Bank Uni

Sally is Head of the Centre for Educational research and Director of CCCI within London South Bank University. Sally has been director of the UK ITE Network for Education for Sustainable Development/Global Citizenship since its launch in 2007and chairs the UK steering group. Sally’s curriculum work and research has focused predominately on educational policy and practice in relation to the broader personal and social development of young people in formal and non formal settings. This has included citizenship education, PSHEE, student voice and sustainable development/ global citizenship education.

Dr Tom Crompton, WWF

Tom is WWF-UK’s Change Strategist. For five years he headed WWF-International's Trade and Investment Programme (working on World Trade Organization issues, for example) where he became increasingly frustrated by the glacial pace of change on this agenda. This led Tom to ask how we might begin to work to help create the political space for more ambitious change.

What leads to more vocal expressions of public concern about sustainability issues? What motivates people to bring more pressure to bear on their elected leaders? These questions, in turn, led to work with social psychologists and political scientists, and the publication of a series of reports: "Weathercocks and Signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads" (2008); "Simple and Painless? The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning" (with John Thogersen, 2008), and "Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity" (with Tim Kasser, 2009). These pieces of work culminated naturally in our last report, "Common Cause" that has inspired many organisations to recognise the importance of values and frames in their work.

Ray Georgeson, Resource Association

Ray’s involvement in the environment sector, especially with waste and resources goes back thirty years as a volunteer, campaigner, educator, policymaker and researcher. In 1996 Ray became Chief Executive of Waste Watch, where he enabled the charity to expand its research, advocacy and educational work in the period when the Government was first developing new strategies for waste management.

In January 2001 Ray joined the new Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) as its Director of Policy, and helped to create and expand the organisation as it began the task of helping the UK accelerate its recycling performance by developing new markets for materials.

Over the past three years Ray has been working independently alongside a portfolio of activities and interests in the resources and environment field. This includes being on the board of REalliance, a independent organisation working to build the capacity of the third sector to reduce waste, reuse whilst demonstrating the social benefits of sustainable resource use.

Recently Ray has stepped into heading up the recently formed Resource Association, a trade association designed to ‘give a voice’ to the reprocessing and recycling sector and promote the environmental and social benefits of managing waste better.

Iona Collins, the Otesha Project

Iona is a Change Projects Director at The Otesha Project UK. Otesha is a youth-led charity that helps young people to become agents of change.  The Change Projects programme works with young people helping them lead their own projects to create positive environmental and social behaviour change in their communities.  Both through Otesha and other organisations, Iona has worked with children and young people in schools, youth clubs, and colleges across the UK and in Peru; using performance, hands-on workshops and music. Her interest in environmental education stems from her own experiences in education since primary school.

Kelvin Cheung, FoodCycle

Kelvin is the CEO of FoodCycle, an award winning charity that builds communities by combining surplus food, volunteers and a spare kitchen space to create nutritious meals for people at risk from food poverty.  Kelvin was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Canada, and his passions lie in community empowerment, food, and cycling in all its manifestations - hence FoodCycle.  Before FoodCycle, Kelvin worked at MyBnk, a social enterprise dedicated to improving the financial literacy of young people.  Kelvin currently is on the advisory board of the London Food Board and is one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Shapers in London.  In his spare time, Kelvin enjoys whiskey, bicycles and Xbox 360.

Juliet Michaelson, New Economics Foundation

Juliet is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Well-being, nef (the new economics foundation). nef is an independent think-and-do tank which aims to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economics, environmental and social issues to put people and the planet first.

Juliet manages a number of research projects which explore the measurement of well-being and its implications for policy, including work on National Accounts of Well-being and the Happy Planet Index. She is an author of nef ’s recent contribution to the UK national debate on well-being: Measuring our progress: The power of well-being. She is a member of the Technical Advisory Group working with the UK Office for National Statistics on Measuring National Well-being and is also involved in nef’s work as secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics, established in 2009.

Morgan Phillips, Waste Watch

Dr Morgan Phillips works for Waste Watch where he leads the Our Common Place Programme – a new approach to building community identity and common purpose to help solve local and global environmental and social challenges.

Morgan is still active academically and is involved in several research projects. He contributed a chapter to the 2010 'Handbook of Sustainability Literacy' and continues to hold strong links with the University's of Bath and Gloucestershire where he completed his postgraduate studies.

Morgan is also a trustee of the Friends of Nowder charity, which works on community capacity building in Bangladesh.

Ian Williams, University of Southampton

Professor Ian Williams obtained his first degree in Chemistry from the University of Surrey in 1988 and a PhD in Public Attitudes to Air Pollution from Road Traffic from Middlesex University in 1995. He has been a lecturer at Middlesex University, the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) and the University of Southampton (2005-present). He was the founder and Head of the Centre for Waste Management at the UCLan and is now Professor of Applied Environmental Science at the School of Civil Engineering and the Environment at the UoS.
 
Professor Williams has a strong track record in the field of waste management and environmental pollution and extensive experience of managing Research Council and Landfill Tax projects, as well as research and commercial projects.

Ian is currently participating on the ZeroWIN-project which will examine and develop new and innovative approaches and effective strategies for the prevention of waste in industry. Zero-WIN enables the regional collaboration of companies from traditionally separated sectors which exchange by-products, energy, water and materials in such way, that the waste from one industry becomes raw material for another.

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