Facilitators are listed in alphabetic order.
Ambassadors / Richard Adlem / Catherine Ambrose / Carly Attridge / Phoebe Barber Rowell / Lynette Barlow / Jane Barratt / Dr Claire Bates / Wendy Byron / Vicki Caddy / John Clarke / Ian Coleman / Steve Collis / Caroline Cooke / Kate Cooper / Tim Crahart / Stephanie Cryer / Emily Cutter / Rebecca Day / Jo Dewsnip / Ben Dunne / Lydia Ferguson / Debs Fox / Mark Gallagher / Nick Gordon / Ben Hall / Helen Handley / Sophie Hargreaves / Kayleigh Harris / Lynne Harrison / Homeshare UK Team / Craig Hosking / Christine Howard / Jess Jackson / Richard Jones / Michael Kazich / Bernie Kelly / Ewan King / Pat Lewis / Megan Lewis / Cathy McSweeney / Ali Miller / Kathryn Morgan / Helen Piscioneri / Sean Reck / Sarah Roberts / Heather Thomson / Eilidh Turnbull / Becky Viney-Wood / John Wilberforce / Becky Wilson / Jayne Wilson / Maria Yousif
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Profile coming soon
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Carly Attridge is a social entrepreneur who brings a wealth of expertise in designing and developing community-led innovation programmes across the UK.
With a creative flair across her work, she excels at growing robust partnerships, facilitating spaces for connection, and bringing together networks at strategic and operational level. She led an award-winning End of Life and social isolation programme in the hospice sector, scaling a project born in East London with 11 other hospices.
Carly is a consultant, currently working with Shared Lives Plus on its Family by Family project, as well as being founder of The Loss Project, which supports communities to acknowledge, process and explore grief and loss.
She completed an MA in Social Entrepreneurship with distinction at Goldsmiths college London in 2020 and was recently celebrated in the Social Entrepreneur Index 2022.
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Phoebe has been at Shared Lives Plus since 2017 and has 14 years’ experience in stakeholder engagement, media relations, change and crisis communications.
She started her working life as VP of the student union, representing members on education and health issues, then moving into working in PR and media for both local and national housing associations, progressing to a social marketing PR agency for Department of Health, and delivering charity and public sector social change campaigns, where she also became CIPR qualified.
In London, she delivered change management and stakeholder engagement for Scope, the national disability charity organisation, working on communications to promote independent living for the controversial closure of very traditional care homes.
Phoebe brings her strategic thinking, creativity and tenacity to strengthening our relationship with members and raising awareness of Shared Lives, Homeshare and Family by Family, so more people can enjoy them.
Lynette is a qualified CIMA accountant working in the third sector for almost 30 years, specialising in charities for the last 20. She has worked for a wide range of charities, but her heart lies with those offering opportunities and choices to young people and vulnerable adults.
Lynette’s role in Shared Lives Plus is to manage the £2.5m budget and all of the finance and back-office functions, like IT, HR, GDPR and Health & Safety. Lynette also enjoys being an active member of the senior team driving change in social care and embedding Shared Lives and Homeshare across the UK. Lynette loves the outdoors and nature and enjoys walking and photography.
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Dr Claire Bates is the founder and leader of the National Supported Loving Network (www.supportedloving.org.uk) which highlights the importance of good support around relationships for people with learning disabilities at Choice Support, a support provider organisation she joined in 2002. Claire has worked closely with the Care Quality Commission on their guidance Relationships and Sexuality in Adult Social Care https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/20190221-Relationships-and-sexuality-in-social-care-PUBLICATION.pdf and their report on Promoting Sexual Safety Through Empowerment https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/major-report/promoting-sexual-safety-through-empowerment. Supported Loving also produced Skills for Care’s guidance on Supporting Personal Relationships https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Learning-development/ongoing-learning-and-development/self-care/Supporting-personal-relationships.aspx.
Claire is an active researcher at the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent, her research focuses on sexuality and intimate relationships. Her most recent research was part of the Tizard Centre’s Love Project which explored the experiences and social care needs of adults with learning disabilities in relation to finding partners, forming and maintaining long term relationships https://research.kent.ac.uk/tizard/the-love-project/.
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Wendy started her career in special education, moving on to child care specialist, social care parenting assessment practitioner and finally to family support, first as a worker, then a senior and then to manager. Over the years she has been part of many child protection and child in need plans but in her heart firmly believes that early intervention and prevention is far more effective. Family By Family ticks all the boxes and Wendy is loving every minute of her role at Shared Lives Plus. Wendy says, “I am so looking forward to seeing families thriving and not just surviving”.
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Vicki Caddy is Head of Communications at Age NI, the regional partner delivering Shared Lives for older people in Northern Ireland. She joined Age NI in 2021 with over 25 years’ communications agency experience, having worked with global brands including Marks & Spencer, Barclays Bank, Tesco and McDonald’s Restaurants.
She is one of a small number of Chartered PR practitioners in the UK, she holds a CIM Diploma in Digital Marketing and a CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications and is a member of the CIPR and PRCA. She has worked with a broad range of government departments, delivering award-winning public information campaigns across health, community, the arts and environment.
Vicki’s passion has always been in healthcare; she managed the press office for one of Northern Ireland’s largest health trusts for seven years and worked with a local nursing home group during 2020 and the COVID pandemic. She has devised and delivered campaigns with a wide range of voluntary organisations, including the NI Children’s Hospice and Leukaemia & Lymphoma NI and she is currently a Board Trustee of Brain Injury Matters.
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John is an AAT qualified accountant with almost 25 years’ experience, mainly in the charity sector, but he has also worked in the retail and not-for-profit sectors. His main passion is working in the charity sector, knowing that his job makes a small contribution to the greater needs of the public, whatever charity he has worked at.
John’s role at Shared Lives Plus includes producing month-end, year-end, and management reports, processing day-to-day information and providing IT cover amongst other tasks. John has also undertaken annual statutory reporting, cost reporting activities and dealing with VAT and Income Tax in his previous roles.
Ian read Economics at university and is an Accountant by profession. He was Finance Director of one of the largest metropolitan councils for 15 years and now has his own business advising on financial management and pension fund management. He consults on projects across the public, private and charity sectors. Ian holds a season ticket at Manchester United, (one of the rare breed who actually hails from Manchester…!) and enjoys being a member of the National Trust. He has supported Shared Lives Plus for over 10 years.
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Steve has been a Shared Lives carer champion since February 2019. Without question, caring is in Steve’s blood and over the last 27 years he has worked in formal nursing and care environments.
Steve has a passion for the caring profession and wants to inspire others to be better, he says that “Being part of a shared lives community is very satisfying and so rewarding, especially when you know you can make a difference. I love nothing more than knowing that I have helped carers in their daily job role and inspire them to be the best they can be, and I hope I always inject a bit of humour in what can be a very difficult vocation.”
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Caroline is the Founding Director of Share and Care Homeshare. Share and Care is a Community Interest Company (CIC) which has been matching and supporting live-in Homeshare arrangements in London and across the UK since 2006. As well as 70% of Share and Care’s Householders living with various forms and levels of dementia, Caroline also has personal experience as her father had Vascular Dementia. This led Caroline to train as a Dementia Friends Champion.
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After initially working in adult care in various hospital wards and theatres and then residential care with adults with Learning Disabilities, Kate moved into social care. She was a foster carer for 15 years and most enjoyed caring for teenagers. During this time Kate completed a degree in social work. Kate has carried out varied roles including supervising social worker, supporting foster carers in caring for foster children, training and development, and direct work with children and young people. Kate is a beekeeper with a couple of hives in her garden and is currently converting a big white van into a campervan which takes up a lot of her weekends.
Kate joined Shared Lives Plus in March 2021 and couldn’t be happier, Kate says “The whole team is so supportive. Being part of a new model of family support at Family by Family is great, developing and delivering a new project is really exciting, and the role of Family Coach is so varied. I’m loving connecting with the families and also networking with other organisations. I’m looking forward to seeing the achievements of the families involved with the project, and to see it role out in other areas”.
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Tim has worked in the third sector since 1996 and has a background in supported housing having worked within housing associations for eighteen years before working for several smaller third sector organizations. During his time in housing support Tim managed services for families, care experienced young people, people with experience of the criminal justice system and those with substance misuse issues.
He has also delivered training on support planning, working with young people, equality & diversity and safeguarding children. In recent years he has focused on development work and his current role involves bringing the Homeshare programme into Wales via launching three pilots throughout the country.
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Stephanie Joined Shared Lives Plus in November 2021, she is the Human Resources lead and supports the whole team at Shared Lives Plus. Steph has over 20 years’ experience in human resources and has worked for a variety of organisations and sectors, overseeing Human Resources, supporting organisations to understand HR, whilst focusing on supporting and developing people and best practice HR strategies. She has a genuine interest and passion for all aspects of well-being and loves promoting the importance of taking care of ourselves and each other and in 2020 qualified as a Yoga Teacher and regularly teaches hatha based yoga classes.
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Jo joined Shared Lives Plus in September 2021 having previously worked for The Prince’s Trust with a background in Operations Delivery, Partnerships and Fundraising management.
Jo leads on the roll out and further development of our Recruitment and Assessment Website alongside developing out suite of carer training modules. Jo says ‘having seen first hand how the right support transforms the lives of vulnerable young people, I am excited to be working in an organisation that supports access to transformational living opportunities for those that need it most’.
Ben Joined Shared Lives Plus in May 2020 and is part of the Homeshare UK team. He is responsible for helping to build the profile of Homeshare, supporting the UK network of Homeshare providers, removing the barriers preventing people from taking part and developing resources to support the network to deliver Homeshare services. Ben is also responsible for growing the Homeshare sector in the East of England, so that anyone wanting to benefit from Homeshare can participate. Before joining Shared Lives Plus, Ben worked in the public and voluntary sectors with a focus on stakeholder engagement, public consultation and developing volunteering schemes.
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Mark has worked for Shared Lives Plus since 2014 and is currently responsible for the management and delivery of our strategic advice. Before his current role, he was responsible for membership support, advice and guidance to Shared Lives schemes across the UK and was the national lead for Shared Lives with stakeholders including CQC and the Department for Health. He brings a wealth of expertise in Shared Lives, supporting and empowering disabled people, service improvement and development.
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Nick has 20 years’ experience in marketing and communications. He has worked for a variety of organisations and sectors, including health, transport and leisure, overseeing marketing and PR campaigns on regional and national level. Nick’s role started as the communications lead for Shared Lives in health, as part of a four-year programme in partnership with NHS England, to demonstrate how Shared Lives can support people with intermediate or long-term health needs. Nick now leads on marketing and business development activity for Shared Lives Plus strategic support services across the UK, as well as delivering communications consultancy projects to expand Shared Lives schemes. He also oversees ambassador activity across the organisation.
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Ben lives in Scotland with his wife Pamela, and son Wilf. He is a Development Manager for Shared Lives Plus, leading on activity which includes Shared Lives and a new Homeshare development project.
Ben has worked in the social care, and education sectors in Scotland since 1993, including work with young homeless people, people living with mental ill-health, and families living in poverty.
Ben says “I love Shared Lives, I love the humanity of it, the kindness, and the compassion that it brings to people’s lives”
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Helen joined Shared Lives Plus as the Corporate Services Officer in 2020. Helen is responsible for supporting SMT, HR and the externally facing strategic support and communications work. Helen is also the lead for health and safety within Shared Lives Plus. Before joining Shared Lives Plus, Helen spent an impressive 22 years in the Armed Forces (Army) as a Logistics Movements Controller and HR specialist and also has worked with several veteran charities.
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Sophie works as the Project Support Officer within the Strategic Advice team at Shared Lives Plus, collecting and analysing all qualitative and quantitative data, and liaising with clients throughout.
She has more than six years’ experience of working with and for third-sector clients and charities, both paid and volunteering. This has included operational support, fundraising, account managing and project managing.
Alongside working at Shared Lives Plus, Sophie is currently studying for an MA in Sustainable Design, specialising in Service Design. She also project manages a third-party hate crime reporting centre at an LGBTQ+ charity in Brighton.
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Kayleigh joined Shared Lives Plus as a Homeshare Development and Delivery Officer in November 2021. Working in partnership with Clarion Housing Group she is currently working on a pilot Homeshare programme amongst Clarion residents to examine how the Homeshare model can be adapted to meet the needs of those in social housing across the UK.
With a background in third sector membership support Kayleigh is passionate about facilitating co-production to champion the voices of older people. Solutions focused, Kayleigh has delivered a number of change projects within the Charity sector with particular focus on inclusivity in policy delivery.
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Lynne has been at Shared Lives Plus since 2014 and was appointed to Head of Membership in July 2020, she formerly held the post of Operations Manager. As Head of Membership, she has responsibility for overseeing the support, information and guidance provided to Shared Lives Schemes and Shared Lives carers. Lynne is also responsible for looking at how Shared Lives Plus can develop, maintain and share good practice to raise the quality of Shared Lives across the UK and to ensure that Shared Lives members’ voices feed into and influence everything we do.
Lynne’s background is varied, and she has worked in private and public sector. At Liverpool City Council she had responsibility for implementing cultural and change management programmes; including the refocusing of some customer facing services. Lynne has always been passionate about working directly with people to deliver services to improve and enrich their lives.
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The Homeshare UK team is: Debs Fox, Ben Dunne, Kayleigh Harris, Jess Jackson, John Wilberforce, Catherine Ambrose, Tim Crahart and Emily Cutter.
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Jess joined Shared Lives Plus in January 2022 and is part of the Communications team, working specifically to support Homeshare UK. She is responsible for providing marketing and communications guidance/support for our various new projects, such as our franchise model, delivering Homeshare services in the North East and North West of England, and the Clarion social housing pilot – which all aim to make Homeshare more accessible for everyone across the UK.
Jess also provides marketing support for our Homeshare UK network members and is helping Homeshare UK to raise its profile.
Prior to joining Shared Lives Plus, Jess has six years’ experience within marketing and communications, in a range of roles, including for a retail franchise, a mental health charity and more recently working with a social mobility charity to raise their digital presence.
Richard trained as a social worker and worked for many years in local government. He was Director of Social Services in St Helens and Executive Director of Adult and Community Services in Lancashire. He has also worked for the Department of Health and was responsible for the inspection of social care services.
Richard has worked in the NHS and in his last role he was an Area Director for NHS England in Lancashire. In 2010/11 Richard was President of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. He now works part time as a consultant with care providers and public sector organisations. Richard is a Trustee at Look Ahead Care and Support and he also chairs a group of social Enterprises in the North West working in the areas of domestic abuse, drug and alcohol dependency and homelessness. Richard lives in Cumbria and enjoys spending time walking and seeing his grown up family.
Richard will be speaking during the Conference Keynote session and AGM.
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A social worker by profession, Bernie joined Shared Lives Plus in 2021 after over 30 years’ experience working in Health and Social Care services including Family and Child Care, Mental Health and Physical and Sensory Disability. She also had responsibility for responding to major incidents and helped to establish a trauma centre in Belfast.
Bernie was Service Manager for Physical and Sensory Disability services in Belfast Health & Social Care Trust from 2007 until 2021. She is currently a Board Trustee of Relate NI.
Meg is a prolific speaker and campaigner for mental health and passionate about making the health and social care system more personal, from the inside. She works with Shared Lives Plus as an Ambassador and in 2019, she won the Shared Lives Plus award for human rights. Her nomination describes her as “devastatingly authentic… she inspired us to respond not as a service to a user, but as humans to a human.”
After four years in a hospital environment, Meg now lives independently with Flower, her dog, and continues to receive some day support via Shared Lives.
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Pat Lewis has been a qualified accountant for over 4 decades and for more than 10 years she has been at the helm of Intellect Business Services. Pat and her team are specialists in foster carers’ tax, benefits, and National Insurance matters and with over ten years of experience in dealing with thousands of carers of all kinds, there is rarely a question that cannot be answered, or a problem that cannot be solved.
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Cathy has worked in a variety of social care and educational settings, with people with a range of disabilities, over the last 25 years. Before Shared Lives Plus, she was part of the set up and running of an independent Shared Lives Scheme in Suffolk and Norfolk for 8 years.
Cathy now works as part of the membership team in providing support, information and guidance to Shared Lives Schemes across the country. This includes monitoring the Scheme Google Group forum, supporting regional and national meetings and supporting Shared Lives schemes to access and use the My Shared Life outcome tool.
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Ali’s background is primarily in managing services and projects for disabled and socially excluded children and young people. Ali joined Shared Lives Plus in 2017 to develop Shared Lives for Young People in Transition. She has since developed the model for survivors of domestic abuse, and modern slavery and is currently developing Shared Lives for parents and their children in Scotland.
Ali takes a trauma-informed, intersectional approach to her development work and is committed to centering the voices of survivors and people with lived experience in the design and implementation of projects and services.
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Kathryn has a background in banking and fundraising, she previously worked for Macmillan Cancer Support, developing volunteer and donor networks across Wales. Kathryn joined Shared Lives Plus in January 2018, her current role as Development Manager for Shared Lives and Homeshare involves supporting both individual members and schemes. With funding secured from Welsh Government, Kathryn is looking forward to setting up a new Homeshare Project as well as growing Shared Lives to be a flexible service available for everyone who needs it.
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Helen has been a shared lives carer for Greenwich Shared Lives for 30 years, caring for 3 gentlemen in her home for 27 of those years. Helen has worked tirelessly to make the gentlemen a part of her family which she says has, at times has been challenging but has given her more joy than she could have ever imagined. Helen joined Shared Lives Plus in February 2019 as a Shared Lives Plus carer champion. Helen has supported many Shared Lives carers from across the UK and says “my time with Shared Lives Plus has been and continues to be a great experience knowing that having a simple “chat” or taking “that call” can help make a true difference to these wonderful people. Long may it continue, and I hope that my 30 years of experience will help and inspire future carers”.
I stay with my Shared Lives family in Kilmarnock with Andrea, who is my carer, Kirsty, Layla, Spencer, Mitchel and Maddie who are all part of the family.
They are a loving and caring family and there is never a dull moment in the house. Living with my family has changed my life in so many ways for the better. I wouldn’t change it for the world – we have been on holidays together, fulfilling my dream of going to Disney World in Florida.
I have been a Shared Lives ambassador for the past 18 months and I also work at the New Beginnings café. Shared Lives is very important because they match you with a family that care, trust and give you support, but also allow you to follow your dreams no matter how big or small. Shared Lives changes lives for the better.
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Eilidh joined BIHR in March 2019 after six months as a project assistant in European Council on Refugees and Exiles. Prior to this she completed legal research internships at the Council of Europe and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. Eilidh also has a background in asylum support casework. She holds a LLB, a LLM in Human Rights and Migration Law and a Diploma in Professional Legal Practice.
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Becky joined Shared Lives Plus in November 2019 as the organisations’ first Policy Officer. She was promoted to Support and Engagement Manager in January 2022.
Prior to working for Shared Lives Plus, Becky accrued experience across the third sector, regulation, and academia. This includes working as a human rights observer in the Middle East and completing a PhD in refugee history at the University of Manchester. As Support and Engagement Manager, Becky is passionate about listening to members, as well as providing support, information, advice, and strategies to help Shared Lives members to thrive.
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John Wilberforce has 27 years of experience in Social Care and Franchising, and has had senior management positions in two of the largest providers in the UK. He joined Homeshare UK / SLP in December 2021. John is heading up the Social Franchise offering and is keen to maximise the impact that Homeshare can deliver for those that use the service, as well as those who have a wider interest in Social Care for the long term.
In his spare time, John is a Board Member of his local football club and co-produced a film in 2018 about his favourite band.
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Jayne started her career as a community development worker in Knowsley, which included supporting the local community to run a regeneration partnership. She then moved to the third sector where she has worked for the past twenty years. Jayne’s roles have principally been leading operational youth work teams and forming partnerships to secure the outcomes needed for young people to reach their potential, as well as fundraising to support the work.
In her last role Jayne was CEO of a charity which supported young people with learning disabilities where she realised the difference a Shared Lives home could make to people.
Jayne joined Shared Lives Plus in 2020 co-ordinating the expansion project, and is now director of development, leading the organisation to diversify and increase income, as well as supporting the membership, communication, strategic advice, Homeshare and Family by Family teams.
