Believing in the power of communities and system change to help communities be healthy - and thrive - by tackling inequalities in and through physical activity. Committed to collaboration for social change.As an Exec. Director at Sport England, I led a new team with a radically different approach to place based collaboration with the Local Delivery Pilots. The pilots tested the idea that investment locally that builds on assets like its people and their skills is essential, but it's not enough. We need the social and physical environment we live in, the organisations that serve us and local and national policies to join up more if we're to help communities to be active and to thrive. Place based system change.Together we explored and learnt why place based system change is needed, what it is and how to do it.Together we have seen the impact and the value and the change it has created - and the value of what hasn't always worked. Real, long lasting change for people's lives and their communities.The most positive and disruptive few years of my working life in realising that 'being the change' is both the fundamental and the hardest change to make. That leading such change means - creating the environment for lived experience to be heard, the conditions for brilliant people to collaborate - and holding some of the inherent tensions.That leading such change can mean sometimes admitting your own vulnerabilities and that change really does happen through shared purpose, genuine relationships and trust."No lesson has been learned more, than how we need to work in collaboration with each community and place"