Leading on support to organisations led by disabled people in London.

Time to Change (2007 to 2021) was voted one of the top 20 public health achievements of the last 20 years by the Royal Society for Public Health. It achieved a 12.7% improvement in public attitudes regarding the stigma and discrimination that people with mental health problems face, which causes major avoidable damage to society by making it harder to seek help. Time to Talk Day 2020 alone generated 2.2m conversations about mental health. Funded by the Lottery, Comic Relief and the Department of Health & Social Care, TTC was Comic Relief’s longest ever funded project. TTC worked with 1556 employers to improve mental health for 10% of all employees in England. TTC Young Champions led campaigns in 3000 schools, and TTC Global ran locally-led campaigns in several developing countries.Place-based partnership: I led 16 mostly regional staff to find and support 7229 Champions with Lived Experience of mental health problems to campaign locally, and recruit and support 50 place-based ‘Hub’ partnerships of Champions, public bodies and voluntary and private sector organisations – three times as many as were promised to funders. 33% of England’s population lived in a Hub area and Hubs made hundreds of grants to Champions for creative activities. Several Hubs outlasted TTC.Finance: I managed a budget of £1m each year, 25% of the TTC budget.Planning & evaluation: I led planning for my team and worked with evaluators who tracked TTC.Governance, reporting and communications: TTC was a joint campaign of Mind and Rethink. I supplied three Boards and management with tailored written and verbal quantitative and qualitative reports.Innovation: In the first Covid lockdown I led my team to rapidly adapt our face-to-face ‘Social Contact’ model to ‘social distancing’, taking five major regular trainings, most local Hub delivery and an annual Hub conference onto Zoom. My team met outputs for the last five years of TTC a year early, giving major added value for no cost.

Advising on the largest (£5m), longest (7 year) 'funder-plus' capacity-building support and investment programme in the UK for a particularly large local voluntary sector. Also developing Camden Giving from idea to fruition with public, private and voluntary sector partners and encouraging voluntary-sector-friendly commissioning. All in a fast, very political environment.http://bit.ly/1KyQhHW

• NCVO Associate Consultant. Coaching and facilitating charity staff and trustees on strategy, impact, governance and funding, and facilitating NCVO conferences.• Writing NCVO Quick Guides to Funding, Collaboration, Campaigning, Governance, Developing People and Equality.• Evaluating NCVO/DEFRA work with 100+ charities whose clients are most at risk from climate change due to poverty, ill health, etc.• Assessing Theories of Change in £0.5m bids for a household name grant maker.• I am also a trustee of the Young Lewisham Project. http://ow.ly/mm2sf

• Co-managing a team using £1.2m of government funding to help time-poor civil society leaders spot and respond to make-or-break political, economic, social and technological threats and opportunities. Participative training all over the UK, guides, national seminars, conferences and social media including 2,500 personal Twitter followers and the popular website www.3s4.org.uk. ‘100% felt they were taking away new ideas about options for strategic action’ (independent evaluator)• Senior fee-earning charity consultant coaching and facilitating charity staff and trustees to build robust strategy.• Coaching youth, sport, hospice, mental health, elderly, student, disability and BME charities to spot their threats and opportunities. Designing and running national workshops to test these, plus a major national training programme on how climate change will impact civil society. ‘Improved our skills, confidence and knowledge a lot’ (Director, Disability Lib)• Facilitating the tense meeting between central government and 100 national community groups after the 2011 riots.• Managing the influential quarterly survey of leaders, Charity Forecast.

• Chosen by Terry Waite for the 2008 award of strategy, policy and media training to recognise my work to date and for transforming this small campaign’s strategy. Awarded by the Prime Minister at Downing St. http://bit.ly/1rulLtO

• Ground-breaking pilot building on my 5 years of activist mediation in London’s East End. Training and running a diverse team of mediators and managing challenging relationships with government and community. Published my learning in journals and the book Forty Cases in Restorative Justice http://ow.ly/eBco9.• My own clients said: ‘Helped me get back on track with my life’ (offender) ‘Meant I didn’t lose hope’ (victim) ‘Efficient, supportive and clear. Warm and respectful. Open and human. Emotionally present. Went that extra mile’ (victim’s father)

• A book about the wartime Pakrac Project (see 93/94) to inspire policy makers, funders and activists. Convincing state and trust funders, tracing hundreds of documents and interviewing fighters, activists and scared locals. ‘Nick has a personally engaged compassion which wins local people's trust, plus a serious capacity for descriptive analysis’ (funder)• Article: http://ow.ly/ezXbV. Chapters: http://ow.ly/ezWWo. Book: http://ow.ly/lH2ap

• Designing and running multi-day simulations for human rights monitors in wartime Kosovo. Training monitors for Gaza after two were killed. ‘Your part most mentioned as most useful’• Creating and running live-in conflict and personal development training in neutral Hungary for young leaders from all sides of ex-Yugoslavia.• Seven years teaching participative training to ex-prisoners, sex workers, drug users and professionals for drugs charity Mainliners. ‘Best training I’ve had’, ‘First class’, ‘Obviously knows his stuff’, ‘Very articulate’, ‘Confident and experienced with a sense of fun’, ‘Hugely enjoyable and informative’, ‘Honest and open’, ‘Excellent’• Auditing Price Waterhouse Coopers for conflict and diversity. Evaluating corporate lawyer mediators for the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution.• Researching rights and citizenship training for the Prince’s Trust.• Speaking on activism and social change. ‘So much positive feedback’ (Head of an international school where I took assembly the day after 9/11)

• Raising £100K in the UK and US, and in Serbo-Croatian co-creating, running and evaluating training and support for ex-Yugoslav peacebuilders which runs to this day. ‘Powerful and original’ (Founding Professor, Bradford University Peace Studies) http://www.cms.hr/• Co-activists won the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for our work (see 93/94) http://ow.ly/eTc34. ‘As a trainer, writer and thinker Nick is clearly impressive’ (Dr Paul Stubbs, Senior Research fellow, Zagreb Institute of Economics)

• Training and leading activists in unique community development and peacebuilding across the tense temporary ceasefire line dividing the ruined and heavily mined town where the post-Yugoslav wars began. ‘Nick is an imaginative, creative, human-touch leader who knows how to inspire colleagues’ (Goran Bozicevic, project co-founder)• Using fledgling web to jump the front lines and inspire $3m of global support for work with fighters, youth, women and the old. I was one of the first into the town and helped end the project 4 years later. ‘A landmark in reconciliation with universal application’ (founding Professor, Bradford University Peace Studies)

• Teaching activists in 28 countries to promote rights through participative training. ‘Nick is a natural born trainer’ (Amnesty Head of Training)• Writing the manual First Steps in Human Rights Education, now in 30 languages http://ow.ly/ezPeo. The Open University made the Radio 4 documentary 'A Better World' about my work in Former Yugoslavia. ‘Excellent manual. Full of good ideas’ (Amnesty Secretary–General)

‘Nick has strong values and a great sense of humour’ (Director)