Simon Kitchen Email & Phone Number

Hexham, England, United Kingdom

I am currently leading the only national charity in the UK dedicated to empowering people affected by bipolar to live well and achieve their potential. Key achievements in the role include:• Service delivery: pioneering, delivering and evaluating new peer support services across face to face, telephone and online mediums. Our evaluation indicated that they are currently empowering over 10,000 people with bipolar to stay well ever month.• Digital technology: working with Comic Relief and an Artificial Intelligence provider to develop the first Chat Bot developed by and for people with a serious mental illness in the UK. It is currently giving advice to over 80 people a day.• Fundraising: raising over £2.5million in under three years through Trust grants, online donations, events and contracts. • Effective financial management: taking the charity from a £100,000 deficit to an almost £100,000 surplus in one year through reducing costs and identifying new sources of income. Increasing cash reserves from 3 months expenditure to over 9 months expenditure.• Conference Management: running a Bipolar Conference with over 300 delegates and speakers covering the latest techniques and approaches to effective self-management.• Driving forward research: working with leading research institutes to recruit 1,000s of participants for critical studies into the impact of Covid-19, the genetic causes of bipolar and treatments to help people manage symptoms.• Governance: fulfilling all the legal and governance duties expected of a charity CEO including overseeing annual audit of accounts, completing returns to the charity regulator, ensuring compliance with data protection and human resources legislation and following the latest best practice in safeguarding.• Management: managing a diverse team of 13 FTE staff and over 200 volunteers with lived experience of bipolar.

London

I am currently leading a change programme within the UK’s largest voluntary sector social care provider. The aim is to give the disabled people we support more choice and control over their lives and a greater say in how the organisation is run. This has so far involved:1) Developing a model of co-production to ensure the views of everyone that uses LCD residential services are identified2) Developing and delivering training in person-centred practices3) Offering advice, guidance, coaching and mentoring support to service managers where barriers to implementation of co-production are identified4) Programme management and coordination across 98 sites, with 150 people trained and over 500 front line staff and disabled people participating5) Personally working with disabled people and front line care staff to identity what’s working, not working and important for the future in their lives, within the organisation and across society as a whole6) Working with senior leadership to implement asks developed by customers7) Ensuring that findings from the programme are incorporated into key policies and or/guidance8) Managing a research contract to evaluate the impact on the programme on the lives of disabled people and the wider organisational development

London

The Dementia Action Alliance brought together private, public and charity sector organisations to take action on dementia. Members ranged from major charities such as the Alzheimer’s Society and Age UK, to Royal Colleges, research institutes, care providers, Department of Health and pharmaceutical companies. It used a peer to peer leadership model to launch calls to action into hospital care, carer rights and the use of language to describe dementia.Achievement as Executive Lead include:1. Facilitated the sign up of 2,500 organisations who collectively committed to 10,000 actions to improve the lives of people living with dementia2. Established the long term strategic direction of the DAA through creating the DAA Board and developing and delivering a three year strategy2. Promoted the DAA externally through: speaking extensively at national and local events; speaking on radio; engaging with print media; growing our social media presence (achieving 3,900 twitter followers)3. Fundraising and budgeting. Raised over £1.2 million for action on dementia from grant funding, sponsorship and member contribution.4. Created a Local Dementia Action Alliance model which facilitated the creation of 170 local DAAs and resulted in the sign up over 2,300 local members.5. Commissioned external research into the benefit of a timely diagnosis and the evaluation of the Local Dementia Action Alliance Programme. Conducted research internally into access to drug treatments and the impact of the National Dementia Strategy for the Department of Health6. Organised events forup to 400 delegates. Speakers included carers, people living with dementia, Secretary of State for Health and CEO of Bupa.7. Oversaw the day to day running of the DAA including managing a staff team of three and half full-time equivalent posts.8. Published four Annual Report.

The SDC was central government’s independent advisor on sustainable development, giving guidance on how to balance different ethnical concerns around the environment, society and economy, through developing integrated policy solutions.• Advocacy lead, supporting Chair and CEO of the SDC in meeting senior political figures.• Policy analysis / research.• Managing the 600+ UK Sustainable Development Panel, maintaining interest and membership through involving them in research and informing them of SDC activities.• Responsibility for ensuring effective engagement techniques were embedded in all SDC research projects.

Regeneration consultant specialising in economic development and neighbourhood renewal

Supporting Housing Market Renewal community consultation in four of the nine Pathfinder areas including Burnley, Hull and Gateshead:• Consulting with stakeholders, community groups, faith groups and residents using a variety of techniques including face to face and telephone interviewing, walkabouts and consultation events;• Working with planning consultants, architects and urban designers to organise events including booking venues, printing display boards and producing and distributing publicity;• Managing stakeholder and community expectations during controversial and often unpopular large scale capital projects; and• Using feedback from consultations to draw up community priorities that fed into the Masterplanning process.

2:1, History

Education record

GCSE and A-Levels