PEOPLE & PARTNERS
Emily Bolton - Founder
Emily is the founder of Our Future. She designed the Our Future model to provide citizens with the resources and networks they need to build a brighter future where we all benefit from the transition to a green economy.
Emily was part of the founding team and latterly executive board member at Social Finance. Her work has focused on creating impact at scale. She led the setup of the first Social Impact Bond in Peterborough Prison which led to a reduction in reoffending and global replication of the model. She has designed and implemented other initiatives which have delivered scale change in entrenched issues. She has a deep understanding of the strategic, financial and operational requirements of delivering change both on the ground and at scale. She developed and published Social Finance’s thinking on this topic.
Emily believes in the importance of joy to all of our lives. She is a board member of Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures – bringing joy, connection and wonder through dance. She has previously been a trustee of one of the UK’s largest foundations, Henry Smith Charity and Safe Lives, a national domestic abuse charity.
Jason Stockwood - Co-Founder
Jason is co-founder of Our Future, and the co-owner and Chair of Grimsby Town Football Club. He has been partnering with the community in his hometown Grimsby to build connections and inspire action. This has included buying the football club as a locus for the community activity, activating a network within and beyond Grimsby and partnering with Common Good Foundation to bring community organising to the town so that the community have power and agency in the future.
Jason is a serial tech entrepreneur having been in leadership roles at Simply Business, Match.com, Skyscanner and lastminute.com. He is currently an investor in over 30 early-stage tech businesses through his vehicle 53 Degrees Capital. In 2021 he was a Leadership Fellow at The Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, on the UK board of B Corp; Chairman of the mental health and wellbeing start-up Sanctus.
Trupti Patel - Investment Partnership Lead
Trupti is the Investment Partnership Lead. Trupti has worked in the social investment space for the past decade. As part of the founding team at Social Finance, she worked on the development of the first Social Impact Bond in Peterborough prison with a particular focus on the financial model, legal structure and investor relations. More recently, she was head of social investment at the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, managing a diverse £45m portfolio of ~80 social investments spanning five sectors from the arts to environment. Trupti brings with her insights from the Foundation which aimed to use all the tools in its toolbox (including grantmaking, social investment and convening) to effect change. Trupti started her career as an investment banker after studying economics.
Killian Troy-O’Donovan - Project Manager
Killian is the Project Manager at Our Future. Before joining the project Killian worked for five years at Social Finance UK after studying economics and philosophy. His recent work has focused on bringing citizen-led organisations together with government, foundations, charities, and investors for projects rooted in local areas around the UK. Previously Killian worked in Digital Labs running data analysis to support government decision-making in health and for a year on an education partnership in Liberia. Killian is also a Director of a youth club in Lewisham which he launched with three other volunteers in 2021, where 260 children access a programme of arts, sports, music, and play. Alongside his current work he supports a coral conservation charity where he worked for three months.
killian@our-future.io
Veronica Oakeshott - Strategic Communications Lead
Veronica is a professional campaigner who has fought for - and won - change on environmental protection, domestic abuse and access to medicines. She is passionate about democratic participation. Her career spans roles in UK government (Foreign Office), Parliaments (Westminster, Holyrood, Kenya) and the charity sector (Save the Children, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, SafeLives, Malaria no More) in the UK and Africa. She now leads the campaign to protect climate-critical forests at the charity Global Witness, exposing the companies and financiers responsible for rainforest destruction and pressing for legal changes to save what is left. She has been an elected Councillor in the London Borough of Newham. Educated at Newcastle and then City University, she won prizes at both for her theses. She is trustee of international education charity, Cecilys Fund, and has two young children.
Barbara Wheatley - Virtual Assistant
Barbara originally trained as a theatre designer, then got into teaching. She started her virtual assistant business sixteen years ago after many years as a special needs teacher.
Barbara is married with five gorgeous grandchildren and loves spending time with them, going to the theatre, cooking and anything to do with motor bikes!
Derrick Anderson
Derrick has more than twenty-five years’ senior management experience in local government and more than thirty years in the public sector. He was on the organising committee board of the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth games. He also holds non-executive directorships of UK Municipal Bond Agency Plc, Social Finance Ltd and Social Value Portal Ltd and is a trustee of the Wave Trust charity. He was previously Chief Executive of City of Wolverhampton Council and Lambeth Council and was voted Public Leader of the Year in the Guardian Public Services Awards 2012. Derrick was awarded a CBE for services to local government in January 2003.
Paul Collier
Sir Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and a Director of the International Growth Centre, and the ESRC research network, Social Macroeconomics. His research covers the transformation from poverty to prosperity; state fragility; the implications of group psychology for development; migration and refugees; urbanization in poor countries and the crisis in modern capitalism, which is the subject of his book, The Future of Capitalism. Paul’s most recent book, Greed is Dead with John Kay was published in July 2020. Sir Paul received a knighthood in 2014 for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa and has been listed as one of the hundred most influential public thinkers.
Debbie Cook
Debbie is the CEO of Grimsby Town Football Club, where she is committed to building on the power of the football club to facilitate great work in the local community. She is a trustee of the Grimsby Town Football Club Sports and Education Trust, (the charitable organisation for the football club) and the On Side Youth Zone Grimsby Board. Debbie was formerly Chief Executive of YMCA Humber, securing and helping deliver the new £8.3m aspirational building at Freeman Street, Grimsby, providing inspiring homes and facilities for young and vulnerable people in the area. Debbie formerly spent 22 years working in local government where she also spent time in youth and community services. She was also CEO of a national arthritis charity for over 6 years.
Maurice Glasman
Maurice Glasman is a political theorist, academic, social commentator and peer in the House of Lords. He is director of the Common Good Foundation. Maurice previously worked for ten years for London Citizens on their Living Wage campaign, and was a senior lecturer in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University and Director of its Faith and Citizenship Programme. He is widely known for establishing “Blue Labour” which encourages a return to community values based on trade unions, the Church and voluntary groups. He is the author of Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia, which argues that the commodification of human beings and nature is a nightmare.
Josie Moon
Josie is a writer, educator and arts practitioner based in North East Lincolnshire. Over the past ten years, Josie has produced original work across arts disciplines including a number of music, story-telling, creative writing and theatre projects in partnership with the NEL Music Hub, Grimsby Jazz projects, Lincs Inspire, New Perspectives Theatre Company, and others. In addition, Josie mentors and supports young artists in the area, helping them shape and develop their work. Josie also works with East Marsh United developing and delivering innovative grassroots community arts projects with and for the East Marsh community. In 2017 Josie established La Luna Publishing which has produced a range of publications for adults and children and collections of writing by young writers in North East Lincolnshire.
Majdi Osman
Majdi is a doctor and scientist at the University of Cambridge and proudly raised in Grimsby. He trained in medicine at University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine before working at the World Health Organization on ways to improve health for young people around the world. He was a Frank Knox fellow at Harvard University and continued his clinical and academic work in Boston, USA. He co-founded YLabs, a non-profit based in San Francisco and Rwanda combining design with public health to develop youth-friendly health care and OpenBiome, a biotech spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT developing medicines using gut bacteria. Majdi sits on the board of the Horizon Youth Zone.
David Robinson
David Robinson founded and currently co-leads the Relationships Project. He is a community development worker and has worked on social innovation for almost fifty years, co-founding and leading several organisations including Shift which uses behavioural insight and award winning design to tackle social problems, the Children’s Discovery Centre which works on literacy and language, and the Community Links. David led Community Links from a one person start up to becoming the National Community Enterprise of the Year in 1994. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Open University and was the first Practitioner in Residence at the LSE's Marshall Institute. David has advised governments for more than 20 years and chaired the Prime Minister's Council on Social Action.
