About us

Alex Evans is founder of the Collective Psychology Project, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. He was part of Ethiopia’s delegation to the Paris climate summit and has consulted for Oxfam, WWF UK, the UK Cabinet Office and US State Department. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.

David Steven is a senior fellow at New York University, where he founded the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver the SDG targets for preventing all forms of violence, strengthening governance, and promoting justice and inclusion. He was lead author for the ministerial Task Force on Justice for All and senior external adviser for the UN-World Bank flagship study on prevention, Pathways for Peace. He is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). In 2001, he helped develop and launch the UK’s network of climate diplomats. David lives in and works from Pisa, Italy.

Click here to email Alex and David. For more information, visit davidsteven.com.

Rahul Chandran is a Managing Director at CARE. Before this, he was the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation, and has previously worked at the intersection of peacekeeping, humanitarian, and development efforts across the globe as well as systems reform and strategic planning efforts at the United Nations.

Prior to this, he was the Deputy Director of the Center on International Cooperation, the Director of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Programme, and an advisor to the United Nations Foundation, the OECD, the Clinton Global Initiative, and numerous other institutions. He has previously worked in civil rights, in documentary film, and on a number of start-ups.

Victoria Collis specialises in working with governments to help them strengthen delivery of public services, particularly education, in fragile and conflict affected states. She has acted as an adviser to senior officials and politicians in a range of countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria and Lebanon.

Victoria is Managing Director of River Path Associates, and collaborates regularly with other consulting firms. She is also a Director of the Acasus Foundation. Since 2015 she has served on the board of the Eden Academy Trust, a multi-academy trust of schools for children with complex educational and health needs in London and the North East of England.

George Graham is Director of Conflict and Humanitarian Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns at Save the Children UK. In this role, he manages a highly influential and award-winning department of policy specialists, advocates and campaigners in London and leads the work of over 100 colleagues worldwide to influence policies and practice with respect to violations of children’s rights in conflict and other humanitarian situations. ??He is also a trustee of Conciliation Resources, a lifelong environmentalist and a dad. He tweets about conflict and social change at @georgewgraham.

Emma Hannay is a public health doctor with a focus on global health strategy and delivery. She works at a global level on organizational strategy across a range of disciplines in global health, and at a country level in implementing health systems reforms in complex operating environments. In her previous role as Head of Health at Acasus, she was part of the team leading the Pakistan Health Reforms Roadmaps, which improved primary care for more than 150 million people, and the DRC’s Mashako Plan to increase immunization coverage for children.

Rachel Locke joined the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice as Director of Impact:Peace in July 2019. Rachel has extensive experience delivering evidence-based violence prevention solutions to some of the most difficult international contexts while simultaneously advancing policy for peace.

Prior to joining IPJ, Rachel was Head of Research for violence prevention with the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. In this capacity, Rachel led coalition building and evidence curation with the UN, bilateral governments, the African Union, civil society and others to explore the challenge of delivering the 2030 Agenda targets for peaceful societies (SDG 16.1).

Kirsty McNeill is Save the Children’s Executive Director of Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns. She leads teams to galvanise the public and influence policymakers on humanitarian action, global development, and help for children here in the UK.

Previously, she founded a consultancy advising some of the world’s leading charities and spent three years as a Special Adviser in Number 10. She came to Downing Street having led the policy and influencing work of DATA, Bono and Bob Geldof’s advocacy organisation, in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and the EU institutions.

Before joining DATA she was on the board of Make Poverty History and managed the Stop AIDS Campaign, successfully negotiating a commitment to universal access to AIDS treatment from the 2005 G8. Today she is on the boards of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Coalition for Global Prosperity and is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Ben Phillips is Campaigns and Policy Director of ActionAid. Previously, he worked for Oxfam in the UK. He has lived and worked in four continents and 10 cities including New Delhi and Washington DC, as well as with children in poverty in East London. He began his development work at the grassroots, as a teacher and ANC activist living in Mamelodi township, South Africa, in 1994, just after the end of apartheid.

Jonathan Tanner is a consultant working with organisations to navigate digital society. His podcast Government Vs The Robots explores how politics will affect technology in the future. His clients have included global think tank the Overseas Development Institute, online ad transparency campaigners Who Targets Me, cross-party political movement More United, creative communicators Unfold Stories, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Before all that, he was Communications Director at Crown Agents. 

Mark Weston is a writer, researcher and consultant working on public health, justice, youth employability and other global issues. He lived for two years in an informal settlement on Ukerewe Island in Tanzania and lived in revolutionary Sudan until being evacuated because of coronavirus. He is the author of two books on Africa – The Ringtone and the Drum and African Beauty.