15th December 2020
It’s our absolute pleasure to welcome five new Trustees to our Board this month. The new appointments double the size of our Board, bringing greater diversity in terms of skills, background and life experience.
The new appointments support a refresh of the Trust’s strategy, which brings a sharper focus on demonstrating the potential for social transformation to drive tech; increasing access to the flexible and inclusive funding that ventures need to grow; and increasing collaboration between social and tech focused organisations to deliver impact at scale.
Each new Trustee brings an impressive track record in the areas of investment, tech and entrepreneurship – all expertise which will help drive our strategy forward and provide vital guidance and support as we continue to find and back people-led solutions to social challenges.
Our new Trustees will be in great company, alongside our continuing Board – Bill Liao, Hannah Keartland, Sebastien Lahtinen, Beth Murray and Nick Temple.
Joining us in December 2020 are:
Anisah Osman Britton
Anisah is the founder of 23 Code Street, a coding school for women in the UK that uses part of its profits to provide digital skills training to women in the slums of Mumbai.
She is also the CTO of Vinokilo- a fashion company making second hand as desirable and as accessible as first-hand fashion.
She has previously held the role of Director at Backstage Capital, an investment fund for underrepresented founders and Operations Director at The Bakery, a corporate innovation house.
Russell Johnstone
Russell leads the legal team for BT’s three Consumer brands (BT, EE and Plusnet) supporting their voice, broadband, mobile, TV and sport businesses.
He started his career at a leading London law firm advising clients across the media, communications and technology sectors in the UK and internationally, and has held various in-house legal roles within TV and broadcasting.
Russell is also a trustee of the Social Mobility Business Partnership, an organisation dedicated to improving social mobility in the legal and finance professions.
Sunil Suri
Sunil is Head of Ventures and Innovation at Catch22, a national charity building resilience and aspiration in communities across the UK. Sunil brings a strong understanding of the early-stage social venture landscape in the UK – since 2018, he has led Catch22’s work with social ventures, supporting entrepreneurs to develop solutions that have the potential to transform the delivery of public services.
Sunil previously set up his own social enterprise focused on supporting frontline workers in the homelessness sector after completing a Social Innovation Fellowship at Year Here. He has also worked for digital bank, Monzo.
Rob Tashima
Rob is Chief Growth Officer at Village Capital, an early-stage impact investor and accelerator. Rob leads initiatives across Village Capital’s innovations and partnerships teams, experimenting with new ways of supporting entrepreneurs and investors.
Previously, he spent a decade at an emerging markets consultancy, where he led field studies on investment issues across Africa. Rob also lived in the Middle East, analysing investment competitiveness across regional markets, and worked on business and regulatory policy for the State of California and at a think tank in San Francisco.
Rob serves on the board of directors of US non-profit, Capitol Area Asset Builders; is an advisor to IssueVoter, a civic engagement venture; and Asoko Insight, an Africa-based corporate data venture.
Nick Wise
Nick is founder and CEO of OceanMind, a non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting the world’s fisheries. Using satellites and artificial intelligence, OceanMind empowers effective fisheries enforcement and enables more responsible seafood sourcing, increasing compliance and sustainability.
Nick has been designing large scale, highly secure software solutions for over 20 years, using innovative techniques focused on market needs. Before joining the ranks of social entrepreneurship, Nick’s journey saw him starting an Internet security business, as CTO of a mature SME, and managing product development in a billion-dollar multinational.
Nick now empowers people to solve global issues with technology.
On behalf of our new Trustees, Sunil Suri said “We need greater collaboration if we are to tackle some of the urgent social challenges of our time. That’s why I’m excited to join the board of Social Tech Trust, which has from its earliest days played a starring role in building the UK’s world-leading social tech ecosystem.”
Bill Liao, Chair of Trustees at Social Tech Trust said, “It is a delightful honour to welcome Anisah, Russell, Sunil, Rob and Nick to our Board. We believe that organisations, driven by a deep understanding of social challenges, that also have deep technical expertise can deliver solutions that make the biggest positive differences to people’s lives.
With the extraordinary talent and experience each of our new trustees bring, we are supercharging our entire team to inspire more organisations to transform lives with tech and we can further tackle some of unintended negative consequences that ill-considered tech has demonstrated.”
END