Career Connect – Case Study

Career Connect is a charity committed to supporting young people and adults to realise their potential. They deliver their mission through high quality and professional career management, employment and training services delivered in schools, in the community and in prisons.

Career Connect is passionate about social mobility and helping the most disadvantaged to create a better future. Their vision is for a society where every individual realises their full potential.

Having developed a new Vision, Mission and long-term strategy, including expanding their work in criminal justice and developing a thriving research and evaluation function, Career Connect were seeking to further strengthen the board by bringing in two individuals operating at a strategic leadership level with experience in Research and Impact and Criminal Justice. As part of Career Connect’s commitment to ensuring that young people are at the heart of what they do, they were also seeking to appoint two young Trustees.

“Prospectus did an excellent job in our recent Trustee recruitment process. We had provided a very detailed brief to ensure we recruited the right skills and experience we wanted to join the Board. They carefully listened and understood the context of our charity and what we were precisely looking for, and produced both a longlist and shortlist of very high calibre candidates. Due to the strength of the field we brought on board more Trustees than we had originally envisaged. We are delighted with the appointments we have made and know that they will bring new thinking and fresh perspectives to support the delivery of our mission.” Chair | Lorraine Dodd

Career Connect appointed six new Trustees:

Nina Ma

Nina Ma is a Solutions Architect at Microsoft, a young trustee at Power2 and Leap Confronting Conflicts and is a Young Trustee Movement Champion. She is Head of Grants of GirlDreamer – a non-Governmental organisation supporting the personal and professional development of millennial and Gen Z women of colour – where she also co-chaired the GirlDreamer Advisory Board. Nina was a winner of a WeAreTheCity ‘TechWomen100 Award’ in 2019 and was the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards ‘Digital Hero of the Year’ in 2020.

Eloise Boye

Eloise Boye is a business consultant in the private sector with three and a half years’ experience working for a youth charity. She recently completed both her undergraduate Degree in Social Psychology and her Master’s Degree in Organisational Psychology.

Eloise has a strong passion for improving people’s experiences within their workplace and creating fair selection and assessment processes.

Katie Pettifer

Katie Pettifer is a senior civil servant. She has worked on criminal justice and social policy in a range of different roles over the past decade, most recently as Director for Offender Policy and Youth Justice in the Ministry of Justice. She recently spent three years at Ofcom, the UK’s independent communications regulator, and she is currently the Strategy Director at the Food Standards Agency.

Lennina Ofori

Lennina Ofori is a consultant, educator and storyteller dedicated to widening access and participation, diversity and inclusion, and equality for marginalised youth and adults. An alumna of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and currently undertaking a PhD in Children and Young People Services: Storytelling for Change, she has an MA in Theatre and the Criminal Justice System, Lennina utilises storytelling, the arts and mentoring to raise awareness on societal injustices including racial inequality, and in order to engage and empower clients, audiences, and students.

Her debut novel ‘A Word From The Margins: The intersections of Race, Gender, Class and Ambition’ is published under Hatchettes’ Dialogue Books due for release in 2022. Lennina has dedicated her career to ensuring that marginalised youth and young adults are provided with equal opportunities, a level playing field and championing diversity and inclusion to encourage ambition and raised aspirations.

Tom McBride

Tom McBride leads the evidence generation and evaluation activity for the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), a Government What Works centre dedicated to ensuring that effective early intervention is available and used to improve the lives of children at risk of poor outcomes.

Tom has 15 years of experience of public sector research and analysis roles. He joined EIF from the Department for Education, where he led the Strategic Analysis function providing analytical support across all areas of DfE policy. Much of his work focused on the performance of disadvantaged children, and the role of education in improving social mobility.

Dr Lauren Bellaera

Dr Lauren Bellaera is Director of Research and Impact at The Brilliant Club, a UK-wide charity whose aim is to support less advantaged students to access the most competitive universities and to succeed when they get there. Alongside this role, Lauren is a Lecturer at Birkbeck, Univecrsity of London and the Institute of Education, UCL. She teaches applied research methods and supervises Master’s dissertations in Psychology and Education.

Lauren has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Warwick and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge. In 2019, Lauren was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. Her research examined the role of critical thinking in higher education.