As the Place Lead for Kindred, Chris works to make real change happen in communities across Liverpool City Region. As an innovative and creative place practitioner, she is immersed in supporting people and communities to make positive change happen in their communities across the region – particularly places outside the city itself – Birkenhead, Kirkby and St Helens, for example, where she has and is working to support radical positive change to happen. Her job is to work with a range of ‘pipeline’ ideas and the people who have them, to support them to grow social impact.
As a member of the team that worked with 150 STOs from across the region to talk about, re-imagine and ‘re-design’ money so it works better for the social economy, with everyone working in and benefitting from it, Chris’s place work continues to be an important part of the process of investing our £6.5m into community businesses, CICs and the wider LCR communities.
In 2017 in Birkenhead, Chris was part of the team that developed the £12k Ideas Festival project that was a pre-Kindred pilot. Working with over 40 local people and groups, the range of ideas for projects are now making a huge difference in the town. Currently, she leads on the delivery of two exciting programmes – Women in the Know in Knowsley, which supports local women to develop a care/creativity pilot with local partners including Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council and in St Helens, developing a new social and creative business incubator hub – in partnership principally with St Helens Borough Council.
Chris works to contribute the learning, creativity and innovation that we’ve developed as part of our Kindred place model, with a passion to keep this work central to all that we do.