Katharine is the inaugural Director of Agenda. She brings 15 years’ experience working across policy, campaigns, public affairs and parliament. She is an expert in social policy and has a track record of influencing the policy, political and media agendas and bringing about policy change for marginalised groups including securing new primary legislation to protect private tenants whose landlords are repossessed; funding for homelessness services and programmes; and the prevention of specific benefit cuts. Katharine currently sits on the Advisory Board for Female Offenders and co-chairs the Women’s Mental Health Task Force at the Department of Health. Before joining Agenda, Katharine led the Policy & Campaigns team at Crisis. She has written  for the Guardian, Telegraph, Huffington Post and New Statesman as well as sector and specialist publications.

A trained journalist, Lisa has spent the past few years focusing on women and girls’ rights. Before joining Agenda, she was in the media team at Plan International UK and also volunteered at Womankind Worldwide. Lisa started her career as a newspaper reporter, before joining Five News and later the BBC as a national television news producer. Lisa has a degree in anthropology from UCL and recently completed an MSc in Gender, Sexuality and Society at Birkbeck, University of London.

Jessica joined Agenda as Policy Manager in March 2018. She has worked in policy, research and service-user lead campaigns in the voluntary sector for over ten years, with a particular focus on gender, youth and justice. Most recently she lead on research and policy development into girls’ experiences of public sexual harassment for Plan International UK, and prior to this worked with organisations including Nacro, 4Children, The Howard League for Penal Reform, Platform 51 and Clean Break. She has a Masters in Gender from the LSE and is a Griffins Society Fellow. She is a Trustee of Clinks, having previously sat on the Board of Women’s Breakout, and volunteers with Opening Doors London.

Connie joined Agenda following 5 months in Brussels, where she was an intern on the Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee in the European Parliament. She studied English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she was the college’s Women’s Representative Officer, getting involved in student activism and politics.