Our Trustees represent a broad spectrum of academics, researchers, editors, and people active in community work.
Hiba Ahmad is a community organiser and political educator based in South London. Hiba works at The Advocacy Academy where she organises for better political education, for the creation of radical and caring intergenerational community spaces, and to create better cross-movement partnerships and collaboration. She also organises broadly in South London on issues of anti-gentrification and police brutality. Hiba is passionate about internationalism and a trustee at Global Justice Now where she organises on issues of climate justice, trade justice, and anti-racism.
David Castle is Editorial Director at Pluto Press, a radical book publisher. He is also Publisher at the Left Book Left Book Club. He was previously Deputy Editor of Red Pepper magazine.
Martin McIvor is a researcher and policy adviser who has worked mostly for trade unions and also in thinktanks, academia and in Parliament for the Labour Party. He is a former editor of the left ideas and strategy journal Renewal.
Baz Ramaiah has worked throughout the education system – as a teaching assistant for students with special educational needs, as a secondary school teacher in two of the UK’s most deprived local authorities, and as a developer of educational technology for teachers in low-income countries. He is currently a Senior Associate at The Centre for Education and Youth where he researches and campaigns for a range of progressive educational causes. He writes regularly for the press on issues in education, including for The Financial Times, the Evening Standard, Tribune and Jacobin.
Alex Randall has spent his career working on climate change and immigration projects. He is currently running the Climate Change and Migration Coalition, a network of refugee and migration groups working together on climate change. Previously he worked on a number of climate change projects investigating corporate power in climate and energy policy, and investigating rapid decarbonisation. He has also been involved in activism around open-cast coal mining and airport expansion. He occasionally writes for Open Democracy and the Guardian.
Cilla’s background is in radical adult and community education, working in universities, trade unions and for the Workers’ Educational Association. She is currently writing about union co-operatives, adult education and the future of work and lost working-class histories. She works with a group of education co-ops to explore emancipatory co-operative education and is attached to the University of Nottingham.
Esther Selsdon is an award-winning writer and journalist and a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow. She teaches writing skills at University College London, amongst other places, and runs grassroots writing and debating projects across England.
Hilary Wainwright is longstanding editor and now co-editor of British left green magazine Red Pepper and Fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex. Hilary is currently working for the TNI’s New Politics project where she is looking at Trade Union led initiatives towards a low carbon economy. Co-author, with Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal, of the classic feminist book, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (1979), Hilary’s most recent book is A New Politics from the Left (2018).
Sally Young has worked in the community and voluntary sector and in the NHS for over forty years. She is actively involved in supporting and engaging with a number of voluntary and community organisations and local leaders. Most of Sally’s work has focussed on poverty, tackling inequalities and enabling people to have a voice. She is a feminist, a socialist, an activist and a campaigner. Her particular interests are women’s issues, children’s and young people’s wellbeing, and asylum seekers and refugee rights. She would describe herself as a ‘posh Geordie’ and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.