Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees is Health Poverty Action’s governing body. It delegates management of the organisation to the Director, but the Trustees remain ultimately responsible for the affairs of the charity, ensuring that it is solvent, well-run, and delivering appropriate outcomes in terms of public benefit.

Health Poverty Action constitution provides for a minimum of five and a maximum of twelve Trustees, who are responsible for the election of new members. All Trustees have to stand for election each year. The same Board of Trustees is responsible for the charity, Find Your Feet.

The Board of Trustees

Oliver Kemp (Chair)

Oliver is CEO of Prostate Cancer Research Centre, which focuses on the advanced stage of the disease treatments are currently limited. Prior to this, he was the CEO of Build Africa. At Build Africa he directly supported over 400,000 people with an increase of over 500% in six years and was awarded the prize for the “Best International Charity in the UK” in 2012.

Ruth Stern (Vice Chair)

Ruth Stern, now retired, has worked in Health Promotion in the UK and South Africa for many years. Her main role in South Africa was head of the Health Promotion programme at the University of the Western Cape, which included a distance learning Masters in Public Health with students from several sub-Saharan countries. She was also the coordinator of the then Global Equity Gauge Alliance programme in Cape Town. In the UK, she was the first coordinator of the Healthy Cities Programme in the London Borough of Camden, one of the then designated WHO European Healthy Cities initiatives. Ruth has been and remains an active member of the UK People’s Health Movement.

Fahad Sayood (Treasurer)

Fahad is Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director of Aviva Capital Partners, deploying short term risk capital as a catalyst for long term investment partnerships.  Fahad has spent 20 years in the financial services industry, across investment banking and insurance. He has taken up a wide range of risk and capital roles within Aviva, including a period as the Group Head of Financial Risk where his team built and deployed Aviva’s global asset data analytics capabilities, and Group Head of ALM where he developed Aviva’s capital hedging platform. In his spare times he excels at telling dad jokes to toddlers who are rapidly losing patience.

Anna Graham

Anna Graham is a child and adolescent consultant psychiatrist and has worked as a doctor in the NHS since 1987. She currently works with children, adolescents and families in a London CAMHS service, with clinical, educational and management responsibilities. She was Lead Safeguarding doctor at Croydon CAMHS. She also has experience of working as a junior doctor in Medicine, Surgery, Accident and Emergency Medicine and Community Paediatrics. Before specialising she worked within General Adult Psychiatry, Alcohol Rehabilitation and as part of a Learning Disabilities team in the community. She has a special interest in working with vulnerable children in care, including refugees and asylum seekers and those who have experienced trauma. She has worked at The Helen Bamber Foundation, as a teacher and supervisor of mentors at CARAS (Community Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in SW London) and at St John’s Hospital, Mzuzu in Malawi.

Dr Rory Honney

Rory is a practicing clinician working half the week in a busy general practice in the UK and the rest of the week dual accrediting in public health medicine. Having completed his undergraduate training at Oxford University he is now studying for a Masters in Public Health at LSHTM. He has spent time working in Kenya and Cambodia, and in Cambodia worked as an NHS Global Health and Leadership fellow alongside the Maddox Jolie Pitt Foundation. His particular interests are in the field of inequalities and environmental health.

Anuj Kapilashrami

Anuj is a Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor in Global Health Policy with an interdisciplinary background in Sociology and Public health. She works at the intersections of health politics and development praxis, with a particular interest in their interface with gender, human rights and social justice. Anuj’s longstanding research interest and experience is spread over twenty years in both academia and the civil society/ development sector in South Asia and the UK.

Betty Williams

Betty has an MSc in Development Studies and has been involved in international development for 16 years. She has experience in child rights, rural livelihoods, adolescent training and development education. Betty worked for International Development NGO Find Your Feet for over ten years as a Programme Manager. She managed programmes supporting tribal women and adolescents from Dalit communities in India and Nepal and small farmers in Malawi. Before this Betty was an accountant and an Economics and Business Studies teacher; she used these skills to conduct financial training for accountants working in Find Your Feet’s overseas offices and partner organisations and also took a leading role in Find Your Feet’s financial management. Betty retired in 2015 but has voluntary roles with several charities concerned with international development and the environment.

Ravi Ram

Ravi M. Ram is a Monitoring & Evaluation, Learning (MEL) and Strategic Planning expert, with extensive experience in solidarity-based international cooperation in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, including direct, on-site engagement with communities and policymakers. As a health systems evaluator and specialist in community health, primary health care and universal health coverage, he brings an emphasis on equity, gender and social accountability to matters of people’s health. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he works on South-South collaborations and activism with the People’s Health Movement, Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health (COPASAH), the Health Workers for All Coalition and the Kampala Initiative.