Our Chair, Sharon Grant, OBE

Sharon has lived in Haringey for over 38 years and her career has focused on both health and social care and consumer representation.

A former university senior lecturer in social policy, she was appointed Chair of Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health in 2002-2008 and then Chair of London Travelwatch 2008-2012. Sharon also chaired the Haringey Citizen’s Advice Bureaux from 2007 to 2015.

She is a trustee of the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham, where she ran the office of the late Bernie Grant MP from 1987–2000, and was also an elected councillor. She is currently a parliamentary adviser on health care, and was this year elected to the Council of the Consumers Association, ‘Which?’.

Debbie Lee Chan

Debbie has lived in Haringey for over 20 years.

She has worked in a variety of sectors as a research and consultation specialist including a tenure as the Research Manager in the Chief Executive’s Office at Camden Council, a fellow in stakeholder engagement at the not-for-profit Office for Public Management, and as a Research Director at Ipsos MORI.

Debbie is currently the Policy Research Manager at the consumer body ‘Which?’. She is an active member of the Social Research Association events committee and a doting mother of two young children.

Bülent Mehmet

Bülent is a qualified accountant and experienced in financial management.

Before completing a degree in Economics at the London school of Economics he worked in the private, public and voluntary sectors in Hackney and Islington. 

Bülent has worked in areas ranging from housing and economic regeneration to public health and social services.

He has had responsibility for financial strategy and management for a number of local organisations and services including, Alexandra Palace Trading Company and charity, Bernie Grant Arts Centre, building schools in Haringey, and the integration of Public Health services from the NHS into Haringey Council.

Vernon Herbert

Vernon is a highly experienced Director with wide ranging professional and managerial experience in both the public and private sectors.

He has a multi-disciplinary background with extensive experience of infrastructure planning and delivery as well as the broader aspects of urban planning and development, the environment, regeneration and management. 

Much of his career has been spent working in local government and more recently, the NHS. Previous roles have included Deputy Director of Environment and Planning at the City of Westminster, Director of Growth and Regeneration at Harlow and senior positions with the Amey Group, Interserve and Tribal Group. He began his career as a planning and transportation graduate trainee at the Greater London Council and is qualified as a town planner.

Laura Guest

Laura is a Masters qualified former Chief Executive who has worked across complex organisations, from NHS commissioning and hospital Trusts to the Department of Health and also in the commercial sector, within London and nationally.

Her experience includes leveraging in-depth commissioning expertise and strategic insights into legislative and government health and social policy trends to innovate solutions. 

Laura has expertise in constructing and validating high-level business cases that source and attract additional external funding, and creating long-term strategic relationships based on trust with partners and policy-makers to drive collaboration and growth.

Laura is a regular speaker at national conferences and has collaborated on various publications.

Gordon Peters 

Gordon has had a career in health and social care over 43 years and has lived in London, mostly in Haringey since the late 1960s.

Gordon was a social worker, then taught social work and social policy, before being Director of Social Services in Hackney during the 1980s. He later worked for the Kings Fund on new policies of community care before spending some years as a health and social development consultant. 

Gordon has always been motivated by finding ways for the most vulnerable people to be actively engaged in both the policies and practice of health and social care and in getting authorities to put patients or users of their services at the centre of what they do. He is particularly interested in how older people in Haringey can improve their health and wellbeing and maintain contact with the younger generations. Gordon currently chairs the Older Peoples Reference Group and Haringey Over 50’s Forum.

Omar Ahmed

Omar is a senior manager with strategic, digital change/transformation, portfolio, programme and risk management skills within the media, oil/gas, financial services and banking arenas.

He has a solid record of effecting change via leadership, creating high performance teams and cross company communications structures. He has worked in both public and private sector organisations, as well as hybrid organisations such as the 2012 London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games.

Omar has worked for a number of national and multi-national organisations including the BBC and Sky as a project manager and transformation consultant and has a professional interest in privacy and data protection. He has a number of pro-bono directorships, and in addition to his degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering is a qualified management accountant.

Kevin Sheridan

Kevin is a freelance  community development and engagement consultant.

Before this he was Director of Community Engagement in the Institute for Health and Human Development at the University of East London, leading on community, public, user, patient and stakeholder engagement from 2006 to 2017.

In the previous three decades Kevin worked variously as a researcher, media practitioner, and as a teacher at higher and adult levels. He has a degree in Urban and Regional Planning and an MSc in Computing Science.