Mandy Johnson, UK director of partnerships for Change.org and Martin Edwards, chief executive of former Charity Awards winner Julia’s House hospice, are among five new judges appointed to the judging panel for the 2016 Charity Awards.
The 2016 panel will once again be chaired by former Charity Finance editor and ex-Charity Commission CEO Andrew Hind. This year he will be joined by a group of ten judges, half of whom are new to the group.
The other new recruits are Prem Goyal OBE, founder and chief executive of Global Markets Consultants; Ruth Ruderham, director of fundraising for the new Prince’s Trust International charity, and Samantha Sparrow, director of Task Squad at vinspired.
Martin Edwards was a recipient of the Charity Awards in 2012, when his charity Julia’s House won the healthcare and medical research category for a project that aimed to increase the frequency of short respite breaks provided to families of terminally ill children. The initiative was so successful that between 2006 and 2011 the charity increased at-home respite care from 1,200 hours per year to 10,870.
Mandy Johnson (pictured) was headhunted by Change.org in 2013 following a string of successes in corporate fundraising at Marie Curie and then at Cancer Research UK. She oversees the relationships between the world’s largest petition website and some of the UK’s most innovative charities and agencies.
Prem Goyal is an Indian entrepreneur who, after a successful career at global institutions including Procter and Gamble and Goldman Sachs, went on to launch the management consultancy GMC in 2002.
Goyal is a trustee or patron to over 25 charities and has personally raised £175,000 for good causes by completing challenges such as the London Marathon and climbing Mt Kilimanjaro.
Ruth Ruderham is a highly successful career fundraiser who, after spells leading fundraising teams at Crisis, Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth, was hired to devise a fundraising strategy from scratch at the newly-charitable Canal & River Trust. After two years there she has now moved to do the same thing at the new Prince’s Trust International.
Samantha Sparrow has been director of Task Squad, a social business connecting young volunteers with paying employers, for two years. In that time she has secured funding from Google, Nominet Trust and Nesta and grown the business, which raises funds for youth social action charity vInspired, to provide five times more hours of work for young job-seekers.
The new judges will share the responsibility with longer-term panellists Su Sayer CBE, chair of CPRE and founder director of United Response; Danielle Walker-Palmour, director of the Friends Provident Foundation; Richard Hawkes, chief executive of the British Asian Trust; Paul Farmer CBE, chief executive of Mind, and John Low CBE, chief executive of Charities Aid Foundation, the overall Charity Awards partner.
Read more about all the judges here.
The Charity Awards 2016 are now open for entries until Friday 7 March. Find out more and submit your application here.
The awards ceremony and gala dinner will be held at The Mermaid at London’s Blackfriars on Thursday 9 June. To book your table please call 020 7819 1200.
