After leaving school Ellie worked as cabin crew for British Airways and travelled the world… well, the airports! Marriage and children followed, as well as teacher training. After a long career as a primary school teacher, including two headships, Ellie relocated from Oxford to Cornwall. As part of her own resettlement to a new area, Ellie went along to a meeting of local people in Bude who wanted to urge the council in Cornwall to resettle refugees. From that meeting, one of the first Community Sponsorship groups in the UK emerged. Since then, Ellie has supported many Community Sponsorship groups across Cornwall and has spoken about her experience at conferences in South West England and to an international audience. For Ellie, taking early retirement has led to a whole new career as a volunteer in several fields and she is very interested in what volunteers bring to and gain from Community Sponsorship.

Shilla has substantial strategic leadership and senior management experience acquired from roles in operations management, project management, technical leadership, line management and clinical research. Among other things, she has led and managed complex, fast-paced, 24/7 operations in heavily-regulated scientific environments. Shilla is a published researcher with a PhD in Immunology. Having recently studied “Corporate Governance, Risk and Control” as part of her MBA, Shilla is passionate about board diversity, inclusive leadership and stakeholder-inclusive corporate governance. In supporting Reset’s work, Shilla draws on her experience as an ethnic minority immigrant. Shilla attends a church involved in Community Sponsorship.

Tim was involved in the setting up of Community Sponsorship of refugees as coordinator of the National Refugee Welcome Board and founding director of Sponsor Refugees. He founded the migration communications agency IMiX and before that was head of migration research at the think tank IPPR. He was director of communications at the Refugee Council, after a career as a BBC journalist. Tim is a novelist.  His latest novel Peace Talks was shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award in 2020.  He is a volunteer member of Peckham Sponsors Refugees, which welcomed a refugee family to Peckham in 2019.