
Leigh joined Collaborate in June 2022, bringing interdisciplinary experience spanning design, facilitation, research and project management to their role as Project Designer & Engagement Manager, including backbone support for a collective impact initiative, directing the production of public artworks, and convening creatives to create community archives.
Previously, they coordinated the New York City Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative, one of the largest American municipal efforts to address inequality through worker ownership. Leigh also helped launch Best for NYC, a partnership between local government and service organisations for guiding local businesses to improve job quality and community impact.
Leigh has worked on Collaborate’s learning programmes such as our work as learning partner for the Cornerstone Fund; place-based projects including our support with charting a New Era for Wigan Borough, building upon successes of the Wigan Deal; and our delivery of the London Leadership Programme, a programme for local government leaders seeking to mobilise change with others on the complex issues London faces.
In their own words:
At Collaborate, I join a cohort of other systems thinkers who similarly think about the fact that how people come together changes what’s possible. Like my team members, I am oriented both toward infrastructures and also to the needs and capacities of people – and how they shape each other.
I come to this work from a place of pondering power shifts and reparative relations to bring about systemic change and draw upon participatory research methods, ecological references, and facilitative and artistic practices in doing so. I am endlessly stimulated by learning new pedagogies and frameworks.
Every day, I recommit to radical imagination and transformation, to collective action for greater equity and collective liberation.