Jenny Willis

Biography

Jenny has worked as a facilitator with Shared Future since 2016, initially with local people in the Preston area as part of the Citizen’s Inquiry on Fracking, and in the West Midlands supporting people using mental health services to inform future policy making in their area. More recently she has worked on inquiry processes on responses to climate change with citizens in Leeds, Lancaster, Kendal, Warwick district and the North of Tyne.

The key thread in Jenny’s work is linking people and ideas within and between different sectors and supporting the influence of ‘grassroot’ voices in policy making.

Jenny started her career in the international development sector, supporting Bond, a network of UK-based organisations working across the world. She was with Bond for the first eight years of the organisation’s development.  She later transferred her networking, policy and communication skills to work with grass roots organisations in the UK. These were run by and for disabled people at Shaping Our Lives.

Since moving on from Shaping Our Lives in 2010, Jenny has continued to work with a wide variety of communities on different issues. She enjoys the challenge of working with people with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints, and gets satisfaction from working out how to identify and achieve shared outcomes in a good humoured and practical way. As a farmer based in Cumbria, Jenny also has a strong interest in the involvement of rural communities in decision making on issues that affect them. Whether specifically related to farming policy or more general issues which impact rural areas.