Who We Are

Ruby was, until recently, a registered social worker, who started her career in children’s residential care, and has subsequently spent over 45 years working in the social care profession, 30 of those in the public sector, and over 25 years in senior leadership positions. Ruby has worked in most areas of social work, although predominantly in children’s services, specialising in child protection and child sexual abuse. She spent 8 years as Assistant Director of Children’s Services in 2 local authorities, leading a range of multi-agency partnerships and service transformation putting children’s voices at the centre of practice.
Ruby moved to the private sector in 2010, working for a children’s services company as their director of consultancy, and subsequently opened her own limited company specialising in safeguarding leadership and staff development. As a social care consultant Ruby has designed and delivered safeguarding training to Ofsted, carried out a range of safeguarding and other Reviews, acted as Interim Director for a major charity, and in 2016 became Director of Communities for the States of Guernsey, Health and Social Care Committee. She was Agency Decision Maker for their Permanence Panel for 7 years, and led their children’s services transformation and Children and Young People Plan.
Ruby has worked with and supervised a huge range of staff and has chaired a broad range of professional partnerships, including CAMHS improvement. She is an accredited Belbin Team Roles trainer, and one of only 3 certified 3VQ – TED® The Empowerment Dynamic – trainers in the UK. This is an approach based on transactional analysis that underpins more empowering conversations and interactions, and has informed her coaching work with hundreds of children’s services leaders over the last few years.

Why OTR?
“The vacancy for Chair of the Board of Trustees for OTR came at the perfect time in my life as I have been winding down my coaching and leadership business and looking for alternative ways to keep involved and connected to young people and community which have driven my professional life to date. I now serve as a Family Court Magistrate, but whilst worthwhile, this doesn’t give me the level of excitement and energy that I know I will find through engagement with OTR as your Chair. I have been aware of the work of the charity since my early days as a social worker in Hartcliffe, my own daughter benefitted from it in her teenage years, and OTRs mission in engaging with the most challenged of young people to improve their resilience and life chances is very close to my heart. I know that I can bring a huge amount of experience to the charity, and can support your CEO and SLT to drive the charity forward. I also know that I will gain a huge amount from your engagement, and that together we can continue to make a real difference to children and young people.”

Simon works as Head of Internal Communications and Engagement at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). He’s held communications and fundraising roles in a range of organisations, including the Environment Agency, Save the Children UK and Shelter. Simon joined OTR as a trustee in 2022.

Jordan is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing and Advanced Nurse Practitioner
working in Primary Care. He is also currently completing a Doctorate in Education,
specialising in understanding the effects of minority student groups in clinical
placements. Jordan has held various management posts in the NHS, with a passion for
prevention and management of mental health problems in young people. Jordan joined
OTR as a Trustee in 2022

Ken is an Audit Director at BDO LLP. He is a chartered accountant with over 13 years of experience, specialising in the audits of large and complex groups. He has experience in the voluntary sector through his role at Switchboard, the LGBT+ helpline where he was on the board for 8 years. He is looking to bring that financial and board experience to OTR. Through his time at Switchboard he could see the challenges and often inconsistent mental health support for young people throughout the country and as such wanted to support OTR with their mission. 

Soizic is an experienced leader, strategist, and advocate for social impact with a decade of work across philanthropy, international development, social entrepreneurship. She is currently Lead of the School of Philanthropy at Epic Foundation, and previously served as Head of the Innovation Award at the Fair Education Alliance, supporting leaders and organisations to design scalable solutions to tackle social and educational inequality.

She has collaborated with organisations including The World Bank, Clinton Foundation, Rolls Royce, and leading universities, and has led programmes in over ten countries across Europe, North America, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. Passionate about mental health and equity, Soizic joined OTR Bristol’s board to apply her expertise in programme design, funding strategy, and recruitment to an organisation whose rights-based approach to empowering young people strongly aligns with her values.

Louise is a Bristol-based solicitor specialising in dispute resolution and commercial
litigation. She brings significant experience from her previous role as legal counsel in
the financial services sector where she advised on a variety of commercial, property
and governance matters. Louise’s combined private practice and in-house expertise
allow her to offer a pragmatic, solutions-focused approach to governance and risk
management, supporting Off The Record in delivering its mission to improve young
people’s mental health.

Joe has 8 years’ experience working for public sector regulators – first in healthcare and now in higher education. Having completed a secondment leading work funding student mental health projects, Joe is now in the final year of training to be a psychotherapist at UWE and recently completed a placement at OTR working on the Freedom project with young people who are LGBTQ+. Joe has previously volunteered in both London and Bristol with young people, adults with learning disabilities, refugees, and asylum seekers. Outside of this, Joe enjoys piano, guitar, singing, playing football, and has just taken up boxing!