Promising Trouble Board
At the beginning of 2024 we had ambitious goals. One of which was to recruit a Board of brilliant minds to support the future governance of Promising Trouble.
We didn’t rush the recruitment process and took care in who we interviewed and invited to join the Board. We couldn’t be happier with the experience and expertise of each and every one of our Board members below.
Board Roles and Responsibilities
The Board is legally, morally and financially responsible for the organisation. The Non-Executive board members are not involved in day to day management of the organisation, although they do need to be aware of what is happening.
Their six key roles are:
Making sure that funds are used to effectively deliver Promising Trouble’s objectives, as outlined in our Article of Association,
Making sure that our strategy is in line with the articles of the organisation,
Making sure that the Promising Trouble has enough funding to meet its objectives,
Making sure that the Promising Trouble has effective senior management,
Making sure that the Promising Trouble operates within the law,
Making sure that the board can handle its responsibilities effectively.
Helen Jaffa
Head of People at Watershed
Helen is Head of People at Watershed, and is responsible for designing and delivering the organisation’s people strategy. She supports inclusion work happening across the organisation and works to embed inclusion within policies and HR procedures. Her work is grounded in a restorative approach to Human Resources, moving away from punitive processes and towards person centered resolution frameworks with room for nuance and intersecting identities.
Her background is in Arts & Culture venue operations, people management and hospitality and she has experience managing big teams of people. Her work has always focussed on improving team cultures and preventing toxic management structures by demonstrating how care can be held at the core of organisations and their people.
Helen has run a consortium of venues working together to improve accessibility in the arts. She has developed and delivered training for the sector and advises other organisations on people development, venue inclusion and inclusive recruitment practices.
Fadzai Madzingira
Fadzai Madzingira is a Trust & Safety professional with a decade of experience in policy development and responsible technology.
She currently works at Twitch on the Trust & Safety Policy team which is responsible for interpreting and writing the community guidelines to keep users safe. Previously she led teams at Meta, Salesforce and Ofcom. These roles included being the Global Hate Speech Policy Lead leading hate speech policy enforcement across Meta products and the EMEA Lead in Salesforce's Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology coordinating the company's road to internet regulation compliance.
As a Rhodes Scholar from Zimbabwe, she read for a Bachelor of Civil Laws and a Master in Public Policy at Oxford University.
Jo Roach
As a serial COO, leadership consultant & mentor, Jo supports organisations through transformative strategic and operational change, and helps start-ups and scale ups to set up for success.
Jo has co-founded the world’s first 3D-printed toy company Makielab, Doteveryone, and most recently Our Future Health, a health research programme which aims to accelerate prevention of chronic diseases and help people live in good health for longer.
Jo works with public and private sector organisations for which digital product and technology capabilities and infrastructure are critical to success.
Dom Hallas
Dom Hallas is the Executive Director of Startup Coallition (formerly Coadec), an independant advocacy organisation that aims to make policy in the UK better for tech startups and scaleups. He is a member of the UK Digital Economy Council.
Join Our Board
We are seeking entrepreneurial individuals who can support us to build stronger relationships with business and philanthropy, be a critical friend as we grow and change, and help us to create connections with changemakers beyond the technology sector.
We are particularly interested in recruiting a Treasurer with experience of finance and financial management of start-ups.
The time commitment for this role will be up to, and no more than, 8 days a year. We can offer a small fee – per meeting – which we would expect to increase in line with our income generation.