Trustees

Robert Ashby – Chair

Robert studied at Oxford, York and Manchester Universities (BA Chemistry, MBA Finance). Since then he has had over 30 years experience of building fast-growing venture capital backed businesses, as Chair, Managing, Finance or Non-Executive Director. Currently he is Director of Tech Finance, specialising in finance and strategy development for fast growing technology businesses. Previously he had been Patron, Chair and Festival Director of Hereford Photography Festival, which he set up as a charity.

“I am passionate about humanism, photography and books.”

Robert lives in Swannington, Leicestershire, where he is a member of Leicester Secular Society and plays squash.

Patricia Rogers – Vice Chair

With an MA from Cambridge University, a PGCE and a Diploma of Management Studies, Patricia is an educator and internationalist, and has lived, taught and written in the UK, Nigeria, Pakistan the Philippines and South Korea.  She also has strong working links with India, Nepal, Tibet, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

I have seen both devastations and transformations resulting from religious convictions. I was a committed Christian, but have been a humanist for about 40 years.

Patricia has been Chief Executive of the Council for Education in World Citizenship, as well as the Jubilee Debt Campaign and Pestalozzi International Village. She is aware of the effectiveness of international collaboration and attended the 2011 IHEU meeting in Norway. She hopes her experience of running educational, international and campaigning charities will be useful to the BHA.

John Woolhouse – Treasurer

John has been a member of the BHA and its earlier incarnations all his adult life. He is a graduate of The Queen’s College Oxford and a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. He is married with three adult children.

John’s business career has been in financial services with a range of senior executive director and latterly non-executive director appointments in both small and larger actuarial and insurance organisations and he has carried out various pro bono assignments in the charitable sector.

Paul Blanchard

Paul is an entrepreneur, award-winning PR consultant, and Vice President of The Media Society. A Yorkshireman, and a vegan, he lives in Hampstead with his wife Heather. In early 2012 he stood down as Chair of Labour Humanists after three years’ service and joined our Board of Trustees. A Fellow of the Royal Institution, he has been promoting humanist/science causes in the media for nearly a decade, and is active within the British Science Association and Sense About Science.

A former parliamentary advisor, he served six years as a councillor in his former home town of York; and stood for Parliament at the 2005 general election, his campaign receiving the largest vote increase in the whole country. In his spare time he is a keen runner and ‘military fitness’ enthusiast.

Blaise Egan

Blaise works for a well-known telecommunications company, where he has been for over 30 years in a variety of management roles. He has been a traffic forecaster, a computer programmer, a database administrator, a management science consultant and a researcher developing telecare technololgy for the frail and elderly. His current role involves data analysis in support of planning the rollout of fast and superfast broadband. He has degrees in mathematics, Statistical Applications in Business and Government, a research degree in Bayesian statistics and he is a Chartered Statistician.  In his spare time he is the treasurer of Essex Humanists.

Alice Fuller

Alice’s interest in Humanism emerged whilst at university, where she found a name for the beliefs she’d held for most of her life. She is now a campaigner for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, and previously The National Council for Palliative Care, and hopes to bring this external affairs experience to BHA board. She is a member of the Central London Humanist Group, and previously a committee member. She is interested in international humanism and fundraised £4,000 for the Emitos Girls Humanist Football Team in Uganda. In her free time she tries to contribute to her local area, and is currently a trustee of a mental health charity Mind in Haringey, member of Camden’s SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education) and supporting a campaign to improve sexual health services in Waltham Forest. She can occasionally be found relaxing in Walthamstow, where she resides with her partner and cat Socks.

Allan Hayes

Allan studied mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge (BA, PhD).  Retired from an academic career, he is now a director of  Leicester Secular Society and a Trustee of the Sea of Faith Network.

Allan is also member of Leicester SACRE, the NSS, SPES,  SAPERE, and Antidote.

Guy Otten

Guy emerged from Cambridge University moved by the example of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and still believing in God, but reading and thought over the ensuing years brought him to humanism in the mid 90s. Retired as a lawyer and tribunal judge he is now a humanist celebrant and Chair of the Greater Manchester Humanists.

Alan Palmer

Alan joined the BHA in 2007 and has been Chair of the Central London Humanist Group for the past three years, seeing it grow from a few dozen members and supporters to about 1,200.

Alan has a business background, being a chartered accountant and corporate treasurer, with a long City career in investment banking and insurance, culminating in 12 years as a director of an investment management company. He was also a director of a public/private partnership company that helped to regenerate the centre of Manchester following the Toxteth and Brixton riots in the early 1980s, and he served for a few years as Secretary of the Lord Chancellor’s Strategic Investment Board. He is now semi-retired, but very active as a non executive director of a housing corporation and a NHS foundation trust and chair of both of their audit committees.

David Pollock

Actively involved in the humanist movement since 1961, David Pollock was a trustee of the British Humanist Association from 1965-75 including a stint as Chair from 1970-72. He was re-elected to the board in 1997.

In addition David is a board member and former Chair of the Rationalist Association and was President of the European Humanist Federation from 2006 to 2012. He takes a special interest in policy and campaigning on the place of religion and belief in society and other questions of public policy.

An Oxford classics graduate, after 25 years in management with the National Coal Board, he was Director of Action on Smoking and Health (1991-95) and then of the Continence Foundation (1996-2001) before retiring to (almost) full-time Humanism.

Mary Porter

Mary was a senior manager in a sexual health charity for a number of years. She then worked internationally as a consultant, mostly with health and third sector organisations,   designing, supporting and evaluating national projects.   This brought her into contact with an  organisation that supported  charities in the UK, for whom Mary became a consultant in the UK , undertaking governance review s of charities and project evaluation and

In recent years Mary has been a non-executive director and a mediator in the NHS and is currently a governor of a mental health trust.  She is also involved as a lay person in the regulation of the nursing profession and in reviews of services in the NHS for a national medical body.  Mary chairs panels that review decisions to detain patients under the Mental Health Act and is a member of a university ethics committee.

Martin Rowson

Martin Rowson is a multi-award winning cartoonist and writer whose work has appeared regularly in The Guardian, The Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Spectator, The Morning Star and many other publications. He also won the prestigious Premio Satiri de Forte di Marmi International Satire Award in 2006. His books include comic book versions of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as well as Snatches, a novel, and Stuff, a memoir about his late parents. His latest books are The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to be Human and Fuck: The Human Odyssey.

In addition to being a BHA Trustee, he is chairman of the British Cartoonists’ Association, and also a trustee of the Cartoon Museum and the Powell-Cotton Museum of Natural History, and a former Vice-President of the Zoological Society of London.

He lives in South-East London with his wife and, occasionally, their two children, both now in their twenties.

David Savage

David was the first chair of Farnham Humanists, a thriving new local humanist group.

David was a founder member of Labour Humanists and is a member the NSS and SPES.  After gaining a BSc and PhD in Chemical Engineering he joined multinational company and for some years worked as a Strategic Planning Manager. Following a period working overseas he was appointed Technical Director of their international soft drinks business, with operations in over 30 countries. He is  a Governor of a special needs school and works to protect river catchment environments.