Hannah Brock Womack joins JRCT
Restructure creating new roles at the Trust with aim to improve diversity and inclusion within staff team
Quaker Hannah Brock Womack has been recruited as one of six new appointments at Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT), in a push for a more diverse staff team as it expands its grant-making capabilities.
The new role, as a grants officer for the Peace and Security programme, draws on her considerable experience in peace and antimilitarist campaigning. The recruitment follows a decision to significantly increase grant spending to over £10 million per year, and to further increase grant-making in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Every year JRCT makes more than 100 grants for charitable work.
Celia McKeon, chief executive at JRCT, said: ‘We received a high volume of applications for these roles and interviewed some truly exceptional candidates. We are lucky to have attracted some wonderful people to come and work with us and we’re so excited for them to join the team.’
The decision to increase grant-spending to £10 million a year was originally made in 2019 as part of a ten-yearly review. The aim was to give to organisations outside London to achieve a greater geographical diversity of funding.
Nick Perks, the former trust secretary at JRCT, said at the time: ‘We have decided to make more grants across the UK in recognition of the importance of devolved nations and regions and that systemic change requires many voices and experiences… We want to be an open and responsive funder and we know that more core or unrestricted grants are what many charities want and could greatly benefit from.’
The other five members to join the grant-making team are Ali Torabi, Mumbi Nkonde, Rose Ziaei, Sheridan Carr and Zarina Douglas Sori. JRCT pledged in August 2020 to ‘do more to ensure our organisation – which has a predominantly white board and staff team – better reflects the society we are part of’. It said it was ‘undergoing an organisational restructure which will create new roles at the Trust and which aims to improve diversity and inclusion within our staff team’.
Hannah Brock Womack made headlines last year when she was blocked from fully being the representative of the Fourth Presidency Group of Churches Together in England (CTE) because she is married to a woman. She has also worked with JRCT-grantee War Resisters’ International on its programme promoting conscientious objection, and Quaker Voluntary Action as its coordinator. The member of Nether Edge Meeting tweeted that the role was a ‘new direction for me’. In an interview in the Church Times last year, Hannah Brock Womack said: ‘I don’t like the word “peace” very much. Violence and war can’t be separated from all injustice. For us to live peaceably together would mean transforming racism, nationalism, poverty, patriarchy, and other structures of oppression which teach us that some lives are disposable. Until we do, we’ll never be free of war and violence.’
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