Our Team

Wendy Sugarman

Wendy is the Company Director of WSA Community Consultants and brings over 30 years’ experience of youth and community work. The breadth of her experience encompasses research, monitoring and evaluation, community development, project management community participation, equalities and diversity and project management.

Wendy is an effective and efficient manager and facilitator, building mutual trust by practising open and clear communication with all WSA clients. She is a strong advocate of collaboration and co-creation, evidenced by projects conducted alongside communities and stakeholders in the UK and abroad.

Highly skilled in approaching complex and sensitive issues, she has successfully facilitated the finding of sustainable solutions for projects focusing on improving health, enhancing local capacity, and reducing inequality.

Recent projects include leading on the Maternal Mental Health Alliance Everyone’s Business evaluation; facilitating a community led panel to build community leadership for the Grenfell community in relation to the distribution of the Grenfell Project Fund; working with the Francis Crick Institute’s team to develop a Patient Advisory Panel in support of its ‘Outwitting Cancer’ exhibition; and facilitating a training the trainers workshop for people living with NCDs for the NCD Alliance in Geneva.

Vicky Daborn Tedder

Vicky, an experienced project evaluation and training specialist with over ten years of collaborative work in social research. Vicky is the Evaluation and Training Manager for WSA. In addition to her passion for measuring project impact and building capacity through training, Vicky has worked with communities and other stakeholders to facilitate the implementation of community empowerment projects. She is focused on supporting local communities to analyse and understand the data they produce and how to confidently apply their understanding to inform best practice. With a doctorate degree in Sociology, Vicky brings rigour to her work, and she has a strong understanding of community groups and social movements drawn from both her hands-on community development work and academic training.

Her recent projects include leading on training, mentoring and action learning to support co-design and community engagement training for Surrey libraries, working with Big Local areas exploring the difference they make through the Measuring Change support, and leading on the Greenwich Community Champions Programme evaluation of the impact on the community and future provision of services.

Katy Knight

Katy, WSA’s Project Consultancy and Research Officer, is a passionate researcher and community engagement specialist with keen analytical skills. She has a wide breadth of experience of working with diverse communities, and an interest in understanding and representing the needs of marginalised groups. She has focused on learning and skills development, health and wellbeing, women’s groups and issues and working in partnerships with local authorities. She also brings experience from community consultation, research and analysis in the Gypsy Traveller and Roma communities. She has worked on projects in the UK and in South India and has an in-depth knowledge of people engagement within the environment/conservation sector. Some of the projects that Katy is working on at WSA include evaluation and supporting communities and projects to measure change as well as setting up a community buddying project.

Pritida Desai

Pritida is the Communications Coordinator at WSA and is responsible for all of the organisation’s external and internal communications. Having completed her law degree and professional exams, she worked as a legal journalist and editor before taking on the role of Communications Manager at a Legal Publishing company. Since then, she has used her marketing and communications skills to support a variety of businesses, ranging from membership bodies to not-for-profit organisations and charities. Experienced in content creation, editing, event planning, social media and website management Pritida joined the WSA team in 2022.

Rufus Attrill

Rufus is the Project Support and Communications Administrator at WSA Community Consultants. He brings a wealth of administrative and project support experience in the third sector coupled with sound technical, and communications capabilities. Skilled in report writing and research, he also provides wide-ranging support to colleagues at WSA including supporting data collection for research, helping to analyse information and organising events and training days. Rufus supports the team on IT related matters as well as offering technical and process support for the smooth running of projects.

Ellie Brown

Ellie has over 25 years’ experience in programme design, management, monitoring, evaluation and learning with a strong focus on gender-transformative programmes in health programmes. She has led evaluation design and implementation across a number of large-scale FCDO-funded programmes. She is a skilled facilitator, confident in working with diverse audiences and using different techniques to engage and communicate. Ellie enjoys collaborative working with teams and is well versed in delivering remote training. She is a confident speaker, who is adept at making materials and knowledge products user-friendly and accessible. At WSA, Ellie is specifically involved in work that is related to community engagement and evaluation.

Sarah Clement

Sarah, an Associate with WSA, has a strong track record of community development, engagement, research and evaluation. She is an experienced facilitator and qualified trainer, with an enthusiastic commitment to tackling inequality and making a positive difference to communities, individuals and workplaces. At WSA, she supports activities in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion as well as community engagement. Previous WSA projects include co-facilitating training on community engagement for the People’s Health Trust and being part of the team supporting the Engage Britain Community Conversations.

Shae Eccleston

Shae is a creative consultant, author, corporate trainer, and associate of WSA. Shae brings considerable experience working with researchers, health care professionals and patients to enhance knowledge and understanding of health inequalities. She has helped WSA develop its EDI policy (equity, diversity & inclusion) and has worked on projects related to health inequalities including facilitating training for NHS England around patient and public voice; other projects for WSA include being a key part of the Greenwich Community Champions evaluation team and leading on community engagement support for Chinbrook Big Local.

Tracy Hind

Tracy works freelance in youth and community development and training and has over 25 years’ experience of working with groups in a diverse range of settings and within multi-agency partnerships. Her skills and experience are in facilitation and training, project management, curriculum and resource development, and fundraising. Her particular specialisms are in lived experience and user involvement work, as well as development and delivery of accredited education programmes in community settings.
Tracy is also experienced in working in statutory and voluntary sectors; primarily in children and young people’s services, health and adult social care services, mental health services and in working with service users, volunteers, front line staff and senior management. Tracy is currently part of the team working to support Whiteley Village to build inclusion and participation as well as the team working on the Listening Exercise for the UK Covid Inquiry. 

Shehnaaz Latif

Shehnaaz is an accomplished trainer and consultant with over 19 years’ experience in outcome and impact practice in the UK charity sector. She has applied her expertise to build capacity and capability of voluntary organisations to self-evaluate their work, training and supporting organisations with all aspects of self-evaluation. Adept at creating tools and techniques for collecting data and producing meaningful findings, she has developed innovative ways to report on and learn from evaluation evidence. She has also designed and facilitated theory of change workshops for various organisations.

Shehnaaz is actively involved in supporting WSA’s work within the Local Trust Community Engagement team and has worked with WSA as part of the evaluation team for Greenwich Council’s Community Champions Programme.

Jo McGreal

Jo is an experienced community development consultant with a history of working with and alongside diverse organisations and communities. She is an experienced leader and practitioner, enthusiastic about making a difference in all aspects of her working life. Her main focus and experience lie in training, development, coaching, evaluation, and volunteer management. Her most recent WSA projects include leading on the evaluation of NHS 10 Steps programme and being involved in the planning and facilitation of co-design and community engagement training for Surrey libraries. She thrives in challenging situations and enjoys working alongside others to create lasting change.

Emma Morgan

Emma is an experienced Community development practitioner with a passion for working with underrepresented and unheard communities. She has worked across the community and voluntary sector and the public sector for 15+ years and brings significant community project design and delivery experience with her. Emma has worked across a number of Big Local Projects supporting with the implementation of plans and projects including working closely with resident led boards and committees. Emma enjoys working with people to bring about the changes they want to see in their communities and has developed strong coaching skills through her work. With WSA Consultants, Emma has delivered workshops, community consultation events, supported evaluative work, and fed into reports. In her time away from WSA Associates Emma is responsible for The British Library’s Community Engagement work, which she established in 2016 and has developed and grown over the past 7 years. Emma has experience of developing community-informed strategy that inspire organisational culture change.

Alister Shaw

Alister joined WSA as an associate in 2022, bringing significant experience as a regeneration and community engagement practitioner to the team. He has a wealth of experience from his work in the Faith, Voluntary, Public and Private Sectors over the past 30 years.

Alister is an enthusiastic advocate and practitioner of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and related approaches. His recent work has included supporting national resident led regeneration programmes at a neighbourhood level, facilitating and coordinating Community Engagement Networks as well as Multi-Agency and Resident Partnerships. He has also worked directly with Local Authorities supporting Transformation Programmes and Service Transformation. More recently he has been advising on and delivering co-production processes involving residents, partner agencies and third sector organisations to provide lasting solutions to locally identified priorities.

He is currently working as part of WSA’s Covid-19 Inquiry team and supporting CARS Area Together around community engagement.

Yvonne Prendergast

Yvonne brings twenty years of practical knowledge as an independent researcher and development worker to her role as an Associate at WSA, where she is currently, among others, supporting Big Local areas to measure change. She also brings extensive experience as an independent small grants’ assessor. Her focus is on promoting equality and social inclusion, particularly within marginalised communities. Yvonne has particular expertise in participative evaluation and research across the public and third sectors, building the capacity of community members to remain actively involved throughout the evaluation and research process. Previous WSA projects include involvement in evaluations for both Greenwich Community Champions and the Bolton Aspirations project, a mentoring scheme supporting care leavers. Yvonne also is an extremely skilled facilitator and regularly facilitates our how to engage communities training.

Jen Wingate

Jen, is an Associate of WSA Community Consultants, and brings over 20 years of community development practice and research experience. She is particularly interested in community development practice learning, training, evaluation and research. Jen has supported learning through the creation of practitioner networks, facilitating informal learning through workshops and practice exchanges, as well as teaching in university settings. She cares about supporting the development of practice skills and knowledge, recognising that practitioners and community members can learn from each other and the experiences they bring. Jen has led on regional empowerment programmes, and advised third sector organisations and local government on community engagement nationally. She has created peer learning environments and facilitated organisational reviews, so that organisations could grow their practice in sharing power and increase the voice of communities in their work. Most recently she was involved in an evaluation project with WSA Community Consultants.