Meet The Team

Mandy Gardner

Mandy has just graduated, having completed a PhD with the University of the West of England and the Power to Change Trust on the values of community business leaders. Her research explored the reasons why people are motivated to run a community business. Her research will be used to support new and existing community businesses in becoming more sustainable.

Mandy led the Bath City Foundation, a sports charity based at Twerton Park.  She trained as a teacher and set up two Study Centres at Bristol City FC and Bristol Rovers FC as part of the ‘Playing for Success’ initiative.

Mandy has a wealth of experience working with individuals and groups to make positive impacts on their communities.  She is passionate about harnessing the power within communities to deliver vital economic, health and wellbeing outcomes.

Mandy is an avid reader, especially thrillers.  She is a football fan and supports Bristol City.

Claire Payne

Claire joined VANS In February 2014 following a 10-year career break to raise a family.  She moved to North Somerset from South Croydon in 2008 but prior to this she worked for an investment company in London, enduring the daily commute for about 10 years.

Volunteering plays an important part in her life, having volunteered in various capacities from as young as 14. Her current volunteering role is as a helper at a local weekly coffee morning.  She often volunteers for a local Secondary school, signing students in and out, when rehearsing for their whole-school productions.

She is a keen board gamer and huge fan of live music, spending a lot of her spare time playing board games and attending board gaming events – with her family and friends, attending local gigs in small venues – usually involving the bands her own children are in, and she sings in a local adult gospel choir.  Claire also enjoys travelling overseas, but this is becoming harder to do, due to the increasing cost of living.

Claire is looking forward to continuing to recruit volunteers into meaningful roles within Children’s Centres, working with the sector to increase the number of young volunteers, and carry on with supporting the North Somerset Wellbeing Collective.

Bernie Micklewright

Bernie joined VANS in September 2018.  Prior to this she worked for the local authority in Human Resources, she has a strong public sector background in HR.  She has also previously undertaken volunteering with Weston HospiceCare.

Bernie leads VANS volunteering and events programme and is responsible for ensuring the smooth running of the volunteering service and development of the programme through the recruitment and training of new volunteers. Bernie is responsible for the online volunteer centre, a database of hundreds of volunteering opportunities with organisations/groups across North Somerset.  Registering with the online centre gives potential volunteers access to the opportunities enabling them to add value to the local communities by connecting them with organisations across North Somerset who are looking for volunteers. In addition, she actively promotes the service through local events.   Bernie is also responsible for the North Somerset Community Lottery and supporting the good causes who participate and who raise money through lottery ticket sales.

Bernie enjoys a number of social activities including theatre trips and eating out and also loves to spend time with her young grandson.

Sue Stone

Sue has worked in a variety of roles in the health service and private sector and her experience covers service improvement, data /business analysis, complaint management, patient and public involvement, training and project management.

Sue has been a volunteer with Healthwatch North Somerset where she trained to become a Volunteer Co-ordinator for ‘Enter and View’. She was a member of their Prioritisation Panel. She also helped at a local primary school with their library.

David Crossman

After a lengthy career in Local Government David is now working in the voluntary sector, as Equalities Co-ordinator at VANS, helping to prevent marginalisation by promoting positive values and inclusive behaviour.

His role is to encourage others to celebrate diversity and to strengthen community links across existing networks and support groups, working to widen opportunities connect and to give local people a greater say in how everyday services that impact on our day-to-day lives are provided.

He’s always had a keen interest supporting others and has been a volunteer in the past, spending time abroad on environmental and community projects, being involved in youth work and as a governor at a local school.  Each experience has been different, but all of them have allowed him to grow as a person and to be actively involved in the things he cared about.

It’s the people he meets that are most interesting, alongside the variety and passion they show for the work that they do.  A real positive of working for a charity is that you get to use and develop a wide range of skills in support of a good cause and to help the lives of others. It’s largely this that motivates him.

Debbie Evans

Debbie has been a Careers Advisor for 30 years and has worked on a variety of projects and in various sectors including National Careers Service, working on New Deal contracts and other government programmes.

Debbie also designed and delivered bespoke careers advice services for specific client groups including unpaid carers through Alliance Homes, people with mental health conditions through Richmond Fellowship and adults with basic skills needs with CSV.

She has always been drawn to supporting those with additional barriers to finding work, learning, and volunteering and pride myself on working in a client-centred way and treating people as individuals with unique skills and attributes who just need extra support to achieve their goals.

As a dyslexic, she knows the struggles of accessing and achieving education and the frustration of wanting to learn new skills with a learning disability – she see this as a strength as can empathise with those who struggle. Despite the difficulties she has encountered, she is a qualified adult tutor and careers advisor.

She has always enjoyed working in the third sector and has secured two jobs in the past, having started in organisations as a volunteer – she is all too aware of the value volunteering has to enhance employability.

In her spare time she enjoys days out with friends visiting places of interest, doing art and craft activities and pub quizzes.  She is also a carer for her mum to help her to stay independent in her later years.

Kirsty Staunton

Denise Paviour

Denise spent most of her working life for Xerox UK. During her time there, she had various roles within the company including Executive Assistant, Business Support Analyst and Engineer Schedular.

She joined the vaccination programme as a volunteer in 2021 working first at Ashton Gate and then at UWE. Denise found her time as a volunteer to be very rewarding enjoying being part of a team supporting the community, and learning new skills.

She went on to become a site supervisor with the project and in January 2022 joined the team full-time as Community Engagement Lead. In this role she brings skills from her previous working life together with those she has learned being part of the vaccination programme.

Denise is now the Ageing Well Coordinator, supporting some of the programmes and initiatives focussed on ageing well across North Somerset.

In her spare time Denise enjoys spending time with her grandchildren and gardening.

            Tracy Edwards Brown

Tracy has over 24 years of experience in practising Community Development.  She started out by running a Parent and Toddler group where she lives in Withywood, this later lead onto her being a trustee and chair of a local organisation in Hartcliffe during the times of government funding for “deprived communities”.   

While supporting a family and volunteering, she secured a job as a Neighbourhood Facilitator with Bristol City Council, working in the North and Central areas of Bristol and leading Neighbourhood Forums.  12 years later, after resigning from her trustee duties and in need of a change she began working with older people as part of the Bristol Ageing Better project with Linkage Network.  At the end of a 3-year project and no more funding, she took a position at Eastside Community Trust where the trust secured St Monica Trust funding for 3 years to work with people over 55 in the area. 

At the end of 3 years of funding from her most recent position and continuing to volunteer as a walk leader in her local community, Tracy now works as Ageing Well Co-ordinator with VANS Improving Ageing in North Somerset, covering the Woodspring area.  An exciting position and unexpected role Tracy interviewed for whilst recovering from COVID. 

Sabah Arshad

Sabah is a full-time Ph.D. student at the school of education, University of Bristol.  Sabah’s primary research interest is in evaluating educational policies, with an emphasis on gender and social inequalities. Her research focuses on the role of education in terms of human capital theory.  Her academic interests include the evaluation of social policies and practices, the impact of conditional cash transfers on children’s education, health and wealth outcomes, social and gender equality policies, and community-engaged learning pedagogy.  Sabah holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration, specialising in Finance.  Sabah earned a Master of Science degree from the International Islamic University.

Along with her PhD project, she relishes providing community support and help to people in crisis, working in different part-time roles within the social and development sectors of Bristol since 2017.  In her previous part-time role at a Bristol-based charity organisation she was responsible for managing the fundraising events and assisting the marketing manager by supporting the website functions and updating social media profiles.  She possesses strong communication and IT skills, including Microsoft Office and G Suite applications.

Tours Blackwell

Tours has a passion for helping people, especially those who have suffered from domestic abuse.

Here at VANS, she manages the Reclaim Project, a free counselling service for people who have experienced domestic abuse. She is also a counsellor and sees private clients in her spare time.

When Tours is not at work or seeing clients, she enjoys weightlifting.