• Bob BensonTrustee, and Grants Committee Chair

Bob is an executive director whose career has focused on enabling societal change for marginalised communities and individuals. He has a sustained track record leading on the equality and human rights of disabled, older people and BME communities in the public and voluntary sector. He’s had considerable campaigning, lobbying and networking success.

Most recently, Bob was responsible for leading on the transformation of community services within Scope to create a more relevant provision of support for profoundly disabled adults and children based on principals of independent living.

• Anna Bennett

Anna Bennett is a charity lawyer at Morton Fraser, Solicitors. She is involved with ongoing advice for a range of Scotland's best known charities. She has particular expertise on the formation and administration of charitable trusts and foundations.

Recently Anna's work has included dealing with a number of applications for charity reorganisations, including the transfer of assets from a significant charitable trust which featured as an example in OSCR’s annual review.

• Frank Burns

Frank is an Honours Graduate with over 25 year’s experience of the management, development, and direction of studies, projects and programmes at local, regional and national levels. His early career began as a Project Manager for a Chronically Sick and Disabled Project within Strathclyde Regional Council. He was also the manager of a Community Employment Group within an inner city area of multi-deprivation working with young adults facing severe life challenges. He produced scripts for Scottish Television social action programming, having begun his career within the field of genetics research.

Joining Lanarkshire’s first Council for Voluntary Service - ALVO in 1988 as its Chief Executive, he has been responsible for developing over £18 million of initiatives from very small scale projects to multi-million programmes. He has been active on a range of national bodies to improve infrastructure support to the local organisations that make up Scotland’s Voluntary Sector.
He was instrumental in establishing a Leader Programme for South Lanarkshire, and has been heavily involved in the Scottish Leader Programme - having been part of the writing team for the South Lanarkshire Programme; and served on the Scottish Programme Monitoring Committee from 2003 - 2009.

He spent a number of years serving voluntary sector interests on the Lanarkshire New Deal Strategic Partnership, building a solid working relationship with job centre managers and directors of service. He is currently a trustee of Voluntary Health Scotland, and a member of the Institute of Leadership and Management.

• Pam Judson

Pam Judson is fundraising consultant and trainer working with small to medium sized community based voluntary organisations in Scotland and overseas. She is the author of several publications about fundraising and generating income from friends and members groups. She has a long-standing commitment and interest in women’s issues stemming from her activist days in the 1970s and has worked with a wide range of women’s organisations in the USA and Scotland.

• Ross McCulloch

Ross McCulloch splits his time between his role as Development Manager with Family Mediation South Lanarkshire and running social media consultancy Third Sector Lab. Ross has previously worked in community planning, education and employability.

He is passionate about social media for social good, working with various third sector organisations on website development, social media strategy and training. As well as organising the bi-annual Be Good Be Social events he is also the founder of ThirdSectorForums.co.uk - an online space for charity professionals to learn, debate and connect.

Ross is a keen mountain biker but wishes he had the time to get better at it!

• Ella SimpsonTrustee

Ella is the Director at Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations Council and has over 30 years experience working in the voluntary sector. She has provided support and care to children, young people, and people with learning disabilities, mental health issues and physical disabilities. She has managed and lead organisations working in the adult care and homeless sectors.

Ella also has a long history of volunteering she is also currently a director of Wicked World Tours a very small charity which assists disabled people to travel. She is a director of STAND International a charity which enables Scottish people who have experienced homelessness to volunteer with organisations in Eastern Europe.

Ella sits on both the board and grants committee for the Scottish Community Foundation.

• Alison Smith

Alison is Senior External Funding Officer with Angus Council managing the external funding team, who amongst other roles, actively support and assist community and voluntary groups in Angus to source and apply for funding. She has been with the council since 1996 and has built up a broad knowledge of lottery, European and trust funding and is currently a member of the Lowlands and Uplands Scotland Programme Priority 2 ESF Advisory Group and Vice-Chair and lead partner representative on the Rural Tayside LEADER Programme.

A fluent Spanish speaker. she previously taught Spanish and continues to enjoy the culinary delights of Spain and travelling. Alison is married with one daughter.