I am Benjamin Welby. I live in York. Moved here in 03 to study History, fell in love with my wife (the brains of this outfit, she’s doing a PhD in Chemistry) after which I did an MA in Post-War Reconstruction.
I’m a Christian. Our church meets at Vodka Revolution.
I support Bradford City. I lived there 88-95 before moving to mid-Devon.
I work in Hull. I’m coming to the end of the Council’s graduate scheme and have worked with schools, nurseries, bins, highways, spreadsheets, maps, consultations, funding formulae, comms, customer services and now, finally, the public through a project supporting housing standards for migrant households.
I’m a student. The council fund us through an MSc in Public Management from the Institute of Local Government (INLOGOV) that sees me deep in my dissertation.
I’m passionate about relationships and community. As a result I’m delighted to see the reimagining of the interaction between citizen and state that’s underpinning so much government innovation at the moment.
I’m excited by the potential of mashing up local government expertise and international development. Maybe we take bureaucracy too far but we shouldn’t forget how effective our local governance is. In post-conflict or development scenarios it’s often under valued or resourced which makes corruption and a lack of confidence inevitable.
I’m incredibly lucky to be exploring this at the moment. Hull is twinned with Freetown, Sierra Leone (where I did my MA research) and I’m part of a project that’s building procurement and contract/asset management capacity in the council there. The ambition is to help develop a waste strategy. Exciting stuff.