Change Makers: Leadership, Good Business, Ideas and Innovation

Rob Law MBE is the founder and CEO of Trunki, the brand behind the ride-on suitcase for children. His entrepreneurial journey has taken him from one of the most famous rejections on BBC Dragons' Den in 2006, to successfully building a team who have pioneered a new retail category of children’s travel products, designing and creating a range of innovative solutions which help families on the go. Si...

Claire Warner began her corporate career in 2003, joining the LVMH owned brand, Belvedere Vodka and was appointed Head of Spirit Creation and Mixology in 2009. In this role, Claire led the development of all new Belvedere expressions, as well as creating the global educational programmes for Belvedere. In 2015 Claire was awarded both Best International Brand Ambassador at Tales of the Cocktail, th...

Credited as the new face of American fashion by Vogue at the start of her career, Arizona Muse first gained exposure in 2010 when she was chosen to open and close Prada’s Spring-Summer 2011 catwalk show in Milan. She has since fronted advertising campaigns for the likes of Chloé, Karl Lagerfeld and Louis Vuitton, and has been in cast in shows for Burberry, Chanel and Dior. She was signed as the fa...

Mark Cuddigan joined Ella’s Kitchen in August 2011, drawn to a company whose founding mission is to improve children’s lives through developing healthy relationships with food. This purpose permeated throughout the business and continues to be a guiding principle today. Mark is a passionate advocate of business being used as a force for good and through his leadership at Ella’s, he exemplifies how...

Throughout her career, Imandeep Kaur has focused on convening and building community, the role of citizens in radical systemic change, and how we together create more democratic, distributed, open source social and civic infrastructure. Immy is a co-founder and director of CIVIC SQUARE, a public square, neighbourhood lab, and creative + participatory platform focused on regenerative civic and soci...

Paul Drechsler was appointed the Chair of London First in 2018. He is Chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce ICC (UK), Non-Executive Director of Greencore Plc, and Independent Director of Schroder & Co. Ltd. Paul is Chancellor of Teesside University and a member of the Global Advisory Board of Trinity College Dublin. Paul was Chairman of Bibby Line Group from 2014 to 2020. Before th...

Dame Evelyn Glennie is the first person in history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest orchestras, conductors and artists. Evelyn paved the way for orchestras globally to feature percussion concerti when she played the first percussion concerto in the history of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992. Evelyn has...

John Rutter was born in London and studied music at Clare College, Cambridge. He first came to notice as a composer during his student years; much of his early work consisted of church music and other choral pieces including Christmas carols. From 1975–79 he was Director of Music at his alma mater , Clare College, and directed the college chapel choir in various recordings and broadcasts. Since 19...

Obsessed with cows as a little girl, Ara Kusuma asked for a cow of her own when she was 10. She and her parents set off to Central Java to visit a few farms and learn the best way to raise and care for farm animals. The first farm they went to had 1,500 cows living in clean, healthy conditions. But at the next stop, they found a different reality. Ara wanted to know, “What if all animals could liv...

Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur with a long record of founding organisations and public service. As a student, he founded organisations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. After graduation from Harvard, he received an M.A. from Balliol College in Oxford University. In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law Sch...

In 2012 Richard joined Iceland Foods, the company established by his parents Malcolm and Rhianydd in 1970. He worked full-time as a shelf-stacker and cashier in Iceland stores in London for a year, before becoming a store manager in Swiss Cottage and moving to Iceland head office at Deeside, Flintshire, in 2013. After various head office roles, including a spell running Iceland’s International div...

Amy Williams is on a mission to convert people’s attention and data into funding for good causes around the world. She co-founded Good-Loop in 2016 after turning her hand from advertising at Ogilvy to volunteering at a soup-kitchen in Argentina. Today working with the likes of Nestlé, Unilever, the Co-Op, Coca-Cola and H&M, Amy’s ‘ethical ad platform’ rewards consumers who choose to engage wit...

Terry Waite has a long and distinguished record as a former hostage negotiator (having been a hostage), humanitarian, and author. Terry comes from Cheshire, where he was born in 1939, and on was first appointed as Education Advisor to the Anglican Bishop of Bristol. He and his family moved to Uganda in 1969 where he worked for the first African Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Ar...

Our guest today is the award-winning Times journalist and bestselling author, Melanie Reid. In 2010, a riding accident saw Melanie break both her neck and back, leaving her paralysed. Since then, she has written about her attempts to come to terms with her disability in her weekly ‘Spinal Column’ for The Times. Her bestselling memoir ‘The World I Fell Out Of’ won the Saltire Scottish non-fiction b...

I. Stephanie Boyce is a solicitor, an experienced general counsel and governance expert. Stephanie has worked in-house at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. She currently sits on the Law Society of England and Wales Council holding one of the seats from the Women Lawyers Division and is a Fellow of the the Chartered Governance Inst...

For Michael Grade, a distinguished and highly successful career in showbusiness appeared to be in the genes. Born in 1943 in London, England, his father was Leslie Grade and his uncles were Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont. Michael became a trainee journalist on the Daily Mirror in 1960, before becoming deputy controller of entertainment programmes at London Weekend Television in 1973. In 1984, he ga...

Colleen is the CEO of the Amos Bursary, founding the charity due to her passion for education and tackling underachievement. Through her expert skills of bringing together elite universities and leading international firms, providing internships and personal development programmes, she has transformed the live of countless young men to secure professional careers by developing them into the UK’s f...

Since 2009, The Amos Bursary has been helping Britain’s talented young men of African and Caribbean heritage, who attend state schools from challenging environments, fulfil their academic potential, attend top universities, secure good professional jobs and give back to society. In 2021 for the first time it will also be welcoming young women to apply. The Amos Bursary brings together universities...

Mark rose to prominence 25 years ago, as part of the hugely influential team behind The League of Gentlemen. Alongside Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson, the four brought their unique brand of humour to the mainstream, creating a critically-acclaimed series combining laughter, irreverence and horror. Mark’s career has taken him from Dr Who to Dracula, Wolf Hall to Westeros and per...

Joseph Galliano is the co-founder and CEO of Queer Britain, the charity working to establish the UK’s first national LGBTQ+ museum – a place as exciting as the people, stories and ideas it explores and celebrates. It will be an essential place for all regardless of sexuality or gender identity, to find out about the culture they have been born into, have chosen or seek to understand. It will help...

Sir Michael Morpurgo, began writing stories in the early '70's, in response to the children in his class at the primary school where he taught in Kent. One of the UK’s best-loved authors and storytellers, Michael was appointed Children’s Laureate in 2003, a post he helped to set up with Ted Hughes in 1999. He was awarded an OBE in 2007 and a Knighthood in the New Year’s Honours in 2018 for service...

Yanis Varoufakis is a member of Greece’s Parliament and parliamentary leader of MeRA25, the Greek political party belonging to DiEM25 – Europe’s first transnational paneuropean movement. Previously, he served as Greece’s Finance Minister during the first six months of 2015. Yanis read mathematics and economics at the Universities of Essex and Birmingham and subsequently taught economics at the Uni...

Lord O’Neill is currently the vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, chairman of Chatham House and a member of Shelter Social Housing Commission. Since leaving government in September 2016, having been Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, Jim moved to the crossbenches of the House of Lords. He led an independent review into antimicrobial resistance (AMR) for David Cameron from late 20...

Dr Pippa Malmgren is an American economist, policy analyst and best-selling author. She served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States, George W. Bush, for Economic Policy on the National Economic Council and is a former member of the U.S. President's Working Group on Financial Markets. On top of being a Board member for the Department for International Trade, Pippa is the found...

Ryan C. Crocker is a career ambassador within the U.S. Foreign Service. Ambassador Crocker was in the Foreign Service for 37 years and, after retiring, was recalled to active duty by President Obama in 2011 to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan. His previous appointments included service as the U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Crocker has received man...