Steve Broome
Director of Research

Steve has 12 years experience of researching community regeneration and economic development agendas.  He specialises in understanding impact through mixed methods research designs.  Steve joined the RSA in October 2008 after working on a London New Deal for Communities programme, where he led evaluation and strategy, community safety and community development programmes.

Alasdair Jones
Senior Researcher

Alasdair joined the RSA in September 2009 after working at the charity Living Streets where he co-ordinated their policy and campaigns work in London with the aim of improving streetscapes across the capital.  Prior to this he worked as a Senior Researcher at the British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA) and as an Associate for CAG Consultants where he specialised in regeneration and sustainability projects.

Before working in the community regeneration field, Alasdair read Geography at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for which he was awarded a first class honours degree with distinction. Having received an ESRC studentship to fund his postgraduate studies, Alasdair switched to the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences to undertake an MPhil in Sociology in which he graduated with distinction. This research-based degree comprised a thesis on the relationship between physical access to the urban public realm and our sense of citizenship.

From Cambridge, Alasdair transferred his ESRC funding to the LSE’s Cities Programme where he pursued his interest in urban sociology under the supervision of Dr Fran Tonkiss and Professor Richard Sennett. His thesis concerned the co-production, through design and use, of public space on London’s South Bank.  By developing and deploying a bespoke ethnographic approach he examined the ongoing redevelopment of the South Bank and the ways that this enabled, constrained and intersected with the social activities taking place there.


Jonathan Rowson
Senior Researcher

Jonathan holds a first class degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, an Ed.M from Harvard University in Mind, Brain and Education, and an ESRC funded PhD from Bristol University. His Doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Guy Claxton, is an inter-disciplinary and multi-method examination of the concept of wisdom, including a detailed analysis of the challenge of overcoming the psycho-social constraints that prevent people becoming 'wiser', similar to what the RSA terms ‘The Social Aspiration Gap’.

A chess Grandmaster, Jonathan was British Champion for three consecutive years 2004-6. Prior to joining the RSA he was a professional player, teacher, and writer. Jonathan views chess as a form of praxis in which we come to better understand our own natures, and has written accessible books on the subject that have been translated into several foreign languages. An invited speaker at International Conferences on Learning, Thinking, and Sport, he has written for The New Statesman magazine, The Herald, and has featured on BBC Radio and Television.

His interest in Connected Communities and Social Capital strategies stems partly from his role in publicising research funded by The Scottish Executive that demonstrated the positive role of chess in raising Social Capital in deprived areas in his home town of Aberdeen.

Fellows

Stephen Feber
FRSA
 
Stephen Feber, FRSA, has started a number of regeneration projects in the UK with a social enterprise focus including the Eureka! children's museum in Halifax and the Stirling Prize winning Magna science centre in South Yorkshire.  He is currently development director of the Big Lottery funded £30m redevelopment project, Heartlands, in Cornwall. He has a long term interest in developing local democracy by building the human, physical and knowledge infrastructures which support the growth of social capital. He approached the RSA in the summer of 2008 with proposals for action research to undertake social network analysis in different settings. These proposals have helped inform the Connected Communities initiative.

Alison Gilchrist
FRSA, Independent Consultant

Alison Gilchrist is an independent consultant who has been involved in community development for more than 27 years: as neighbourhood worker, lecturer, writer, trainer, manager, director, policy adviser and researcher. She has worked at local, regional and national levels of government, with community, voluntary and public sector organisations. Her particular interests are networking and equalities practice. Alison is the author of the Well Connected Community, to be published in July 2009. This is a guide to using theories of social capital and social change for practitioners, in particular looking at how network models can be used in community development work.

Carolyn Hassan
FRSA, Director, Knowle West Media Centre

Knowle West Media Centre is based in Bristol, England and is engaged in developing the creative, educational and social potential of people within the surrounding community and the city as a whole. The media centre acts as a creative focal point for the community, providing access to project facilities, training and mentoring, as well as managed workspace for local businesses.