Meet the Staff

Jo Mackie - Chief Executive

I am incredibly proud and privileged to work with a very high quality small team to help the Wood Family Trust achieve its key objectives, giving me the unique opportunity to oversee the development of a young and dynamic Trust which can offer both expertise and finance to our carefully selected strategic partners.

As a new Trust we will continue to learn and develop, ensuring that we invest in dynamic, forward thinking organisations which deliver a blend of interventions which meet our objectives and achieve systemic impact.

We will constantly work to improve our understanding of a very complex landscape and continue to be proactive, take risks and make strategic investments based on key business principles to provide long term sustainable socio-economic benefits to our target communities and partners.

I am very fortunate to have a diverse and enterprising team to support our Sub Saharan and UK objectives. Our people will always be our success.

We have come to the conclusion that we will only be able to effectively develop our Market and Value Chain programmes in Sub Sahara Africa if we have a really high quality manager based there.  We are delighted that David Knopp has joined us as our Director of Africa, based in Kenya. David has a global reputation for his knowledge and success in Making Markets Work and value chain analysis and we believe we have a good opportunity to make a real impact under his leadership.

Caroline Gilbert has joined us as our UK Manager and she will responsible for managing and supporting our UK investment portfolio whilst analysing the market for new partners. Caroline comes with a very impressive background in the voluntary sector - blended with an acute understanding of business principles.

Caroline will be joining our already established UK team, Rachael Ashley – UK Investment Officer and Georgea Hughes - UK Investment Officer who have been critical in the start up stages of the Trust and will be essential in the successful operation of the Trust going forward.

David Knopp Director of Africa	Caroline Gilbert UK Investment Manager

Rachael Ashley UK Investment Officer	Georgea Hughes UK Investment Officer