Our Advisory Board

Allan currently serves as Deputy Chairman of the West Midlands Region and on the Association Finance Board at Conservative HQ. He was elected to Coventry City Council in 2008 and is currently in his fourth year as Deputy Leader of the Opposition at the City Council. He has been a member of the Licensing and Regulatory Committee, Planning Committee, Audit Committee and has held a variety of Shadow Cabinet roles since 2010. He has previously worked as an adviser to the Chief Whip of the Conservative Delegation of MEPs in the UK, Brussels and Strasbourg, and as Head of Office for a Member of Parliament and Government Minister. His previous positions include Rolls-Royce in business relations and as Public Affairs Adviser at Cadent, formerly National Grid Gas Distribution. Allan has held a variety of Non-Executive Directorships including at Whitefriars Housing, part of the WM Housing Group, one of the region’s largest not-for-profit social housing businesses. He has also served on the Board at the Bond’s Hospital Estate Charity in Coventry and spent five years on the Board of Trustees at the Coventry and Migrant Refugee Centre, which provides information and practical help to refugees and asylum seekers in the Coventry area. Following the Mayoral election, Allan was asked by the newly elected Mayor, Andy Street CBE, to join his team as Senior Policy Adviser at the West Midlands Combined Authority. In his spare time, he is a long-suffering supporter of Newcastle United.

Stephen was formerly Director of Faculty and Professor of Strategy at Birmingham Business School and prior to that held senior positions at the Universities of Bath and Warwick. Stephen is an industrial economist by training and is a leading international scholar in business ethics and corporate social responsibility, specialising in how organisations build and manage mutually rewarding relationships with stakeholders. Stephen has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals in business and management studies including the Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies. His research has been cited more than 7,000 times and he has held visiting positions at Lund University in Sweden and George Washington University in the United States. Stephen has a demonstrable commitment to mentoring and professional development, having supervised 15 PhD students to completion and led numerous development workshops for early-career researchers. Throughout his career, Stephen has contributed significantly to academic leadership within the scholarly and professional community. He is a former president of the International Association of Business and Society, and an active member of the Academy of Management, where he has served as secretary, representative at large, and newsletter editor for the Social Issues in Management Division, as well as leader of the Division doctoral consortium and a panel member for the junior faculty consortium. He currently serves as an associate editor at the British Journal of Management, and as a member of the editorial boards of Business & Society and Business Ethics Quarterly. He has served as member of the Chartered Association of Business Schools’ (CABS) Research Committee and is a member of the Scientific Committee for the influential CABS Academic Journal Guide (the ‘ABS list’).

Andraea has over 30 years’ experience in the international corporate commercial sector.  She has shaped and lead the corporate social responsibility and sustainability business agendas in several international consumer goods companies. Most recently she was the leader of this agenda at Coty Inc, the world’s third largest beauty company, headquartered in the USA. Prior to that she led this responsibility in Denmark-headquartered Carlsberg A/S, one of the world’s leading brewers; using its profit to fund an internationally renowned science & art foundation.  Before that she led much of the responsible growth agenda at Reckitt Benckiser PLC, a world leader in health, personal and hygiene products, and Cadbury Schweppes PLC, both headquartered in UK.  She has worked on the responsible growth agendas and challenges in businesses in over 60 countries across all continents.  

Having championed the agenda at Board level, Andraea is passionate about ensuring that responsible growth thinking is built into the DNA of business managers and leaders as they develop through their careers, and is core to the strategies of all businesses across the globe.     

Andraea spent her early career in consultancy, specialising in marketing and PR and later in internal change management working with a wide range of global corporations including Diageo, Aon, Shell, HSBC, Avon, De la Rue and Lloyds TSB, amongst others.  Andraea started her career working in the Houses of Parliament and politics.

She was educated at Oxford and Exeter Universities where she was an undergraduate in Chemistry, and CASS Business School, where she did her MBA.  She has been a visiting lecturer on Services Marketing at CASS. Andraea has authored several articles on communication and change management, and co-edited ‘Understanding Organisational Dynamics’ (Routledge).

Andraea is a member of Birmingham University Business School’s Advisory Board.

Tom Levitt is a writer and consultant on responsible and sustainable business and the author of several books including ‘The Company Citizen’ (2018) and ‘The Courage to Meddle’ (2020). A former Member of Parliament (Labour, 1997-2010) and a serial charity chair, his clients have included major businesses, think tanks, councils, social enterprises and others. He’s a co-founder of the award-winning social enterprise, Fair for You, and chairs a Taskforce on ‘Business Schools and the Public Good’ for the Chartered Association of Business Schools. Having studied how small businesses engage with communities, he’s a regular judge for the West London Business Awards. Tom was recently a member of a BSI committee looking at enhancing social value and, before that, of the independent sustainability advisory panel for Walgreen Boots Alliance. www.sector4focus.co.uk 

Jean has been Chief Executive of St Basils in Birmingham since 2000 and prior to that had over 20 years’ experience of managing housing and neighbourhood services in several Local Authorities in the North East and Midlands. St Basils is a registered housing association and charity providing a range of accommodation and support for young people aged 16–25 who are homeless or at risk in Birmingham and the West Midlands. Jean is currently Third Sector Assembly Champion for Housing in Birmingham and is a member of Birmingham’s Housing Partnership Board and Birmingham Social Housing Partnership Executive. She is Chair of the West Midlands’ Mayor’s Homelessness Taskforce and is a member of the Government’s Advisory Panel on Rough Sleeping and Homelessness. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham in 2006.

Nicola is Director of Business Development at Business in the Community, The Prince’s Responsible Business Network and was voted by The Sunday Times as one of the top 100 UK entrepreneurs giving back to future generations. Nicola is an active community investor, enterprise and age champion and is a passionate advocate of the Build Back Better movement. Nicola champions the global goals and facilitates many panel discussions and roundtables to drive the UK’s contribution towards 2030, she connects and convenes business leaders to achieve more together and mentors future ethical corporate pioneers and entrepreneurs. With a diverse business development background and over 20 years of experience in the education arena, Nicola has designed and delivered high-level policy, donor, partnership and marketing programmes for a wide variety of organisations and sectors globally. Nicola is a Trustee at The Conduit Trust and Sustainability West Midlands, an advisor for the Women’s Business Council and is also founder of a co-operative manufacturing company, which aims to provide employment to women with barriers to traditional workforce engagement.

From the Highlands of Scotland, via Rugby School in Uganda, after ten years of commercial management with BP and theological study at Oxford, David Urquhart served as a parish priest in Hull and Coventry and as Bishop of Birkenhead. He has been Bishop of Birmingham since 2006, and co-ordinated Birmingham’s Social Inclusion Process from 2010–2015, chaired the University of Birmingham’s Wealth Distribution Commission in 2013 and is a Director of the Birmingham Hippodrome. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Birmingham in July 2009. Bishop David is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Envoy to China, a Church Commissioner, a member of the UK Banking Standards Board and a governor of Rugby School. As a member of the House of Lords, where he is Convenor of the Lords Spiritual, he comments regularly on finance, business and the constitution while taking every opportunity he can to promote developments in Birmingham and the surrounding region.

Frederick F. Wherry is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He uses qualitative and comparative methods to ask how race and other identities matter in the marketplace, how individuals make sense of credit and debt, and why some communities (but not others) can more easily use their cultural traditions to revitalise their neighbourhoods. He was appointed President of the Social Science History Association in November 2017 and is also chair-elect of the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and past-chair of the Consumers and Consumption Section. He is co-editor, most recently, of Money Talks: How Money Really Works with Nina Bandelj and Viviana Zelizer and is general editor of The Sage Encyclopaedia of Economics and Society: Volumes 1–4. He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Consumption (with Ian Woodward) while finishing a new book titled Financial Citizenship (with Kristin Seefeldt and Anthony Alvarez). He co-edits a book series at Stanford University Press: Culture and Economic Life and he currently serves on the Community Development Research Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.