Our trustees

Emma Baylis
Emma is a Managing Director at Interpath, a global financial advisory firm which combines the energy, ambition and agility of a young organisation with the experience and quality of a Big Four firm. Emma’s responsibilities at Interpath include Head of ESG through which she works closely with the firm’s senior leadership to help shape the responsible business agenda including diversity, inclusion and social impact. Prior to joining Interpath, Emma was a partner at the Big Four firm KPMG where she worked for 21 years in the firm’s tax practice. During that time, Emma worked in a range of roles including on the firm’s Tax leadership team working across the UK regions and in London as well as internationally through her leadership of the UK firm’s Global Mobility practice.

Throughout her career, Emma has been a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in the workplace and the wider responsible business agenda. Her interest in social mobility and socio-economic inclusion was shaped by her own experience of joining the professional services as a non-graduate in the 1990s. She has continued to advocate for breaking down barriers in entry routes to careers in professional services and more generally.

Deborah Finkler
Deborah spent more than 30 years as a partner in leading international law firm, Slaughter and May, and from 2022 to 2025 was the firm's first Managing Partner.  As Managing Partner, Deborah led on a number of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives, both within the firm and the wider legal community. Between 2022 and 2024 she was the co-chair of Legal CORE, a collective of City law firms brought together to tackle the under-representation of ethnic minority lawyers in the legal sector.  In 2024, following work undertaken with the Bridge Group, Slaughter and May was the first major law firm to commit to social mobility targets for its workforce. Deborah is currently vice-president of the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk, which supports lawyers and human rights defenders working in precarious circumstances, and for eleven years was a trustee of Trust for London, a charitable foundation providing grants and thought leadership in connection with the remediation of poverty and inequality.

André Flemmings
André has worked in financial and professional services sector for twenty years and has specialised in Culture, Engagement, Wellbeing, People Transformation and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) for over fifteen years. With a background in financial communications, André became the Head of Communications and a Deputy Director at recruitment tech specialists, Rare 2011. Whilst there, he worked with their financial services and strategy consulting clients to develop pipeline programmes for underrepresented and low-income candidates at the entry level. He also worked with Rare’s Founder to devise the launch of the Contextual Recruitment System, an industry-leading recruitment tool that helps assessors discern candidate potential by, amongst other things, considering applicants’ socio-economic backgrounds.

Over much of his career, André has held recruitment, talent pipeline, engagement and inclusion roles in organisations including Deutsche Bank, Macfarlanes, a leading US-heritage law firm, and Linklaters. At the latter, and as part of its early career team, he designed and launched the firm’s social mobility and careers inclusion strategies, Making Links, and championed process improvements such as virtual internships, abandoning rolling recruitment, and generally improving access to technical and cultural information available online for all prospective talent. In another role as WH Smith PLC’s first Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing, he shaped its sustainability and inclusion strategies, strengthening its people governance. Aside from working with commercial teams collaboratively to develop inclusive product lines, André also aided the growth of the company’s socioeconomic infrastructure, through the encouragement of closer industry association ties, helping to lay the foundations of a junior talent pipeline, creating a mentoring programme for mid-level talent, and better leveraging existing measures and augmenting staff benefits, wellbeing and financial support.

Sam Fraine
Sam is passionate about supporting young people to succeed, the golden thread running through his career. He is currently Head of Philanthropy at Impetus, a national education and youth employment charity. Impetus invests over the long term in high-potential non-profits that support young people experiencing disadvantage, reaching 475,000 young people in 2025/26, and its policy team also builds the case for large-scale government intervention through independent research, targeted campaigns and influencing. Prior to joining Impetus, Sam spent several years at leading social mobility charity, upReach, growing philanthropic income and supporting the charity's national expansion.

An enthusiastic linguist, the first chunk of Sam's career was spent working in Berlin and Lyon, before pursuing a career in charity fundraising. Sam has a BA French & Spanish from the University of Bristol, an Executive Master's in Leadership from Bayes Business School, and a Diploma in Fundraising from the Chartered Institute of Fundraising.

Reverend Josh Harris
Josh is Priest-in-Charge of the Guild Church of St Katharine Cree in the City of London, where he is leading the church's revitalisation as a multilingual community hub, workplace chaplaincy, and catalyst for civic renewal. He is also Director of the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work, which brings together workers, businesses, and civic and political leaders to build a fairer economy in the City. He currently serves as Chaplain to the Lady Mayor of London, Dame Susan Langley DBE, whose agenda to ‘unsquare the Square Mile’ includes a substantial focus on developing new opportunities for people to access careers in the City.

Josh began his career as a Parliamentary Researcher in the House of Commons before moving into policy research and analysis at the Institute for Government, where he led work on supporting effective decision making as a Senior Researcher. He was seconded to the Prime Minister's Implementation Unit in the Cabinet Office and held a Junior Associate Fellowship at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge. He subsequently worked in the community and faith sector, managing a major project for the Centre for Theology and Community and advising on refugee and migration policy through the Good Faith Partnership.

A first-generation university graduate, Josh brings to the Bridge Group both a personal understanding of the barriers that shape access to opportunity and a career spent working at the intersection of policy, community, and institutional change.

Ross Murdoch
Ross is a member of the senior leadership team and a Head of Department at the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s financial regulator. He sponsors the FCA’s Social Mobility Network, which has led a range of initiatives to improve socio-economic diversity within and beyond the organisation. He has also supported charities focused on social mobility and inclusion and has served as a jury member of the Ethics and Trust in Finance Global Prize. In his role at the FCA, he leads work to investigate and prosecute financial crime and previously spent a year on secondment at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Fraud Section.

Lydia Nicola
Lydia is Head of IT Operations at Amnesty International, where she leads IT infrastructure, operations, and services across the organisation’s offices worldwide. Before Amnesty, she spent several years leading IT services, data, strategy and cyber security across a consortium of charities, and worked as an independent consultant advising start-ups and non-profits on data and digital strategy. She also sits on the IT steering group for Betknowmore UK. She has been named in Computing’s 2025 IT Leaders 100, the Global Future CIO 100 in 2024 and 2025 and the UK Next CIO 2024 and was awarded IT Leader of 2025 at the Women in Tech Excellence Awards.

Her work is grounded in a commitment to public good and a belief that technology should enable rather than obstruct. She has a particular interest in the social impact of digital infrastructure, in inclusive governance practices, and in the ethical adoption of emerging technologies - and is currently working to put together a nonprofit AI in Practice group. Outside her professional role, she mentors IT professionals from under-represented backgrounds and provides voluntary digital and governance support to other charities.

Simon Picot
Simon is Senior Director and Head of Oncology Research & Development Portfolio Management at the pharmaceutical company GSK. Throughout his career, Simon has brought his commitment to diversity and inclusion to improve recruitment processes; at GSK, Simon has piloted initiatives to increase the diversity of the interview panel to enable a better-rounded perspective on candidates. He was previously a strategy consultant at McKinsey, where he was a core part of the recruiting team that expanded outreach to diversify beyond the South-East. Simon’s experience includes widening access to public health in low-income countries: he was part of the World Health Organization emergency planning team during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and later as Risk Manager at Gavi, the vaccine alliance, supporting global vaccination programmes.

Simon is currently a mentor for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds in London with the Youth Careers Collective (formerly Spark!), and also for young people in the North-East, where he lives with his family, through the Social Mobility Foundation.

Tim Smith (Chair)
Tim is a solicitor and partner in the London office of international law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP (BCLP).  He is co-head of BCLP’s “Social Inclusion” diversity group. Since the group launched in 2015, BCLP has regularly been ranked amongst the top employers in the Social Mobility Foundation’s Employer Index. BCLP was also one of the first law firms to successfully embed contextual recruitment tools in its graduate recruitment and has won awards for its apprenticeship training programme.

Tim is also a former trustee of the Aspiring Solicitors Foundation and is a current Board member of the legal social mobility charity PRIME. In addition to his work as a solicitor, Tim has sat as a part-time Judge since 2013.

Ann Swampillai (Deputy Chair)
Ann is a Senior Civil Servant who joined the UK Diplomatic Service in 2004, and currently serves as Deputy Director, Transformation, a role that seeks to harness the diversity of the UK’s workforce to maintain the Civil Service’s cutting-edge capability. She is an experienced international lawyer with over 10 years’ experience of advising FCO ministers on high-profile issues; and is passionate about equality, diversity and inclusion, having developed extensive cross-Whitehall and industry networks to help learn from and share best practice. She is also involved in the Baytree Centre’s PEACH mentoring programme, helping girls and young women from less advantaged backgrounds through providing regular support with school work and advice around career opportunities.

Andrea Waugh
Andrea is an Associate at Freshfields and sits on the Freshfields’ Social Mobility Network committee. She founded the firm’s ‘Care in the City’ initiative which aims to bring care-experienced individuals working in professional services organisations together through networking events. She holds a dual-qualifying law degree in Scots and English law from the University of Aberdeen. Andrea is a former Making Links Scholar and was elected as the voice of young carers in Scotland between 2014 and 2017. She formally served on the Children's Panel, a form of Care and Justice tribunal, where decisions are made to protect children at risk.

Laura Yeates
Having joined Latham & Watkins in January 2023, Laura is now a Global Senior Manager in the Organisational Development & Strategy function. She also leads the Community Engagement & Volunteering strategy for the London office. Prior to joining Latham, she spent 16 years as Head of Graduate Talent at Clifford Chance, where she oversaw the graduate recruitment and development teams, both of which won numerous awards for ground-breaking initiatives focused on improving access to the legal profession, innovation in the sector and tackling the stigma of mental health and sexual harassment in the workplace. She was also Co-Chair of the London Inclusion Committee.

In 2020 Laura founded the Sustainable Recruitment Alliance, a collective of employers and universities committed to reducing carbon emissions associated with early talent. With over eighteen years of early talent experience and five years HR experience, she is also a Fellow of the CIPD, a Governor at Harris Academy Purley, sits on the University of Law’s Law School Advisory Board and is a member of Tender’s Corporate Advisory Board.

Laura has previously been an Opinion Leader for People in Law, Steering Committee member of GROW mentoring and a member of National Student Pride’s Corporate Advisory Board. She is also a former Board Director of the Institute of Student Employers. Laura was named LGBT+ Ally of the Year at the 2022 British LGBT+ awards and included in the Women of the Year awards 2022. In 2024 she was awarded Individual Leader of the Year at the Global Good Awards.