Our Trustees

Tamzin Aitken

Reina Alameddine

Hannah Barker

Vernon Freyer

Alison Griffin

Sally Hogg

Harmin Sijercic

Naomi Webb

Tamzin is a freelance arts manager, creative producer, and strategic consultant. She has extensive experience across the arts sectors, including theatre, opera, classical music and dance including working with Intermusica Artists’ Management, English National Opera, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Glyndebourne Opera, Wilton’s Music Hall, and the Royal Opera House. Tamzin is passionately committed to supporting the rights of all people, and successfully galvanised the music industry in January 2018, producing fundraising concert ‘A Child of Our Time’ at the Royal Festival Hall in aid of the Refugee Council's Children’s Section. Having worked with Play for Progress (which participated in the event), she is thrilled to be on the board and to support the organisation in its development.

After a number of years as a medical doctor in Lebanon, Reina is currently re-training as a GP in Leeds. Before moving to the UK, she worked extensively with refugees and marginalized populations in Lebanon. As Medical Director of a primary healthcare centre in Beirut, her work focused on ensuring equitable access to quality health services for refugees and the host community in Beirut as well as delivering care in mobile clinics and outreach centres.She provided care to young refugees who had fled conflict zones and survived traumatic immigration journeys, bearing witness to their stories of courage and determination. She also worked with the Ministry of Public Health on a national initiative to improve the quality of primary care services in Lebanon and has served as a member of several international teams providing training, mentoring and consultancy to organisations such as the World Health Organisation and UNHCR, with the aim of strengthening primary health workforce worldwide. Reina is excited to support the Play for Progress team in their work with young displaced people in the UK.

Hannah is a charity sector manager, experienced in supporting non-profits to maximise their reach and impact. Hannah has always been driven by her passion for supporting people to be the best they can be. She started her career in the local government sector, including advocating for policy change to enable disadvantaged children and young people to be better recognised and supported. She then took her passion for supporting marginalised people and communities to Spring Impact, where she has worked as a consultant and manager supporting a range of non-profits to develop strategies and plans for scaling their impact. As a huge lover of music herself, Hannah knows how valuable the arts are in building connections, confidence and changing perceptions. She is thrilled to be a part of the Play for Progress family.

As a passionate advocate of social enterprise as a vehicle for delivering change to under-privileged communities, Vernon currently works as a Social Impact Consultant on a range of impact measurement projects at Make An Impact CIC. Previously, he worked as a recovery practitioner working with people living with drug and alcohol addiction where he worked with a caseload of young people to support their recovery. With first-hand experience of the immigration system in the UK, where he arrived nearly 20 years ago as a young man, he has a deep understanding of the value of community for unaccompanied young people seeking asylum, and is looking forward to bringing his insight and experience to the Board of Trustees.

Alison works as Head of Influencing on conflict and humanitarian issues at Save the Children UK, where she leads a team to influence policymakers and galvanise the public to take action. She’s passionate about building power alongside children and those with lived experience to make change. Previously she’s led communications and fundraising at Refugee Action and before that spent time working on local advocacy projects in West Africa with Action Aid Senegal. As a keen pianist she knows the power of music in helping young people feel like themselves again and is really pleased to be able to support the Play for Progress team at such a vital time in UK politics and culture.

Sally is Senior Policy Fellow at the Centre for Research on Play, Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at the University of Cambridge. Sally is a specialist in childhood development, with a varied career including leadership roles in charities, national and local governments. Before joining PEDAL, Sally was Deputy Chief Executive at the Parent-Infant Foundation where she led work to raise awareness of the importance of the earliest years, and to drive change at a local and national level. She has also held other influential roles at the Maternal Mental Health Alliance and the NSPCC, where she developed and implemented research-led interventions. Sally started her career as a Civil Servant working on Children’s Policy in Westminster and in New South Wales, Australia. She is interested in the impacts of intergenerational trauma and has a strong belief in the power of play. 

A long-standing member of the team at Freedom from Torture, Harmin is a Music Therapist in the Children, Young People and Family Team, where he has developed a strong insight into the complex psychological and practical needs of young people who have experienced significant trauma. Having arrived in the UK as a refugee from Bosnia in 1992, he soon started working as an interpreter and then caseworker in Newcastle and later in Birmingham. Having grown up surrounded by music at home, and being a keen pianist, he now uses the medium of music to help heal others of their trauma and rebuild their lives. 

Naomi is a theatre producer and charity executive. She has worked at a number of major UK theatres, and as producer for internationally renowned theatre company Complicité. It was during this time that she first visited the Calais ‘Jungle’ refugee and migrant camp in 2015 and began to combine her arts experience with humanitarian work. She is currently Executive Director of Good Chance, an arts and human rights charity created out of the belief that art has a pivotal role to play in humanitarian crises. Good Chance now collaborates with refugee artists across all art forms and runs a range of programmes which bring together local people with refugees and asylum seekers across three interlinked strands of artistic work. Naomi believes passionately in the power of art to transcend borders and barriers and amplify important through often unheard voices, and she is delighted to support the Play for Progress team and their vital work with these exceptional young people.