Ellie Hale

Ellie is fascinated by technology’s power to transform lives, systems and mentality. She is exploring how we can better navigate social and environmental change with both tech and governance that is more conscious, collaborative and caring.
‍
Ellie has been a member of Catalyst’s incubating organisation, CAST, since 2016. A keen network-builder and connector, she developed and led the Digital Fellowship programme for charity leaders and Design Hops (originally face-to-face training), in partnership with facilitators and infrastructure bodies across the country. During the pandemic she helped map and mobilise Catalyst’s ecosystem into a series of coordinated crisis responses. She led a team providing skills, relational and grant support to 223 grantees and 60+ digital partners.

As Catalyst’s inaugural ‘new team’ member, she worked with Stewards Cat Ainsworth, Dan Sutch, Nick Stanhope and Tessa Cooper to lay the groundwork for its next phase: designing participatory, network-led governance experiments; securing support from its founding funders for the continuation, momentum and transition of Catalyst; and recruiting her ace co-Producers, Jo and Siana.

She co-runs and nurtures peer communities including Tech for Good London, Tech for Good Brighton and Agencies for Good.
Outside of Catalyst, she is a proud Trustee of Quaker Social Action, volunteer with Animal Free Research UK and AnimalAid, and a qualified tower crane operator.

Megan Gray

Megan is passionate about the power of charities and other social sector organisations and how they can collaborate and be supported to lead change.

Megan joined Catalyst in May 2023. Before that she worked for 18 years at NCVO, most recently as director of strategy and transformation, where she drove significant change, including a radical and ambitious programme to scale NCVO’s impact through technology and digital approaches without increasing its cost base, and transforming NCVO into a more responsive and member-focused organisation.

Strategy design, development and implementation is the thread that has run through her career, from seven years developing support programmes for charities to help them develop strategies to respond to a changing world, followed by seven years focussing particularly on the impact and potential of digital and technology, and then leading the development of a coherent and compelling new strategy for NCVO.

Megan loves to work with curious, caring, and ambitious people, who value working in the open, sharing and collaborating. Alongside the creativity of setting strategies, just as important to Megan is the hard work of planning how to deliver; how to make the greatest impact with what are always finite resources and changing ways of working in subtle or fundamental ways.

Megan is an East Londoner, amateur musician (mainly choral singing these days) and Mum of two.

Sheeza Shah

Frustrated by wealth disparities and funders prioritising conventional products over impactful solutions, Sheeza has spent the last decade working across the tech, non-profit, and social enterprise sectors. She has helped numerous enterprises with business and fundraising strategies, raising over £300,000 through UpEffect, a tech-for-good crowdfunding platform with a 95% success rate. Sheeza has embedded sustainable frameworks into organisations and guided social entrepreneurs toward meaningful impact.
‍
As Director of Operations and Partnerships for Zebras Unite (ZU), she developed policies, protocols, and resources to manage the operational stability of this hybrid, cooperative movement. She also launched the Zebra Solidarity Fund, inspired by the Islamic Zakat framework, a 2.5% wealth tax, and is currently designing an Islamic finance instrument at UpEffect aimed at fostering racial equity.

A Post Growth Institute Fellow and a leading voice on Islamic finance, Sheeza has been recognised by the Financial Times, Computer Weekly, and others for her work. Passionate about regenerative and community-owned models, she believes true economic equity requires shifting away from extractive practices. As Catalyst's co-executive director, Sheeza is eager to advance the network’s vision of using liberatory technology to address systemic global injustices.

Hannah Turner-Uaandja

Hannah is a public involvement and engagement worker with nearly 15 years of experience. She is passionate about involving people with lived experience in shaping the systems, services, and products that serve us all. With a focus on power-sharing and power-transferring methodologies, she has led and facilitated involvement and co-production projects over the years, including strategic priority-setting, citizens' juries, public involvement in governance, peer research, service design, and community engagement initiatives.
‍
In 2024, Hannah joined Catalyst as the Participatory Engagement Lead, where she will work with partner organisations to advance tech justice efforts. Her work is shaped by her lived experience and formal education on race, class, and social change, and she is dedicated to centering decolonial feminism in her practice.

In her spare time, Hannah is a mother of two and volunteers as a non-executive director at her local dance organisation, Company Chameleon. She is also an active member of the nonfiction BookTok community, where she learns in community with people from around the world to further decolonise her perspective on justice, equity, and liberation.

Kate Swade

For the past 10 years Kate has been helping to set up and run Shared Assets CIC, a think and do tank working to create a more just land system through practical projects that reconnect people and land. She has recently stepped back from that role and become freelance. She is helping establish a spin-out from Shared Assets, the Digital Commons Cooperative, as a mapping and data software community tech start up, and it's this work that has sparked her interest in the digital world.  

She has enjoyed building her understanding of the tech landscape and particularly the critical tech and civic tech worlds, and had been following Catalyst's work with interest, so she was really excited to see this role come up!Her main area of expertise is around governance - both as an adviser to complex land-based projects on governance models, and also as an experienced trustee and non-exec director.

She is really interested in governance as a potentially transformational force, and is particularly interested in the organisational processes that we use, and how they can move us away from systems of dominance and control. At Shared Assets she and her colleagues spent a lot of time thinking about how they worked and she is so excited to learn from all the work Catalyst has been doing in this area too!