Jess Steele

Background

About Jess Steele

Jess Steele was awarded an OBE in Jan 2016 for services to community assets in the UK. In April 2022 she completed a PhD from University of Leicester in 'Self-renovating neighbourhoods as an alternative to the false choice of gentrification or decline' Jess launched her company Jericho Road Solutions in May 2013. Having worked intensively as a local community activist - first in Deptford, then in Hastings - and at national level with BURA, DTA and Locality, it was time to bring all this experience together. Jericho Road connects neighbourhood and national perspectives, offering neighbourhood coaching to good people in interesting places doing ambitious projects, while working with government, funders, corporates and academics at national level to make neighbourhood change easier. Previously Jess was Director of Innovation at Locality, the national network of community-led organisations. She wrote the bid and led delivery on the £22M national Community Organisers programme and worked to establish the legacy body. On secondment to central government in 2009, Jess brought forward policy to support the meanwhile use of empty buildings for community benefit. She led the Meanwhile Project and was a non-executive director of Meanwhile Space CIC 2010-22. As a community activist and entrepreneur in South East London until 2002 she wrote "Turning the Tide: a history of everyday Deptford". She led the Get Set for Citizenship programme and established numerous social enterprises - a publishing company, an environmental consultancy, a children’s nursery and a community finance company. She founded the creative outreach charity Magpie Resource Library and published extensively on local history. She lives in and works from Hastings and has been deeply involved with the town for two decades. She played a leading role in the rescue of Hastings Pier from abandonment and dereliction (2006-16), then experienced the loss of the pier from community ownership in 2018, but went on to lead the rescue of other neighbourhood buildings, which are now all part of Hastings Commons. Expertise includes community asset development, local community enterprise, genuine welfare reform, community organising, and seaside regeneration. Skills include: connecting (people, ideas, projects), telling stories of what could be, and making some of that happen in a specific place. All her work aims to bring local people and practitioners into a more central role in shaping policy that affects their neighbourhoods and leading the delivery of change on the ground.