Jess Steele

Background

About Jess Steele

Jess Steele was awarded an OBE in Jan 2016 for services to community assets in the UK. She launched Jericho Road Solutions in May 2013. Having worked intensively as a local community activist - first in Deptford, then in Hastings - and for the last 10 years at national level with BURA, DTA and Locality, it was time to bring all this experience together. The 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 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 remains a non-executive director of Meanwhile Space CIC. As a community activist and entrepreneur in South East London she wrote Turning the Tide, 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 played a leading role in the saving of Hastings Pier. Expertise includes community asset development, local community enterprise, genuine welfare reform, community organising, and seaside regeneration. All her work aims to bring local people and practitioners into a more central role in shaping policy that affects their neighbourhoods.