Meet the team
Let's work together to help your campaign deliver.
Whether it's dismantling the hostile environment, demanding change in key public services or building inter-community solidarity, we bring together a team from a range of backgrounds, skill and experiences to support you in your efforts. Our team have all supported victories for systemic change from the local to the national. From nurturing facilitation, moving through conflict, growing movements, to delivering fierce campaigns - we use diverse methods to support communities campaigning for systemic change.
Amira Elwakil
Collective Care Trainer
Amira is a collective care trainer with Act Build Change. She is also a participatory English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher. She has organised on migrant justice issues including housing with Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth and access to healthcare as part of the Patients not Passports campaign. She has a particular interest in embedding care, a participatory pedagogy and an anti-oppressive lens to organising work.
Ezimma Chigbo
Collective Care Facilitator
Ezimma is a writer, healer and creative facilitator with a background in youth work. She specialises in working with young women exploring issues such as healthy relationships, labels and identity and has worked mainly with young women involved in the criminal justice system.
Imani Clough-Brown
Membership Manager and Coaching Lead
Imani has over a decade of experience in youth justice and education, she has successfully led leadership development programmes, supporting change makers - including young leaders to take action on issues they care about. She is an experienced youth and community practitioner with skills in coaching, leadership development and strategic partnerships.
Latifa Akay
Head of Collective Care
Latifa has over a decade of experience working and organising with communities around social justice issues and on arts-based community projects. Latifa is interested in transformative approaches to safety and justice and produced and co-wrote The Radical Safeguarding Workbook in her former role as Director of Education at Maslaha. Latifa approaches organising with the belief that collective action is all we have and that only by building solidarity across struggles and oppressions can liberation truly be a possibility. Latifa is a trustee at the Inclusive Mosque Initiative and was co-director of the 2021 MFest at the British Library. She holds an LLM in Human Rights Law and before moving to London in 2012, she worked for two years as a journalist in Istanbul.
Louie Herbert
Senior Organiser Trainer
Louie has been organising for over a decade. As one of the founders of ACORN UK, he was instrumental in developing the strategy and methodology that laid the foundations for ACORN to become the largest community union in the UK, winning millions of pounds worth of victories for working-class communities. He also has organising experience with 38 Degrees, the Labour Party and Debt Justice. For Louie, organising should be a politicising process; he believes that through collective action, people will see their shared struggles and identify the people responsible for creating those struggles.
Ricky Wong
Co-Founder, Designer & Developer at Act Build Change
Ricky is a designer and developer specialising in building brands, websites and systems. Over the past 15 years he has collaborated with many organisations, from local companies to international institutions, on hundreds of projects varying in scope and complexity. Projects such as branding Southend-on-Sea Borough Council's sustainable transport campaign and developing digital tools for the Wellcome Sanger Institute's genome sequencing programmes for malaria and COVID-19. He co-founded Act Build Change with Stephanie in 2018, combining organising skills with technology at a time when community organising training was niche and exclusive in the UK. Together, they set out to make organising more accessible to all.
Stephanie Wong
Founder and CEO of Act Build Change
Stephanie is a community organiser, facilitator and collective care practitioner. She has won with many others on issues from citizenship for young people, securing better wages for 1000s of staff and winning housing for those seeking asylum. She has trained hundreds of community leaders who have gone on to win local and national policy change and political elections. She taught as a guest lecturer in community organising at University College London for three years and is a trainer and coach for Marshall Ganz. She built Act Build Change with her husband Ricky in 2018 in response to some of the inaccessible ways organising was taught in the UK at the time. Together, they hoped to give a contribution to the field of organising that would allow more of us to get great organising training in accessible, dignified and transformative ways.