Alison Baum OBE

Working strategically with the Managing Director to grow the reach and impact of iPiP. Developing an innovative mental health and wellbeing programme for primary school children. working with CEOs and senior leaders in the public and charity sectors to support their organisations to embrace the power of digital transformation to effectively and cost-effectively empower their service users and enhance their service delivery

After stepping down as CEO of the charity I founded, Best Beginnings, the Board invited me to become President.

I founded Best Beginnings to support parents, improve child health outcomes and reduce inequalities. Best Beginnings has always taken an innovative, evidence-based and collaborative approach to driving lasting change. To date, we have supported over 4 million parents to give their children the best possible start in life. Some key achievements of the important work I led: * Conceiving, developing and launching the Baby Buddy App, which has gained over 380,000 registrations and provides free and personalised, 24/7 support and advice for expectant and new parents of all backgrounds. Baby Buddy has been found, through independent evaluations, to be an effective public health intervention. * Adapting and releasing Baby Buddy in Greece in Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Russian and English, and securing Australian Federal funding to create an Australian version of the app to support their public health priorities. * Producing and releasing over 300 educational videos, which have over 7,700,000 views across platforms and are integral to the Baby Buddy app. * Secured more than £10 Million, including multi-year funding from diverse income streams. * Been a keynote speaker at over a hundred national and international conferences and events. I have done many live and record interviews on TV and Radio including on the BBC and Sky News and been interviewed for several podcast series.

Supporting leaders across the for-profit, academic, healthcare, and charitable sectors, to increase their impact through systems thinking, and an increased focus on collaboration, diversity, inclusion, listening, innovation, purposeful people-centred design, implementation science, and data-driven learning.

I founded a social enterprise called Express Yourself Mums with the aims of: * Providing breastfeeding, expressing and baby carrying products for parents * Providing free information on expressing and breastfeeding for parents * To raise money for five charities with every sale * To become profitable and invest profits into campaigning/resources for child-health including breastfeeding In 2006, I left Express Yourself Mums in the capable hands of Carly and Sharon, and Founded the child health charity Best Beginnings.

Over 9 years at the BBC Science Department, I honed skills in translating and communicating complex scientific and medical ideas for a lay audience by researching, producing and directing programmes, including Horizon, Trust me I'm a Doctor and Tomorrow's World. In 2001 I was seconded to work with Greg Dyke, Susan Spindler and Caroline Van Den Brul on the ‘Making it Happen’ the BBC's 2001/2002 Internal Change Programme. This was a multi-faceted strategic role that involved stakeholder work, communications and speech writing. Through it, I gained an understanding of Change Management theories, the work of John Kotter and the power of taking an "appreciative inquiry" approach. These new insights informed my decision to launch Best Beginnings and heavily influenced the co-creation methodology that has underpinned all the charity's work.

I studied Pure and Applied Biology at St Catherine's College.

I was an awarded a Distinction for my MSc

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