Paul Parker
With over 20 years of experience working with an extensive range of charities, Paul has led major fundraising reviews, strategies, and programme evaluations. He has extensive expertise in Lottery and trust fundraising, tender writing, project evaluation, and fundraising strategy development.
Paul’s efforts have enabled rapid growth for clients, with many examples of strategy development enabling client voluntary income to double or more within 2–3 years. He has directly secured well over £10 million for charities as well as equipping organisations with the skills and support to achieve substantial growth themselves.
Based in Suffolk, Paul supports clients while also leading our team of charity consultants and driving business development. A full member of the Institute of Fundraising, he is passionate about the voluntary sector and its potential to positively impact society. Paul takes a hands-on approach, working closely with charities to understand their unique challenges, supporting them to communicate their needs and impact and maximise their potential to make a difference.
Steph Prentis
Steph started working in the field of community regeneration in 2006 with an employment and training contractor supporting disadvantaged individuals. Since 2009, Steph has focused solely upon supporting Charities to successfully fundraise, strengthen their organisations and improve the services they provide to local people. Her work with them focuses on developing effective and robust fundraising and income generation strategies, successfully bidding for large grants and tenders, developing effective monitoring and evaluation processes and undertaking charity evaluations.
Steph’s experience is broad, drawing on work for the social housing sector, skills and employment, children and youth services, health and social care for older people, community cohesion, patient representation and medical charities.
Committed to working with Charities in order to help them make a difference to the lives of some of the most vulnerable in our society, Steph has directly secured over £4 million for the voluntary sector in the last 3 years alone and has supported a number of our clients by auditing their fundraising positions and developing new fundraising strategies.
Fay Cope
Fay has been working in the charity sector since 2004, initially in supporter care before focussing on Trust and Statutory Fundraising in 2011. Since then she has successfully raised over £3 million in funds from Trusts & Foundations, Big Lottery Fund, and Statutory grants and contracts. Her experience includes developing fundraising strategies, monitoring and reporting, developing face to face approaches to engaging with grant funders, supporting project/new business development and supporter care.
Fay has worked with a wide variety of charities in areas such as social welfare, disability, mental health and international development. Fay holds a BA (Hons) in Archaeology and MA in Museum Studies.
Cathy Welch
Cathy has been working in the third sector for over 40 years. She has worked for a diverse range of organisations, from national bodies to small local charities, in roles including fundraising, project delivery and strategic planning.
Since 2014, she has specialised in fundraising from Trusts and Foundations, successfully achieving multi-year grants from funders totalling over £3 million, including National Lottery Community Fund, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Porticus UK, The Baring Foundation, Arts Council England and Innovate UK.
Gemma Walpole
Gemma has over 20 years experience working in the charity sector and is a full Certified Member of the Institute of Fundraising (MinstFDip).
Prior to joining Charity Fundraising Ltd Gemma worked for local and national animal welfare and social welfare charities in CEO, senior leadership and operational fundraising roles. Her fundraising experience includes individual giving, grants & trusts, charity retail, and fundraising strategy development. Gemma also has experience in governance, currently as a trustee for a grant making trust and a charity supporting young people in Norfolk.
Gemma is passionate about the third sector and is committed to helping charities further the vital role they play in making the world a better place.
Linda Bowie
Linda has worked in fundraising for more than twenty years, supporting a range of voluntary sector organisations including small charities and large, national organisations.
She has a PhD in English literature. Prior to joining Charity Fundraising in January 2024, she worked at The Fostering Network for more than ten years submitting successful applications to a range of funders including The Scottish Government, National Lottery Community Fund, The Promise Scotland, Garfield Weston Foundation, Life Changes Trust, and many others. She has experience in a variety of areas including care experience, homelessness, disability, children and young people. She lives in Scotland and has extensive knowledge of the Scottish fundraising sector.
Dee Midgley
Dee has over 20 years experience in the charitable sector both as a fundraising consultant and in-house in Head of Fundraising, Head of Income Generation, Supporter Relations and Marketing roles. She has successfully secured grants ranging from £5,000 to £3.5 million from organisations such as Garfield Weston, Porticus, the National Lottery, and various government contracts. She also has a long track record of successfully developing and enhancing individual giving campaigns, legacy giving and corporate partnerships.
She began her career in the British Army, which has equipped her to specialize in supporting a variety of charities across the UK. Her work addresses issues including homelessness, the rehabilitation of ex-offenders both inside and outside of prison, military-related PTSD, domestic violence, mental health and well-being, youth engagement services, and faith-based charities.
Rachel Poynor
Rachel has over ten years’ experience of working with a range of charities including Marie Curie, Beat, Working Chance and Ella’s in project management, service development and fundraising roles. She has experience of monitoring and evaluation across health and social welfare issues including homelessness, carer support, end of life care, ex-offender rehabilitation, modern slavery and mental health conditions.
She has studied qualitative and quantitative research methods and holds a BA (Hons) in Social Anthropology and an MSc in Public Policy. Her undergraduate research included ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda and her master’s research focused on co-production in adult social care during which she undertook qualitative research with ‘experts by experience’ and local authorities. She has previously volunteered as a Hub Leader for FoodCycle where she consulted with Hub users and volunteers, and currently volunteers serving customers at her local community shop. She is also a trustee of a local charity offering subsidised counselling.
Graham Parker
Graham is the Director of Charity Fundraising Ltd, a business with a social purpose which he founded in 2000. Graham has been involved in voluntary sector work and fundraising for over 40 years, achieving specialist expertise and a track record of success in achieving grant and contract funding for a wide range of revenue and capital projects.
Following employment with a Charity in his early twenties, Graham went on to serve 25 years in the Governor Grade of the Prison Service. In this role Graham engaged serving inmates in activities supporting disabled people including chartering sailing ships and riding for the disabled. Inmates routinely worked with Graham to achieve funding for these activities from grant funding sources and fundraising events such as running the London Marathon.
On early retirement from the prison service, Graham founded and built a Charity and young people’s project working proactively with offenders, ex-offenders and those at risk of offending; engaging them in new and positive lifestyles. Through Graham’s leadership and skills as a professional fundraiser, the Charity grew substantially over five years.
From small beginnings, Graham has built Charity Fundraising Ltd into a major UK Fundraising Consultancy. He has worked directly with a huge range of voluntary sector organisations across the UK developing fundraising strategies, providing advice, guidance, planning, training, mentoring, research and bid writing; achieving £ Millions in grant funding for client organisations. Graham is a Director of the Association of Fundraising Consultants, an associate member of the Institute of Fundraising and has achieved NCVO approved consultant status for Charity Fundraising Ltd. Graham is supported by a team of experienced charity fundraising consultants and officers.
