Welcome to WISH East.

A dynamic energetic and enthusiastic professional who achieves excellent results. Sandra is a conscientious and driven senior housing professional with a passionate sense of purpose, and a tremendous appetite for customer excellence and continuous improvement.  
As a CIH Chartered Member, she is a trusted professional with extensive housing experience and a commitment to ethical standards.
She has a combination of sound commercial acumen with core social values that have allowed her to lead and navigate successfully through some of the most challenging strategic environments, whilst keeping customer-centric values at heart.  
 There is an increasing awareness of the housing crisis, with a need to grow talent who can respond to the rapidly changing social, financial and political landscape.
Sandra is keen to raise the profile on how a career in housing is not only rewarding but also one that can make a real difference in people’s lives. She’s keen to highlight that each and every day is different, where you can go from grappling with significant societal issues, to sharing the first moment someone walks into their new home.

Anna’s career journey spans over 20 years - from leaving home on the Isle of Skye to go to the Glasgow School of Art, she is now in living in Essex and working in Hertford.

Having always worked in fast-paced customer centric retail, hospitality and manufacturing environments, she has spent the last 6 years, in the Social Housing sector, specifically in reactive maintenance as People Manager with MCP Property Services.

As an active member of the Lanarkshire Board of the Developing Young Workforce in Scotland before relocating, she is keen to drive MCP’s ethos of supporting people into sustainable employment. Creating opportunities for young people to experience the world of work and start an apprenticeship is not only the right thing to do in terms of supporting individuals and the local community but also ensures businesses have the skills required for the future.

Kelly has worked in Social Housing for 10 years in a variety of roles spanning customer experience, repairs and maintenance, customer safety and asset management. She joined Accent Group as Building Information Manager covering all aspects of Asset data management and building safety.

Kelly has completed CIOB Level 6 Diplomas in Fire Safety Management and Building Safety Management, being one of the first cohorts to complete this qualification. She has a drive for ensuring good quality data is shared with colleagues and customers to ensure that homes are safe and fit for purpose.

Being a board member for Wish East helps Kelly in her ambition to bring more women into the property sector; she enjoys mentoring and championing others.

Suzanna has spent the last 19 years working in the housing sector in a variety of roles. Her experience has been gained mostly in Local Authorities across Essex and East London managing teams of staff across a wide range of areas. This has included strategic housing, affordable housing development, planning policy, housing policy, homelessness, provision of specialist supported housing and finding innovative solutions to meet housing need.

Suzanna now works at Harlow Council in the Regeneration team delivering affordable housing and town centre regeneration projects.

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I’ve worked within compliance for nearly 4 years and housing for over 10 years.

I am passionate about keeping residents and staff happy and wherever I work, I want to ensure all my colleagues feel supported in the working environment.

I am part of two Employee Resource Groups within Hyde and volunteer as a Treasurer for Unify Bame.

A career highlight so far is being part of the Fire Risk Assessment (FRA) team and getting our FRAs to 60 day head, ensuring 100% compliance for over two years before I moved to the Building Safety Team.

This year I won the Future Leader award at the very first G15 Ethnicity Awards.

Anna is an Assistant Manager at Beever and Struthers, a professional services firm who specialise in audit, tax, consulting and service charge examinations within the social housing sector. Anna works within the Risk Assurance and Advisory team and manages a range of clients nationally ranging from small providers of 1,000 units up to G15 providers with over 60,000 units. Anna leads on specialist internal audit work including building and fire safety, development and property compliance and is passionate about working to help providers keep their residents safe.

Following a successful 20 year career in FTSE 100 global organisations, including Granada PLC, Sainsbury's, Compass Group and SSP Group where she was Global Senior Vice President for Communications and Business Development bringing brands such as M and S Simply Food, Starbucks and Caviar House and Prunier to travel hubs, Amanda set her consultancy - Perfectstorm in 2010.  

She has a number of high-profile clients in the housing sector and led on the Clarion merger where she is still a shareholder.  She has also led on commercial benefit realisation in other mergers, growth and change programmes, including Karbon Homes, L and Q and Iceni Homes.  Amanda led the first Ministerial round table for the Green Paper consultation post Grenfell in the East of England, working with the Housing Minister, MHCLG and the Cabinet Office.  She is also Associate Commercial Director for Housemark and is leading on their brand repositioning and growth.   Her non housing portfolio has included the Lawn Tennis Association, Harvey Nichols, Women Ahead/Moving Ahead and Elm an ethical older person’s provider. 

Through her work with her retained Communications and PR clients across the sector she believes passionately in leveraging the value that East of England organisations can bring to the national and regional agenda.   She mentors several developing women both in and out of the sector.    Amanda is advanced media trained and a regular public speaker.
 

Estelle is a specialist social housing solicitor who advises registered providers/housing associations, their subsidiaries, local authorities and developers on all aspects of affordable housing acquisition, development and disposal.  She has gained broad experience in commercial property over 20 years of practice, acting for institutional landlords, real estate funds, Transport for London, NHS trusts, and national retailers before specialising more recently in social housing. Estelle heads up Howes Percival’s social housing team and acts on land led and S106 acquisitions advises on planning agreements and variations, easements, shared ownership site site-up and sales.  Estelle is ranked as a Leading Individual in the Legal 500 and delivers training on topical issues in social housing.  Estelle is based in Norwich.

Since landing my first job with a housing association back in 2002, I have worked predominately in strategic housing related roles for local authorities, including affordable housing development and housing policy. I currently work part-time in the Housing Strategy & Partnerships Team at West Northamptonshire Council.

During my career, I have been involved in two Local Government Reform processes both in Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire and held both officer and leadership positions. I have led on the development of key strategies, such as a Housing and Homelessness Strategy, and been successful in achieving significant amounts of government funding to help homeless people.

Rebecca has experience of leading a wide range of maintenance, planned investment and compliance areas both in Housing Associations and Local Authority environments.

Rebecca has led on sector leading procurement for large scale 20 year partnering contracts. She is committed to driving forward collaborative procurement and collaborative partnerships to ensure that outputs for residents remains focused on quality.

Rebecca looks to increase the housing sector’s understanding in this area by sharing the knowledge of how these dynamic partnerships deliver in an ever challenging environment and the innovation that can be gained from long term arrangements.