Ellie Hale

Producer

Ellie is fascinated by technology’s power to transform lives, systems and mentality. She is exploring how we can better navigate social and environmental change with both tech and governance that is more conscious, collaborative and caring.
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Ellie has been a member of Catalyst’s incubating organisation, CAST, since 2016. A keen network-builder and connector, she developed and led the Digital Fellowship programme for charity leaders and Design Hops (originally face-to-face training), in partnership with facilitators and infrastructure bodies across the country. During the pandemic she helped map and mobilise Catalyst’s ecosystem into a series of coordinated crisis responses. She led a team providing skills, relational and grant support to 223 grantees and 60+ digital partners.

As Catalyst’s inaugural ‘new team’ member, she worked with Stewards Cat Ainsworth, Dan Sutch, Nick Stanhope and Tessa Cooper to lay the groundwork for its next phase: designing participatory, network-led governance experiments; securing support from its founding funders for the continuation, momentum and transition of Catalyst; and recruiting her ace co-Producers, Jo and Siana.

She co-runs and nurtures peer communities including Tech for Good London, Tech for Good Brighton and Agencies for Good.
Outside of Catalyst, she is a proud Trustee of Quaker Social Action, volunteer with Animal Free Research UK and AnimalAid, and a qualified tower crane operator.

Jo Morfee

Producer

Jo has worked in the tech sector for over a decade within a range of contexts from large corporate organisations to lean startups. She noticed a lack of diversity in the tech sector and felt the impact of this. Directly experiencing the consequences of this inequality led her to Co-Found InnovateHer, a pioneering organisation with a mission to tackle the gender imbalance within the digital and tech sector through educational programmes for girls aged 13-16, and campaigning. After establishing and growing this social enterprise for over 6 years as a Director, Jo joined Catalyst as a Producer in December 2021.

Fascinated by the possibilities and opportunities emerging from the pandemic, Jo followed a calling to get involved in co-creating societal change. Jo believes that everything is interconnected and draws a lot of inspiration from nature and ecosystems. Working at the intersection of technology, systems change and supporting civil society excites Jo. Her contribution as a Producer at Catalyst is centred around developing Strategy and figuring out how we might transition into a new identity, in response to what the sector needs today.

Jo is currently learning British Sign Language (BSL) and is passionate about accessibility and inclusion. She currently leads Catalyst’s inclusion work with support from external partners, and is fascinated by the possibilities which can emerge when we are collectively working in an open-hearted and values-led way.

Megan Gray

Producer

Megan is passionate about the power of charities and other social sector organisations and how they can collaborate and be supported to lead change.

Megan joined Catalyst in May 2023. Before that she worked for 18 years at NCVO, most recently as director of strategy and transformation, where she drove significant change, including a radical and ambitious programme to scale NCVO’s impact through technology and digital approaches without increasing its cost base, and transforming NCVO into a more responsive and member-focused organisation.

Strategy design, development and implementation is the thread that has run through her career, from seven years developing support programmes for charities to help them develop strategies to respond to a changing world, followed by seven years focussing particularly on the impact and potential of digital and technology, and then leading the development of a coherent and compelling new strategy for NCVO.

Megan loves to work with curious, caring, and ambitious people, who value working in the open, sharing and collaborating. Alongside the creativity of setting strategies, just as important to Megan is the hard work of planning how to deliver; how to make the greatest impact with what are always finite resources and changing ways of working in subtle or fundamental ways.

Megan is an East Londoner, amateur musician (mainly choral singing these days) and Mum of two.

Kate Swade

Member

For the past 10 years Kate has been helping to set up and run Shared Assets CIC, a think and do tank working to create a more just land system through practical projects that reconnect people and land. She has recently stepped back from that role and become freelance. She is helping establish a spin-out from Shared Assets, the Digital Commons Cooperative, as a mapping and data software community tech start up, and it's this work that has sparked her interest in the digital world.  

She has enjoyed building her understanding of the tech landscape and particularly the critical tech and civic tech worlds, and had been following Catalyst's work with interest, so she was really excited to see this role come up!Her main area of expertise is around governance - both as an adviser to complex land-based projects on governance models, and also as an experienced trustee and non-exec director.

She is really interested in governance as a potentially transformational force, and is particularly interested in the organisational processes that we use, and how they can move us away from systems of dominance and control. At Shared Assets she and her colleagues spent a lot of time thinking about how they worked and she is so excited to learn from all the work Catalyst has been doing in this area too!