People
We fall under the overall governance of The Heritage Alliance (opens in a new window) which is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (no 4577804) and a registered charity (no 1094793).
Our particular affairs are looked after by a steering committee drawn from our members. This is chaired by Trevor Cooper.
The HRBA Development Officer is Becky Payne.
The Meetings Officer is Charlotte Dodgeon.
The Membership Secretary is Donna MacDonald
The Co-Editor of the monthly newsletter is Lucy Jacob. (The other co-editorship is in vacancy from January 2025.)
All of the above are volunteers.
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The Chair of the HRBA is Trevor Cooper (0.1FTE). He retired some years ago from a career in business. He has had a life-long interest in church buildings, and has an especial interest in the future of historic churches.
In 2004 he published How do we keep our parish churches?, a short book which presented a range of objective facts and figures on the factors affecting the future of church buildings. In 2011 he jointly edited Pews, benches and chairs: church seating in English parish churches from the fourteenth century to the present, and in 2014 he edited For public benefit: churches cared for by Trusts, the first wide-ranging examination of the several hundred churches, some still in routine use, which are cared for by charitable Trusts.
He has been an external member since 2002 of the Historic England Places of Worship Forum and its predecessor, and sat on the Southwark Diocesan Advisory Committee from 2003 until 2013. He was previously Chairman of Council of the Ecclesiological Society.
Becky Payne is Development Officer of the HRBA (0.2FTE). After a degree in archaeology from Durham University, she spent several years ‘digging’ her way round the world before joining Historic England (then known as English Heritage). Between 2003 and 2010, she was the Policy Officer in the Church Buildings Division, Church of England promoting and enabling the potential of church buildings as a resource for the whole community.
She is now working as a freelance consultant undertaking projects on different aspects of sustaining historic places of worship. This has included creating a web-based resource on the Arthur Rank Centre website for congregations of all denominations who are looking after rural places of worship and, on behalf of the Diocese of Hereford, updating a toolkit for places of worship who want to develop wider community use of their church building. She has also undertaken research on social enterprises within rural places of worship as part of an HLF funded project in partnership with the Plunkett Foundation to find out whether social enterprise can be an effective way of making rural places of worship more sustainable.
She provided the content for the book Churches for Communities, adapting Oxfordshire’s Churches for wider uses (Feb 2014) which told the stories of those, largely volunteers, who had undertaken major community and building project in 25 places of worship in Oxfordshire. She recently developed guidance for urban churches on behalf of the Diocese of London to encourage more of them to open their doors. She is currently project manager of a four year project evaluating the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Grants for Places of Worship Programme. She is also a consultant on the Open University led research project looking at how community-led design can help places of worship to more effectively engage with their communities and create more open, vibrant and sustainable places. She is a Trustee of the Churches Visitor and Tourism Association and since 2014, a member of the London DAC.
Charlotte Dodgeon is our Meetings Officer
Charlotte has some twenty years’ experience within the Heritage sector. She started out in the South West team at English Heritage (as it was then) advising, assessing and monitoring projects across Cornwall, Wiltshire and Devon under the Joint Scheme for Places of Worship and its successor, and the old Conservation Partnership Scheme. After a brief spell as Marketing Assistant at Morley College, she realised that she missed the world of heritage too much, and joined HLF in 2001, first as a grants assistant and officer in the Yorkshire & Humber team, and then as part of the Programme and Process Unit, where she quite quickly moved across from working on some of the ‘community’ grants, to the Townscape Heritage Initiative and the Places of Worship programmes, becoming Programme Manager in 2008, responsible for writing programme guidance and providing advice and interpreting policy for both HLF staff and the wider sector. In 2014, she relocated to the South West, and joined the Roof Repair Fund team until 2016, since when she has been working as an independent consultant, primarily giving support and guidance to places of worship that are looking for funding to carry out project, both at application stage and supporting them during the life of the project
Our free, monthly newsletter is undertaken jointly by Lucy Jacob and ANO.
Lucy Jacob currently works part-time for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) as their Training Officer, and also does one day a week as the Events and Marketing Coordinator at the UK National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS-UK).