Meet our team

Clare has over twenty years of work experience in the voluntary sector, much of this in grant making. Most recently she was Economic Justice Programme Manager at the Barrow Cadbury Trust, managing a portfolio of grants which sought to create fairer financial systems and enable the voices of those on low incomes to be heard by local and national policymakers.    

She served on the board of a credit union for several years and is currently a trustee of the Wakefield and Tetley Trust. Clare lives in East London and now works as a freelancer within the voluntary sector.

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Damon has more than thirty years’ experience of providing, designing, and commissioning services to meet the needs of disadvantaged groups and communities. He has also been involved in consumer campaigns at the national and international levels on issues of credit, debt, and financial exclusion for over two decades.

Prior to founding CfRC in 2010, Damon was co-chair of the Debt on our Doorstep campaign, which ran from 1999 onwards and campaigned for caps on the cost of credit; greater funding for affordable lenders, and for more effective responsible lending requirements.

During this period he worked in local government with responsibilities for advice and economic development, and between 2008 and 2010 as the Head of Policy for the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion.  However, his initial career was spent as a money and welfare rights adviser in the voluntary sector.  

Damon holds a BA(Hons) in Economics and Politics from the University of Warwick, and an MA (With Distinction) in Public Policy from the University of Nottingham.

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Niall is the Markets & Consumer Insights Manager at Fair4All Finance, joining in August 2021, having previously anchored their affordable credit programme at Carnegie UK from 2016-2021.

Niall spent the 1990’s in community development projects in the Craigmillar and Wester Hailes neighbourhoods of Edinburgh. His experience there of credit exclusion and its impacts led him to concentrate on the field of affordable credit.

Although he has held positions within Bank of Scotland, and Moneyline, most of Niall’s work has been as a freelance consultant supporting the establishment, or development, of community lenders; identifying the impact of a lack of access to products and services for some households; or monitoring high-cost credit lenders and their changing customer base.

Niall is also a Director of Right Way Credit Union and a member of Moneyline’s Impact Committee.

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Diane is a Growth and Development Consultant specialising in Financial Inclusion. She is an alumnus of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme and has also studied at Harvard Business School. She regularly uses her sector knowledge to contribute to research and development in Financial Inclusion.

Most recently, Diane has been working with Fair4All Finance on programmes to increase access to fair and affordable financial products and services in some of the most deprived areas of the country. However, she spent 15 years in commercial manufacturing developing a breadth of experience in senior finance and operational roles. In 2003 she joined Moneyline - a Community Finance organisation based in her hometown of Blackburn - and over the next two decades was at the heart of Moneyline growing to be one of the leading organisations in the sector. Appointed as CEO in 2013, Diane built a customer-focused brand and team, delivering innovative products, grounded in the insight of the communities they serve. Her work and leadership helped raise the bar for what people expect of financial services for individuals in financially vulnerable circumstances.

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Carl has more than ten years experience researching the impacts that indebtedness has on poverty, and designing policy and new innovations around the needs of low income households in the UK.

They previously worked for Fair By Design - the advocacy and social investment initiative addressing the poverty premium, or the extra costs of being poor - from its inception up until December 2022. There, Carl focused on the consumer credit and household energy elements of the poverty premium and led a campaign calling for the national government to introduce a social tariff for low income households into the retail energy market.

Prior to working at Fair By Design, Carl worked at Toynbee Hall as a national research lead focusing on subjects such as the impact of national government-led savings initiatives to boost low income households’ savings rates, and how the regulatory cap on payday loan charges affected users of high cost credit.

Carl has written two books on the subject of poverty and debt: "Loan Sharks: the rise and rise of payday lending" (2012) and "Payday Lending: Global Growth of the High-Cost Credit Market (2014)". Carl is currently studying for a PhD looking at the social and financial exclusion of workers in the gig economy, at the University of Birmingham.

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