Our Team
Director
Bryn Phillips
Our Director, Bryn Phillips, is a leading Industrial Areas Foundation-trained organiser with an impressive history in community organising. Today there are over 100,000 beneficiaries of his work in the UK, enjoying improved labour, property and civil rights as a direct result of issues-based organising.
Beyond policy influencing, Bryn has revived the use of the ‘House Meeting’ to spearhead major national / international citizen-led campaigns. Notable initiatives include “Uber”: workers and the gig economy, the building safety campaign, damp and mould in social housing, and COVID-19/Levelling-Up housing efforts, including the winning of a moratorium on evictions.
Over the years, Bryn has focussed on forgotten towns in the Midlands, North West, and Humber regions of the UK, where he has trained hundreds of leaders in organising and action techniques. He has advised several of the UK’s leading NGOs in community strategies.
Bryn studied organising in the UK and the United States, including a certificate from Harvard Kennedy School, and was mentored by leading community organiser, Fred Ross Jr.
Our Board
UK Common Place Board of Trustees
Our board is rooted in the very communities we aim to uplift. Post-industrial regions, coastal towns, and corners of large cities lagging behind in development—as well as smaller towns. Places like Grimsby in North East Lincolnshire, Stoke on Trent in North Staffordshire, Bolton in Greater Manchester, and Swansea in South Wales. Comprising respected individuals who come from or have significant ties to these areas, our trustees bring an invaluable, firsthand understanding to our mission.
As our board grows, we're intent on continuing to anchor it in the forgotten places that are central to our work. The trustees that join us bring not only their individual expertise but also the essential perspectives of these places. They're fundamental to defining our approach.
Each UK Common Place trustee shares our commitment to a place-based strategy to change-making: underscoring our ambition to reinvigorate communities that have been left behind.
