Board Members

Niti is the newly appointed chair of Sampad.

She chairs the board of Harbr, a London based health tech accelerator. She is Senior Digital Health Advisor for AXA Emerging Customers and was recently Medical Director to KPMGs Global Healthcare Practice. She runs a boutique health system consulting firm Health4alladvisory Ltd and sits on the board of the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital. Niti is immediate past President of IDF Europe.

Niti has worked with numerous charities in the health and social care space and has expertise on fundraising, governance and financial management of charities.

She is deeply interested in the arts both personally and professionally as a means to well being.

Niti is a senior Doctor who has deep expertise in Digital models of health care and funding of healthcare both from a public sector and private insurance perspective. Niti helped to build up the largest chain of primary care clinics in the UK – the Modality Partnership – and held several senior commissioning roles in the English NHS. She worked with HCL to operationalise their first healthcare venture.

Niti was Medical and Innovation Director of Emerging Markets for BUPA, where she helped to create an innovative model of micro-insurance in Bangladesh in partnership with Telenor, creating a digital front door to healthcare for 7.8 million people. She established and supervised clinics in China, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Hong Kong and helped create health benefit management systems in Saudi Arabia, UK, India, Hong Kong, and Thailand.

Niti has delivered universal healthcare work in India, Middle East , Kazakhstan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. She is currently working with countries developing mobile health propositions at scale that include financial protection models and new models of distribution and this has reached over a 11 million consumers in eight countries.

With Harbr, a wide portfolio of companies have been engaged and accelerated, a few examples being Drone delivery, fitness for endurance athletes, remote monitoring , digital pathology and biotechnology for COVID-19 testing ,genome sequencing, personalised cancer therapies, training and development of healthcare staff online. Currently, Harbr has set up a primary care accelerator in the NHS  working with over 600,000 patients.

Paresh Solanki is a passionate advocate for social change who uses media technology to amplify the voices of the marginalised and empower individuals and communities. He is a highly skilled and experienced communicator with a proven track record of success.

Paresh’s work is characterised by its creativity, innovation, and commitment to positively impacting people’s lives. His diverse projects have won numerous accolades in broadcasting, events production, project management and community cohesion. He holds a Fellowship of the Royal Television Society and The Institute of Leadership & Development.

His recent projects include:

Filming a series of testimonies of individuals directly involved in the expulsion of Ugandan Asians in 1972.

Filming a series of testimonies of people who responded to the COVID crisis in the UK.

Developing health campaigns including ‘Fighting Prostate Cancer’ clinics’; Long Covid Awareness series, Organ Donation in Asian communities’ Fighting against hate crime.

Paresh was a senior executive and producer/director at the BBC, where his roles included Managing Editor, Network TV BBC Birmingham; Chairman of the Board, BBC Relocation; Editor, Asian programmes; Executive Producer and producer/director of international documentaries, events & media campaigns. His biggest success was the creation of the BBC Mega Mela festival, which, for the first time, featured diverse Asian talent on national television and radio in multiple genres. Paresh also worked in BBC News and foreign affairs as a journalist.

After leaving the BBC, he was a Media Expert for the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Programme based in Strasbourg. He then was the Inter Faith Network’s Assistant Director, responsible for creating the National Inter Faith Week which incorporates over 600 events nationally and has been running for 15 years.

Paresh is a Trustee of the Media Diversity Institute (MDI), which works in conflict areas worldwide in campaigning and training for responsible media coverage. He is a former Trustee of Sandford St Martin Trust, which awards for excellence in faith-related broadcasting. He is a member of BAFTA, the Royal Television Society, the Royal Photographic Society, and the British Psychological Society. He’s held various positions in judging awards, including the BBC and National Faith through a Lens Photo Awards, and sitting on government-led committees.

Barry is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (qualified in 1971), a past President of the Birmingham & West Midlands Society of Chartered Accountants (2003-2004) and an ICAEW National Council member (2007 to 2015).

He also chaired the ICAEW West Midlands Regional (Economic) Strategy Board and through that has attended various local economic groups.

He is Chair of Governors at KE VI Camp Hill School for Boys, and Board member of the charities, KE VI Schools in Birmingham, and KEVI Academy Trust Birmingham.

In the 1970s Barry was the Hon Treasurer and Company Secretary of Birmingham Arts Laboratory, and after a career break in the early 1980s worked as the Administrator for that organisation and Birmingham Arts Shop. He returned to professional practice as a chartered accountant, but with a growing specialism in the accounting, taxation and audits of arts & media companies, most of which were limited by guarantee/ charitable trusts.

He retired from audits in 2009 and a couple of years later joined the Board of Sampad, previously an audit client for 10 or so years. He still deals with the accounts of a number of arts & community companies, usually in the Independent Reporting Accountant role.

Jon is a partner at Anthony Collins Solicitors LLP and has expertise in funding, particularly project finance and debt finance for housing associations.

He advises housing associations, financial institutions, social enterprises, local authorities and infrastructure companies. He has expertise in the financing of property development, infrastructure projects and social housing projects.

He is also an author of articles on finance and a conference speaker.

Dr Emma Margetson (1993) is an award-winning acousmatic composer and sound artist based in the Midlands, UK. Her work is recognised nationally and internationally, and was recently featured on the British Music Collection’s #AComposerADay series, which showcased the profiles of 31 female composers and their unique contributions to composition in the UK.

Emma’s compositional work is focused on developing novel compositional approaches that are actively geared towards increasing engagement with electroacoustic composition in order to reach wider audiences, in particular disadvantaged segments of the community, and younger people. Furthermore, Emma has collaborated with a variety of arts organisations across the West Midlands and beyond, and has extensive experience in multichannel composition, sound diffusion and interpretation for 2D and 3D audio.

Emma is currently a Lecturer in Sound Design at the University of Greenwich and also a Research Fellow for the AHRC Leadership Fellowship project, Audiovisual Space: Recontextualising Sound-Image Media. She is also a Visiting Lecturer for the Music Technology programmes at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Her work has been published with Urban Arts Berlin, Sonos Localia and obs акусма AUDIOR 068.

Beyond composition, Emma has considerable experience in the administration and coordination of events and projects within the arts sector, including working for many years as an administrator for BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre).

Emma’s first association with Sampad was through the SEPP: Digital programme in March 2015 where she worked on the STRP Festival in Eindhoven, Netherlands. After receiving training from the Young People on Arts Boards Scheme with Birmingham City Council, Emma relished the opportunity to join the board of Sampad and is currently chair of the Arts and Education subcommittee.

Ian Grosvenor is Professor of Urban Educational History at the University of Birmingham. After reading History and Politics at the University of Hull he trained as a school teacher. He has taught in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors in Wolverhampton and Sandwell. After fourteen years as a teacher he moved to Newman College as a primary teacher trainer.

He became Head of History at the College in 1994. He then became Director of Educational Research in the School of Education at Nene College [now the University of Northampton]. In 1998 he joined the School of Education, at the University of Birmingham as a PGCE Secondary History tutor. He has held several roles in the School, including Head of School 2006-8.

He was awarded a personal chair in 2004. From 2010 to 2014 he served as Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement at the University and is currently responsible for city and cultural partnerships. Ian has a longstanding interest in history having also worked as a local history tutor for the WEA and the School of Extramural Studies at Birmingham.

He has been actively involved in local history projects, most notably Making Connections (2002), Connecting Histories (2005-07) and Birmingham Stories (2007-09). He curated the exhibition Children’s Lives at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2012 as part of the Cultural Olympiad. He s currently director of the AHRC funded First World War Engagement Centre Voices of War and Peace: the legacy of the Great War.

He has been involved in anti-racist politics and curriculum activity around Birmingham since the early 1980s and was co-convenor of Black Pasts, Birmingham Futures 1999-2008. Publications Assimilating Identities. Racism and Education in Post 1945 Britain (1997), Silences and Images. The Social History of the Classroom (1999) with Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere, The School I’d Like (2003) and School (2008) both with Catherine Burke, Materialities of Schooling (2005) with Martin Lawn and Children and Youth at Risk (2009) with Christine Mayer and Ingrid Lohmann.

Gurdip is part of the BBC Academy’s senior team heading up Future Skills and Events. Under his portfolio he looks after the roll-out of training for digital skills; major Pan BBC strategic projects and external partnerships with Creative Skillset, National Film and Television School and the Arts Council.
Before working with the Academy, Gurdip forged a successful production career as a Executive Producer in BBC Factual; CBBC and BBC Worldwide.
As Head of Asian Programmes at the BBC, Gurdip was responsible for a number of network and international series including the award winning Arts and Culture show ‘Desi DNA’; landmark documentaries such as ‘Partition: The Day India Burned’; ‘Lost World of the Raj’ and BBC Two’s ‘Indian Food Made Easy’.
In addition to his career at the BBC, Gurdip was Senior Vice President & Head of Programmes for Sony Pictures based in Mumbai and led the creative renewal of Sony Entertainment India commissioning and adapting global entertainment formats such as ‘Dancing With The Stars’, X Factor and ‘I’m A Celebrity’.

Delia has worked in the museum and heritage sector for over 15 years. She has worked at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust since 2010. In her role as Director of Cultural Engagement she oversees collections, learning, research, digital and cultural events.

She is responsible for the Trust’s cultural programme onsite in Stratford upon Avon, online, nationally and internationally, in particular leading the development of the Trust’s internationally significant and Designated collections. She has recently co-edited ‘Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life.

Treasures from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’ published in February 2016. She also oversees the development and delivery of outstanding education and research programmes, including Shakespeare Week a national annual celebration which aims to give every primary school child a great first encounter with Shakespeare.

Previous roles include Museums and Communities Manager at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council and Collections Development Officer (later Head of Collections) at the National Waterways Museums with responsibility for their nationally Designated collection across three museum sites. Her work in museums has focused on making collections more widely accessible. Delia is Non-Executive Director and chair of the board at The Other Way Works.

The Other Way Works uses real world spaces and emerging technologies to create playful theatre that immerses audiences in the story. She has a BA in Economic and Social History from the University of Leicester and received her doctorate from the Centre for English Local History at the same university in 2002.

Satnam Rana-Grindley was born and brought up in Wolverhampton. She graduated in 1999 and started her career at BBC Radio 5Live as a researcher before joining the Midlands Today team as a trainee journalist in 2002. She presented weekly radio show BBC WM ‘Midlands Masala’ and has also presented BBC Asian Network. Satnam has worked in several roles; as a producer, director and presenter on regional news and the current affairs programme ‘Inside Out’ in the West Midlands.

Satnam loves to share her passion for media with young people, talking to them about all of the possible careers available to them and inspiring them to follow their dreams. She has worked with the National Council of Journalists (NCTJ) to recruit future journalists onto the Journalism Diversity Fund and she has been a judge for their annual awards.

Satnam is on a career break from the BBC and is now the Head of Communications at Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership where their mission is to drive inclusive economic growth. Satnam says she is getting used to a career change that brings personal growth with a sprinkling of familiarity.

Away from work, Satnam does what she can to raise awareness of breast cancer following a diagnosis 3 years ago. She is vocal on social media about ‘self-checking’ and has done numerous talks about her experience. Crucially, she uses her recorded video diaries to campaign at a grass-roots level in south asian communities where the subject of breast cancer still remains ‘hushed’.