Family team

Our Secretariat (Family team) is small but global with staff living and working around the world. Our team supports our strategy through facilitation of projects, knowledge collection and dissemination, publications, scoping of new members and fundraising and communications.

Our team is led by our CEO and the Leadership Team:

Amanda Griffith

Chief Executive Officer
Amanda has over 35 years of working with marginalised and vulnerable children and young people. She has been a CEO of 3 UK charities and worked in the secretariat of national, European and international networks. She has extensive experience of working in the Middle East and North Africa, West Africa and CEE and CIS countries as well as managing multi-agency and multi-disciplinary contracts. As well as significant practitioner experience of working directly with children and young people Amanda has contributed to legislation and policy development in both the UK and Europe.  She was a consultant for the European Commission on equality and diversity. She has published papers with the European Commission and the German Government. She is a trained counsellor and youth worker and has a BA in Economic History, BSc in Psychology and MSc in Psychological Research.  She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).At Family, Amanda…is in charge of leading the Secretariat so that it implements the strategic direction of Family as laid out by the Board.  She is responsible for the management decisions made in consultation with all members.

Andrea Thompson

Head of Fundraising and Communications


Andrea has nearly 20 years fundraising experience. She has developed and managed fundraising programmes in the UK as well as across 15 global fundraising markets. Her experience covers both voluntary and institutional fundraising as well as communications. Prior to joining Family as Interim Head of Fundraising and Comms, Andrea worked for ActionAid for over 10 years, most recently as International Director of Fundraising and Communications. She has lead teams through significant change processes and was recently responsible for co drafting ActionAid’s new ten year organisational strategy.Andrea is originally from Belfast but has been living in London for 22 years. She lives in London with her 2 young children.



Alexis Chapman

Interim Strategic Finance Director 

Alexis has worked in charity finance and governance for 30 years.  After training with KPMG in London, she took a job at Save the Children Fund and worked there for 13 years taking on the role of finance director and then switching to become the fundraising director.  At Save, she was involved in a major change programme reshaping the organisation in the face of financial pressure, rolling out global finance systems and the implementation of an organisation wide supporter care system.  She was also involved in the early phases of a global market development programme.   After leaving Save, Alexis trained as an executive coach and facilitator and spent 12 years working freelance as an interim FD, as a consultant and as a coach for a wide range of not for profits organisations.  She has extensive non executive experience and is currently a board member at Christian Aid, chair of The Border Consortium and a member of the Finance, Fundraising and Investment committee at Comic Relief.Before joining Family, Alexis has spent over three years working on helping a mental health charity separate from its founding hospital and set itself up as an independent entity,  doubling the resources generated for its grant making programme.

Lopa Bhattacharjee

Director of Alliance Programme  

Lopa has 21+ years of experience of working with a range of CSOs, INGOs, networks and government systems on child protection issues in countries of Asia and other continents. Lopa has specific expertise on preventing sexual violence against children and reintegration and child participation. Lopa has also worked with several donors to support their partner CSOs on organizational safeguarding. She started as a social worker supporting children affected by trafficking and child sexual exploitation that enabled her deeper understanding on the need for children to grow up in safe and caring families. She started and headed the child protection programming for Terre des hommes Foundation in India. She facilitated the South Asian Regional Forum on Violence against women and children to influence the regional mechanism to combat prevention of trafficking and exploitation of women and girls. Lopa has been co-authors for peer journals on issues related to participatory research with survivors of child sexual exploitation and monitoring and evaluation of reintegration. Very recently, as the co-chair of the task force on children and young people’s participation, Lopa led the global survey of children and young people for the UN Day of General Discussion organized by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Lopa lives in India.