Our Team
Kezia Jackson-Harman
Kezia is Renaisi’s Senior Project Manager in Place and systemic change. Her work focuses on bringing organisations, individuals and networks together to learn about, interrogate and design approaches to bring about place-based and systemic change.
About Kezia
Kezia’s strength is in using place-based and systemic approaches to support organisations, networks and individuals to reflect on their role within their system, understand barriers to change and design strategies that can drive lasting, inclusive change. She has experience facilitating participatory systems mapping, power analysis, journey mapping and root cause analysis processes alongside a range of other design tools to support others to understand how they might approach place-based and systemic change.
Kezia’s career has focused on learning and facilitation. She is experienced in developing and facilitating thematic learning programmes and communities of practice, as well as providing capacity support to place-based funders and delivery organisations. Prior to joining Renaisi, she supported place-based funders to develop their practice around equitable grant-making, sustainability, and community engagement while working at UK Community Foundations.
Kezia has deep interest in exploring the role of philanthropy in community development and systemic change. She has progressed this both through a masters exploring the role of place-based community philanthropy in shifting power and accountability in community development and work with a range of UK-based funders aiming at place-based systemic change.
Kezia’s work at Renaisi
Kezia works across Renaisi’s portfolio of place-based and systems change projects.
This includes facilitating local partner networks, managing and delivering place-based research projects, and supporting the adoption of place-based and systemic change approaches within Renaisi. Alongside this, in her role as an embedded learning partner Kezia is supporting, advising and building the learning capacity for place-based networks that are targeting systemic change around a range of issues including: inequity in career outcomes for young people, the experiences of women who have No Recourse to Public Funds, a lack of joined up service provision and racism and ableism within our health and employment support systems.
Kezia leads our Place-based System Change Community of Practice, where she works with the community to share learning around how to approach place-based systems change and collectively work through emerging challenges to design new ways of working.
Specialisms
- Designing place-based and systems change interventions
- Building communities of practice
- Facilitation of learning and community engagement activities
- Capacity building for place-based organisations
- Power and participatory approaches in funding
- Organisational learning and development for place-based system change
Portfolio
- Research on place-based approaches to funding to inform London Funders’ approach to place
- Lead researcher for the developmental evaluation of Power to Change’s Empowering Places Programme
- Place-learning lead for Renaisi’s Learning Partnership with Youth Future’s Foundation’s Connected Futures Programme
- Learning Partner for Smallwood Trust’s Women’s Sector Resilience Fund
- Facilitator and learning partner for the City and Hackney Anchors Network
