Hashmukh is currently the Chief Executive of CEMVO. He was appointed to this post in December 2007.

Since becoming the Chief Executive of CEMVO, Hashmukh has been responsible for steering the organisation to work more effectively in building partnerships with different stakeholders to address some of the social exclusion issues facing our communities.

Hashmukh joined CEMVO in 2001 to manage the pilot London Capacity Building programme. This was an innovative programme which developed the leadership and organisational capacity of minority ethnic voluntary organisations over a period of time. In 2003, he was appointed as the Director of Capacity Building and was responsible for the strategic development and management of CEMVO’s National Capacity Building Programme. CEMVO’s capacity building programmes have developed leadership and sustainability of the Black and Ethnic Minority voluntary sector.

Prior to this Hashmukh managed an £8m regeneration scheme in LB Newham. He was previously Principal Grants Officer responsible for LB Newham’s voluntary sector grants programme.

Hashmukh has extensive knowledge and experience of community engagement, regeneration issues, and on issues affecting the voluntary sector.

Hashmukh is a member of the HMRC Stakeholders Forum and DWP’s Ethnic Minority Working Party.

Born in Singapore and brought up in Brunei and Singapore

Having arrived in the UK only five years ago, Shereen quickly made her mark as Director of the Council of Ethnic Minority Voluntary Sector Organisations for Wales, securing over £1.5 million in grant funding for Muslim and other community organisations. She has been at the forefront of opposing Islamophobia in Wales and has given presentations to the Welsh Assembly Government. In the field of inter-faith dialogue, Shereen founded the Swansea Faiths Forum in South Wales in the immediate aftermath of 7/7. She has recently been appointed to the All Wales Convention.

Rushi Munshi has over 20 years of wide ranging experience in financial and human resources management, project management, strategy and strategic developments and has provided leadership to a team of people in the public and voluntary sectors.

Having worked in cultural sector with different local authorities up to Principal Officer’s level, Rushi joined Council of Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations (CEMVO) in January 2002 as a Regional Director for Yorkshire & the Humber region. Rushi moved his offices to Manchester in September 2004, to take charge of the development of Community Enterprise Centre (EMF House) at 12 Charlotte Street in Manchester. The four storey grade II listed building offers office units, conference and meeting room facilities.

Recent work of Rushi’s role with CEMVO includes management of Capacity Building Programme and Interface Project; ‘A Field Study on identifying barriers for potential BME employees’ and promotion of career opportunities for the HM Prison Service, North West Area; Consultation Report on ‘Working with Black and Racial Minority Community Members Across Merseyside’ commissioned by Greater Merseyside ChangeUp; undertaking training and consultancy projects; delivering consultation on the North West Regional Offender Manager (ROM) office’s Commissioning for Diversity documents; etc. CEMVO North West has also established a region-wide BME 3rd Sector Consortium consisting of over 98 organisations. The regional office has delivered a contract for the North West Regional Offender Manager (ROM) office; and a Leadership Residential funded by the Learning & Skills Council. It has formed partnership with ACEVO (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) and CILT (National Centre for Languages).

Dr. Kebede trained and qualified as a medical doctor in the former USSR prior to coming to the United Kingdom eighteen years ago. He was born in Ethiopia but left at the age of nineteen to study medicine in the former USSR. He studied at Kharkov Medical Institute in the Ukraine, qualifying in June 1991 with a MD in General Medicine and then worked for a year as a Senior House Officer at Kharkov District Hospital in Orthopedic surgery and the psychiatry department where he had completed his pre-registration training. At the same time he worked part time for an American pharmaceutical company in Moscow, as a medical advisor. As a Senior House Officer he began to specialize in the area of mental health and spent one year as SHO in the psychiatric in-patient clinic. In the UK he worked as a project co-coordinator for the Ethiopian Health Support Project, which provided an invaluable service to young Ethiopian refugees and asylum seekers. At the same time he studied and completed a MA in Mental Health and Social Policy in the University of North London. In January 1996 he moved to Bristol to work as a mental health advocate and mediator for the only Black Mental Health Project in Bristol, Black Orchid, under the umbrella organization of Bristol Black Voluntary Development Unit, which is currently called the Black Development Agency. In June 1998 he moved back to London and later joined the mental health team at Greenwich Social Services Trust, working as a Project Worker until he started working with CEMVO in September 2000. In October 2000 he attended and did a MBA Masters in Business Administration in East London. Prior to getting the Regional Director post he was on secondment at the Afiya trust from CEMVO for three years as a Capacity Building Officer, successfully capacity building over 60 BAME organisations and assisting them in securing over £500,000 funding. He was also a strategic advisor for the board of trustees of the Afiya trust which was led by the late Lord Michael Chan & to the CEO of Afiya trust. Dr Kebede sits in different national and local authorities’ boards representing CEMVO, some of which are:

1. Advisory Board Member of the Digital Outreach project which is working toward the digital TV switch representing Black and Ethnic Minority communities who will be needing support and assistance on the digital switch.
2. Steering Committee Board Member of The British Heart Foundation’s Young Hearty Project           
3. Child Work Development Council Reference Group Member
4. Editorial Board member of the Health Care Journal

Dr Kebede, since May 2004 to the present time, is CEMVO’s Regional Director of London and the South East of England, operating from the CEMVO Head office at Stratford London.

Muhammad has worked in senior roles in the private, public and voluntary sectors.

In the Voluntary sector Muhammad currently is the Regional Director of CEMVO. In his role he has been instrumental to the development of the organisation since its inception. His roles have included being responsible for the strategic development of offices and programmes across the UK. Currently he is working with the senior management team in diversifying the organisational funding base by expanding into to new areas of operation includes leading on the development of social enterprises.

Having held numerous trustee roles in the voluntary sector, he believes in passing on his skills to others and mentors young people. In so doing, he helped develop a mentoring programme 10 years ago through a supplementary school, starting initially with 5 tutors and 50 young people. Today, the school has 120 professionals (all working voluntary) and 600 young people attending the school on a weekly basis. In 2007 the school was awarded the Queens Award for Voluntary service.

In the public sector he holds various non executive directorships. He currently is non-executive director of the Bristol Primary Care Trust (PCT) which has a budget of UK £650m. Muhammad was also recently appointed non executive Chairman of Bristol Community Health a UK £35m health care organisation which has some 1300 staff. In 2002 Muhammad was one of the youngest people in the country to be appointed by the secretary of state as non-executive board member on the West of England Learning and Skills council.

In his personal life, born in the UK to Bangladeshi parents, Muhammad is a law graduate with postgraduate qualifications in Marketing and Business Management. He was one of the first Bangladeshi boys to have gone to university from his home town in Walsall. He speaks, several languages including Bangla, Urdu and Arabic. He regularly contributes to radio debates on a range of topics. Muhammad has travelled extensively throughout the world, mostly for pleasure, to just under 40 countries.

Wondwossen has more than 20 years experience working in the public, voluntary and international development organisations including for five years with the EU development work in Ethiopia. He lived in the UK since 1991 and he has been a College lecturer for 5 years and in the last 10 years he has been working in the voluntary sector in programme, project, and grant management. He is skilled in using PRINCE 2, MS Project, Logical Framework Analysis, Project Cycle Management, and Indicators. He is experienced in various monitoring and evaluation techniques, organisational development, capacity building of diverse range of communities and voluntary organisations. He has prepared budgets and expenditures and compiled various financial reports. He successfully implemented organisational quality assurance and standards such as Investor in People, Matrix and PQASSO. He has proven track record in funding proposal and report writing: winning grants and bids from European, government, trusts, community and corporate sources. .

After completing his B.Sc. in Psychology and a Cert.HE in Humanities (History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Comparative Religious Studies), Ben completed a M.Sc. in Cognitive Neuropsychology, the non-elective modules of an M.Res. and a Ph.D. in Psychology, the latter including aspects of neurology, optometry, neuroimaging/electrophysiology and psychopharmacology. He is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society and a Member of the Psychobiology section. Ben has over 10 years experience working in NHS and independent medical establishments, universities and the voluntary sector. He is a Vice-President of a CHAI-registered independent healthcare provider for patients with neurological conditions who he led through 'Investors in People' and 'PQASSO Stage 3' quality standards while helping to register them with the National Care Standards Commission. He joined CEMVO in August 2009 after completing maternity cover as a Teaching Fellow on the Doctoral Programme in Clinical Psychology at the University of Southampton. In addition to presenting his research findings at national and international conferences (including at the American Academy of Neurology), he has written extensively on health and advanced research methodology (including for the ‘Journal of Neurology’). He regularly responds to policy consultations, is a member of six forums and analyses research data using various statistical packages (e.g. SPSS/AMOS, MATLAB) and Geographic Information Systems. Ben also writes funding bids (he has co-written successful funding applications to obtain funding from the BIG Lottery, Essex Community Foundation and Essex County Council), including with Wondwossen Tadesse (e.g. from Serco (Flexible New Deal) and the National Offender Management Service), and undertakes business consultancy work. Together with Jacob Mathew he is responsible for the development and maintenance of CEMVO’s website.

Dr. Nileema Vaswani is currently Project Manager of the Essex and Southend Local Involvement Network (LINk) Project, a department of health initiative to enable local people to influence the commissioning and delivery of health and social care services. Nileema joined CEMVO in October 2008 as a Research and Policy Officer but was instrumental in the setting up of the Thurrock LINk project.

Prior to this, Nileema worked as a Senior Ethics Adviser at the British Medical Association, where she advised doctors on a range of ethical issues that confronted them in their day-to-day interaction with patients, and also developed guidance for doctors. For over a year, Nileema also ran a medical ethics website for which she wrote a weekly column on the ethical issues surrounding various topical health stories to raise people’s awareness of medical ethics issues.

Nileema spent many years in academia, and holds a double first degree in Psychology and Philosophy, an M.Phil in Philosophy and a PhD in Medical Ethics. She has extensive knowledge of the ethical complexities that arise in medical contexts and a strong awareness of how people from different cultures and communities may engage with health and social care services.

Ian has worked for CEMVO since 2003. Before this he was employed in the voluntary sector, mainly working in community development, health and patient involvement both as a consultant and in an employed capacity since 1994.

His career before this included work in the education sector as a teacher, lecturer and advisory teacher, then in banking as a training manager responsible for establishing a 15,000 workstation computer aided learning network including the design of learning materials. After this project, he was a member of the group introducing Total Quality Management to the bank including rewriting the training material for the retail bank’s branch staff.

Kim O'Connell has worked within the Social Care remit for over 25 years, with many of those at Manager level. She was a registered home manager within older people/dementia, children with disabilities and learning disabilities settings, with both Private and Local Authority providers.

She worked for 8 years within a health setting, implementing and managaing a unit for patients whose health care was complete, but unable to return home until social care needs had been met.

Kim was also a CSCI(CQC) Regulation Inspector and held a case load of 33 services in North East London, she has an extensive knowledge of requirements and regualtions within the provision of services aand standards set within regaulting these services. Kim holds a City and Guilds Advanced Management in Care qualification. Advanced food and hygiene and Halth and Safety Qualifications. Risk assessment and Risk management Qualifications.