Our Secretariat

Our Secretariat is a small but global team that supports our alliance to achieve our goals. Our Secretariat is led by our Leadership Team, who you can meet below.
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Amanda Griffith

Chief Executive Officer

Amanda has over 35 years experience working with marginalised and vulnerable children and young people. She has been a CEO of three 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, Central and Eastern European and Commonwealth of Independent States 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, as well as publishing papers with the European Commission and the German Government. 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 our alliance members.

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Andrea Thompson

Director 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.

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Lopa Bhattacharjee

Director of Alliance Programme

Lopa has over 20 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.

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Katanu Mwosa

Director of Finance & Corporate Resources

Katanu Mwosa has worked for more than 25 years in development organisations and private sector companies across South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa as a senior finance professional.  She is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who has worked as a consultant and in senior roles in various NGOs where she helped build financial management capacity in finance, operations and programmes teams.  

Katanu has also considerable experience at the board level with organisations such as Restart Africa, and previously with VSO (Federation Council and VSO Jitolee), Kenya Gatsby Trust and Colobus Conservation.  

Katanu has an MSc in Development Management from LSE and a BSc in Accounting from Syracuse University. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.