Meet new Board Members
Aideen Elliott
Duduzile Faith Simkhumba
Personally, she has a special interest in matters of diversity and inclusion, gender equality and social development.
Her qualifications include a Postgraduate Degree in Business Administration (University of Witwatersrand South Africa) and a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing Management (Management College of Southern Africa).
Gavin Timlin
He is also the founder of CreateSound, a Social Enterprise delivering mobile music production services and tuition in outreach contexts across 100+ locations in Ireland, and TSLI, a start-up delivering job training and inclusion programmes for people seeking asylum in Ireland. Since March 2022 he has also been working in a consultant role for the Irish Refugee Council, supporting the process improvements, research and hands-on programme delivery for accommodation and employment projects, as well as research pieces, including Empathy Mapping.
He has a strong understanding of the refugee and migrant landscape in Ireland and abroad, having worked closely with multiple support organisations/NGOs on independent support projects in Ireland, Greece & Palestine. He haa also developed public support and resources as part of his participation with Comhlamh’s member group ‘Ireland Says Welcome’, including national mapping of resources, submissions to Oireachtas, and system ‘explainers’.
Karen Jeffares
On return to Ireland in 2014 she also began working part-time as a DevEd facilitator with a variety of Irish NGOs (Afri, LASC, Comhlamh, PBI Ireland, Spiritan Education Trust, etc), which she continues to do today. In recent years she has co-founded a new organization in Co. Monaghan called Siolta Chroi (Seeds of the Heart), whose mission is to restore Ireland’s ecosystems and communities – they run workshops and other educational activities and projects that help people reconnect with the land and each other. She is currently home-schooling her 6-year-old daughter and setting up an independent Waldorf school for County Monaghan with a collective of parents in the county. She continues to believe that we can change the world for the better and is excited at the prospect of connecting with the work of Comhlamh and its member groups as a Board Member.
Lola Ade-Onojobi
She has a bachelor’s degree in Economics and two master’s degrees in Business Administration and International Human Resources, respectively. She has over 25 years of experience working as HR Consultant, HR Practitioner, and SME Co-Founder/Director in consulting, start-up, and multinational environments.
She has worked in both Africa and Europe in the professional services, telecoms, oil and gas, financial services, media/advertising, international trade and development, and construction sectors. Her HR experience lies in HR Strategy, organisation design and development, HR policy, process and system development, reward and recognition, competency-based performance management, succession planning, organisation culture, change management and enterprise solutions implementation. She is passionate about equality, diversity, inclusion and belonging, and currently serves on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) Advisory Board for Trocaire Ireland.