What Our Clients Say

We were looking for an organisation that could help us integrate our theory of change into our strategic planning process alongside project management support and SMT workshop facilitation to enable everyone to reach a shared level of understanding. Out of all the responses we received, we felt that Eastside People had the most specific experience of developing strategy and partnerships in the areas of social mobility and youth, of managing the move from a theory of change to a longer-term strategy and of facilitating engaging strategy development processes.

Thanks to the engaging and informative workshop delivered by AI Confident & Eastside People, our leadership team now feels more comfortable and well-prepared to embrace AI, and encourage responsible use. The session effectively demystified AI, providing us with a solid understanding of its fundamentals, potential use cases and risks. Our aim for the session was to collectively feel more comfortable with all aspects of AI, and it more than delivered on that aim. We left with a clear understanding of the next steps we need to take and empowered to champion AI applications within our teams while clearly understanding risk and the required governance. This workshop was instrumental in helping us feel more confident with AI and its applications, paving the way for future innovations.

Recruiting Trustees can be difficult. I have worked with Eastside People twice now and both times they successfully recruited the candidates with the skills and qualities that we asked for. I would thoroughly recommend them.

It is always a pleasure working with EP. Communication is great and they are always quick to understand your needs and propose clear, appropriate ways forward.

Eastside People provided invaluable independent support for Richmond Fellowship and Humankind throughout the merger discussions, development of the case for merging and the ongoing integration. As a large and complex merger we could not have done this without their support. In all conversations, they helped us to stay focused on improving impact for the people who we work with.

The YIF coaching support (from consultant Katie Roberts) has been really helpful. I feel more confident in approaching people and problems and have a tool box of strategies to improve relationships, get buy-in and realise the success of the projects I'm working on. I've felt empowered to start asking directly and clearly for what I need and have moved our project from a stalemate to being able to break ground this week.

The relevant experience and calibre of EP Consultants offered a calming influence and steady hand - alongside invaluable help and support when most needed.

A professional and personal service, Melissa built a great relationship with us by understanding our needs and adapting as required and provided high quality candidates - thank you for everything!

I would have no hesitation in recommending Eastside People. Bernice and Melissa were instrumental in assisting with our recruitment of a CEO and Head of Operations; they provided excellent advice as to the processes to be followed, the timelines that they recommended and the anticipated remuneration levels. They oversaw collating a strong list of candidates for both jobs, meeting all stated deadlines, and were just so supportive throughout. I would not hesitate to use Eastside again - i am just hoping though that I will not have to for a few years now that they have met our core requirements.

Having taken care to manage our expectations, Eastside People then over delivered by helping us to appoint a very high quality candidate on a tight timeline and at a competitive cost. Highly recommended.

I thought it was a great day. I think the level of trustee engagement was very positive and creates momentum. The quality of the facilitation enabled us to achieve strong outcomes. For instance, our Trustees came away a lot clearer as to where they should invest their time to support and oversee the work of the charity.”

Highly recommended!

Every time I work with the Eastside People team, I am left with a sense that the team works hard to connect with our needs and those of the task/assignment we are working with as an organisation. For this work, I approached Eastside People as my preferred provider (no competitors were considered). This is an indication of the trust we have in them.

Alice and Ruth were very good at asking targeted questions, bringing in people at different levels of the organisation, reflecting back, and cutting through the noise,” she says. “We often framed our conversations around practical delivery, and Eastside People could reframe these ideas strategically…There was this miraculous moment where we’d done all the talking, and Eastside People came back and had captured everything in a more strategic way than we could articulate it.

Recruiting Trustees can be difficult. I have worked with Eastside People twice now and both times they successfully recruited the candidates with the skills and qualities that we asked for. I would thoroughly recommend them.

I very much valued the support we had from Eastside People when recruiting new trustees. They quickly understood our brief, were very supportive of the process and supplied us with an excellent field of candidates. I would highly recommend them to others in our sector.

The service was excellent. Whilst it proved difficult, initially to attract a shortlist of candidates, Bernice was always candid about the challenges but also optimistic about the final outcome. Through her persistence we not only made an appointment to the Chair role but also were able to appoint an additional trustee from the shortlisted applicants. I would highly recommend Bernice and Eastside People to other charities.

Excellent and I would strongly recommend Eastside People to anyone. The Eastside People team and Paul inspired confidence, listened attentively, understood and worked with us effectively. Quickly established an understanding and a rapport which enabled us to move forward effectively and with confidence.

I felt very confident with Eastside People's support throughout the process.

Extremely professional and supportive. Lucinda really listened to the approach we wanted to take as a Board of Trustees and guided us throughout the whole process. We really appreciated the clear and wise advice given to us and the great ideas on how to involve our wider team of stakeholders in the appointment process. I highly recommend Eastside People.

We are thankful to EP for the support provided to the social enterprises in our accelerator programme. We received great feedback on the workshops led by EP consultants.

We had a really positive experience using Eastside People to recruit Trustees, we were supported throughout the process and got some fantastic candidates.

ShareAction engaged Eastside People to help us understand the strategic options available for an operational unit, including partnership, social investment and spinout. We were grateful for the breadth and depth of experience which EP consultants John Leach and Warren Taylor brought. Their advice greatly strengthened what we would have been able to do ourselves, giving the management team and board assurance that the market had been fully explored. They delivered a great outcome to maximise the success of the important programmatic work and ensure its long-term sustainability.

Marlijn helped us find our dream candidate, due to her dogged determination, fierce passion for the sector, and commitment to inclusive recruitment. She guided us through the process and took her time to understand our organisation and needs thoroughly, and kept us informed throughout the process.

When working with Renu I felt I was working with someone who really cared about finding us the right person and really understood our organisation. I also felt that she cared about her candidates too and presented a very balanced case for all of them. Overall I enjoyed working with Eastside People a lot and would totally recommend it as an agency who has the right balance between care for the client, access to good candidates and efficiency of whole process.

Very approachable and took time to listen to our needs at the start of the process. Kept in contact with us throughout the recruitment and offered good and professional advice and service - thank you.

Excellent. Eastside People now understands our business and needs and has found really good and appropriate candidates. Lucinda is a good listener and I really felt we were working off the same page. I have mentioned the success we have had with EP to other charities who can see the value of the very active Board we have built with EPs assistance.I won’t hesitate to use again and to recommend to others. As we grow we will need more Trustees of the sort of quality EP seems to find.

I’d like to say how impressed we have been with Eastside People’s support through this process. You sourced great candidates and all three that the Senior Management Team met would have been able to do the job well; we were just spoilt for choice, which is a lovely place to be.

It was super helpful to have you facilitating the day, we both agreed that we got further than expected and I think we are very upbeat and motivated about the next steps.

We needed a way to choose between our two productivity suites which met the needs going forward and a model that would enable our teams to productively work between the two until that solution was in place. Marc (Eastside People consultant) broke the stalemate and got us moving on a key piece of organisational infrastructure. His excellent insight and guidance resulted in clear strategic recommendations that were balanced and consultative and allowed the organisation to select a core productivity suite. Marc’s advice was invaluable to us in this process.

We have worked with Eastside People on both interim and permanent recruitment and have been really impressed with their service. They have been great at understanding our needs, finding high quality candidates and providing helpful guidance and advice along the way.

Eastside People were very professional throughout the process. They clearly understood our business needs. We were rewarded with a shortlist of excellent candidates and a successful recruitment campaign. The deadlines we set were quite tight, but were all met. I would definitely recommend using them for Trustee recruitment.

As a medium-sized charity British Home needs to manage its resources efficiently, while also responding to the emerging risks and opportunities within an unpredictable health and social care environment. Eastside People provides access to a broad range of professionals, providing the intellectual capacity and practical support required to navigate our strategic challenges when and where we most require it. British Home has worked with Eastside for over four years, and I remain continually impressed not only by the range of insight and expertise provided but also by their collaborative style, which often feels as if they’re a natural extension of our team.

Working with Eastside People was brilliant for our growing social enterprise. Kevin's exceptional support played a pivotal role in helping us attain our investment objectives, thereby contributing significantly to our ability to enhance our overall impact. Thanks again for the support, we'll definitely work with you again.

NOAH’s theory of change developed with Eastside People was instrumental within the development of our 5-year strategy. It has also been the cornerstone of our ongoing social impact analysis through which we hold ourselves accountable for making a genuine, quantifiable, and lasting difference.

We are excited that our partnership with Eastside People and the associated funding will help us to grow our membership and support them in a more focused way to achieve their aspirations of becoming charity trustees and chairs.

We are absolutely delighted with the help Eastside People have given us and with every one of the people Lucinda has enabled us to find.

We found Eastside People very helpful in the recruitment of our new CEO. Their advice was good, speed of turnaround was excellent with good support throughout the process. Very professional.

Bernice was a pleasure to work with; she has a warm and engaging style, and holds to the highest professional stands. The interim finance professional sourced for us added value to our organisation in a focused way

Ann, our Eastside People Consultant, helped us get a group of new Mentors ready to support Social Entrepreneurs. She has an incredible ability to listen to the needs of the trainees and adapt her style and the content of the sessions to suit them, and it was a real pleasure to work with her. As a result of this partnership, we were able to train 18 new Mentors and develop a series of auxiliary materials to aid them in supporting Social Entrepreneurs to sustain and increase their impact.

Eastside People has successfully recruited key roles within our charity which are crucial to our ongoing development and growth. Their professionalism, sector knowledge and expertise, as well as practical advice and guidance, ensured a successful and enjoyable recruitment experience for all. The team at Eastside People created a wonderful recruitment pack that gave insight and a window into who Wandsworth Oasis is and what we stand for. I know that helped attract the best candidates. Thank you EP!!

Eastside People takes the time to understand your organisation and its needs. Their support in the not-for-profit sector is second to none.

We need to be prepared for the growing population of people needing end-of-life care. A bigger, more efficient organisation will be able to deliver equality of care across the area, as well as reaching out to different groups of people who haven’t engaged with the hospices before. We received really good, sage advice from Eastside People. They drew upon their experience of many mergers and gave lots of options about how to approach different situations. The benefit of working with a consultancy like Eastside People is that there is a portfolio of expertise behind your main contact, I know there will always be someone at Eastside People who can offer advice if I pick up the phone.

We were delighted with the service offered by Eastside People, and extremely impressed with the quality of applicants they managed to attract. We had a tough job to get the longlist down to a manageable number for the shortlist, but in the end we interviewed six candidates and all were excellent - we were only looking for four but ended up offering positions to five new Board members (and the sixth interviewee was also more than appointable). Overall we are very pleased with the support and service offered by Eastside People - thank you all!

We achieved all the things we were hoping for from having the support of Eastside People. They took time to fully understand the brief, organised the process very efficiently, worked flexibly within our budget and helped us get to a place where we now have a clear plan for growing unrestricted income. The lead consultant Kevin Davey was a pleasure to work with; skilful, quick to grasp what we needed, full of inventive ideas, backed up by a wealth of practical business development experience directly relevant to our sector. As well has having a menu of options for new services we can offer, we are already seeing increased sales as a result of support to restructure internally, improve our pitching and sales documents, review our pricing and improve productivity through better use of volunteers.

Nike (new CEO) is excellent and already making great progress with BSIR. We are delighted with her appointment!

Bernice and her team were very professional and found us the best Chair for our Board. It was a very smooth process and we enjoyed the journey that both of our organisations went on together. Bernice introduced a new way to promote the role, redact the job spec and do blind shortlisting which was all very welcome. Our Chair has now been endorsed and we are really looking forward working with them.

I wanted to drop you a message to say thank you for reaching out on LinkedIn for the HFEH Mind trustee role and for your guidance through the process. I was offered the role yesterday, which is great news! Thanks.

We really appreciated the depth of knowledge and flexibility offered by John (our EP consultant). His summary report on our accommodation options, based on local research and several meetings with us, has been really supportive to the board making decisions on how to treat the charity's assets and funding allocation to properties.

We worked with Lucinda at Eastside People during 2022 and several months on, we remain absolutely delighted with the help she has given us at Abbeyfield Southern Oaks and with every one of the people she enabled us to find. With her help we been able to move from a Board of totally committed but ultimately amateur Trustees to a much more professional Board with the right mix of skills to match our business as a Charity. I have no doubt that this is a contact we shall want to keep ‘warm’ and it is one that my colleagues and I have already mentioned to others as well as one that can help an organisation to transform itself.

I liked Eastside People’s style, which went down well with the board, and their emphasis on consultation which works well for us as a membership organisation.... Eastside People helped with the diversity of interactions we had. These included internal meetings, staff away days, telephone interviews with members, member workshops and board meetings.

Eastside People understands the space in which we work, our concerns and the relationships with the organisations we are connected to. They also have the experience needed to help clients meet the stringent good governance, due diligence and data requirements made by funding organisations such as CAF Venturesome.

It was hugely energising. It was a catalyst to get us all involved in the one thing.... The EP team were great and worked really well together, and I liked that they challenged us, but in a constructive way. It felt like one big team, with the EP team supporting us throughout.

We approached Eastside People and I was impressed with the way they executed their plans and within the agreed budget to deliver excellent candidates from which we were able to appoint a high calibre individual.

From the initial consultation through to the confirmation of support, the process was made incredibly smooth by Eastside People. The professional approach enabled CCL to successfully apply for an Access Reach Grant, which in turn provided the charity with the services of Eastside People consultant Mike Taylor. Mike proved to be extremely knowledgeable regarding our sector which greatly assisted in formulating the bid to CAF Venturesome. Despite the constraints brought about by the uncertainty surrounding the easing of lockdown and the associated impact of COVID-19, Mike produced a thorough short-to-medium-term strategic business plan for the charity, covering the multiple strands of our business and ensuring that relative sensitivities were applied throughout. This huge, and ultimately successful, piece of work was formulated and presented in a relatively short time-frame. Chanctonbury Community Leisure would like to pass on our thanks to Mike Taylor and Eastside People for their professional and expert assistance as well as their continued enthusiasm and support to see the aims of the Charity harnessed and achieved.

We worked with the Eastside People team to try and find a new home for 3SC. Their team worked hard to understand our hopes and ambitions and to identify potential best fit organisations. They were extremely pro-active in driving the process and keeping us updated as a Board. While we finished up finding a different solution without Eastside Primetimers involvement we would almost certainly have spent much time down rabbit holes, chasing unsuitable partners. Thank you.

Eastside People are known as the merger experts in the world of not-for - profits with very good reason! From the very beginning, Eastside People have shown themselves to be hugely knowledgeable and supportive; engaging Deborah Jenkins as Project Lead was an absolute master stroke. Without Deborah's input I am 100% confident that we would not have achieved the merger; her knowledge, experience and skills ensured that the end goal of merger remained at the forefront. Thank you so much to Deborah and Eastside People for helping us to achieve our ambition of the creation of Nurtrio, who now have the support of an outstanding parent company, Navigo CIC.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with James to plan and facilitate a strategic planning workshop with our Board. He brought a great deal to the day, not just in his excellent facilitation skills, but also his own experience of strategic development. The outcome was a clear articulation of our vision and top-level strategic aims which has since informed a revision of our strategic plan.

We had been searching unsuccessfully for 2 years for a treasurer to join our Board. When we turned to Eastside People for help they understood our needs and quickly came to understand our organisation. They were outstandingly informative and pleasant to deal with. They found us a perfect treasurer. I would certainly recommend them.

Working with Eastside People was a pleasure. Bernice looked after us throughout the process, providing great advice and support and went out of her way to ensure that the candidates were well looked after. The whole recruitment process was well run, delivered on time and ended in the recruitment of two top quality candidates.

EP understood what we needed and delivered.

Thank you for helping us to measure our social impact better and produce financials that make sense.

This is definitely a service that we will use going forward. It is very useful to work with a specialist with our charity space. The understanding of our requirements and the importance of candidate-job fit is amplified when we know that our recruitment partner already knows our environment, but more importantly focuses on our specific needs as a client. I highly recommend EP.

Thank you for a great (Partnership) Board Away Day. I'm very happy with what we achieved and the whole experience of the day, as are Board members - several of whom said it was the best Away Day so far.

We really enjoyed working with Kevin, he understood our requirements and completed the project very quickly and professionally, thank you!

I have found EP efficient, effective (and good value) on a number of occasions and will happily recommend them.

Avenues engaged Eastside People to assist with our work to develop Board thinking around a key strategic priority. The support we received and the consultant's understanding of our objectives meant that we were able to achieve a positive outcome. The benefit of having independent expertise from outside the organisation was a significant contributory factor in shifting how the Board thought and approached the topic.

Great support from Eastside People and importantly listened to what was needed and responded quickly and in language we could understand.

It was a great pleasure to work with Ann, our key priority was to work on our financial sustainability [for our Power to Change funding]. We know what we need to do. Thank you for all your support and connecting us with other persons.

We were more than satisified with the service from Eastside People and particularly to have some a strong interim candidate who was a real asset to the charity. We were delighted to have Jenny as Interim HR Director for Future Men and we benefitted from her expertise and professionalism.

Bernice was a fantastic support when we were recruiting our new Head of Fundraising. She took the time to really understand the role and how it would fit in with the organisation and as result we were presented with an excellent selection of quality candidates. Bernice was supportive throughout the whole recruitment process and I would highly recommend her services to other organisations.

We found EP to be a very professional organisation who listened carefully to our brief, matched us with exactly the right consultant and enabled us to move our project forward to a point where we were able to implement the new system that we needed.

Kevin was a great support sharing his knowledge and expertise in an easy to understand way. Thank you.

Kevin Davey and Rosie Chadwick helped us develop a diagnostic health check that differentiates grantees according to resilience, designed and refined within agreed timelines. The support they and Eastside People provided was invaluable in developing our approach.

I have no doubt that the strategy wouldn’t have been as robust without Eastside People. We will have a road map for BAUS for the next four years, which is critical for any organisation.

We engaged Eastside People to appraise the different options available for strategic collaboration. Their knowledge, practical support and skilful facilitation of our strategy day helped us make significant progress towards optimising resources, reducing costs, focusing on core specialisms and speaking with a more unified voice.

We found Eastside People to be responsive and willing to listen to our requirements and expectations of the output from their work. We ended up with a very useful and thorough Business Plan that not only helped us gain interest from potential funders, but is also a document that we continue to use to implement the project.

I enjoyed working with EP and would definitely work with them again.

We were thrilled with Bernice's work and advice. She was as excited as us to use the Be Applied 'blind' hiring platform to help debias our Board member recruitment and she just totally understood both our organisation and our needs, as well as being a fantastic source of advice on best practice as we went through the process, including the interviews.

Eastside People supported us with new trustee integration and the facilitation they provided was a very good start to this important process for us. It enabled our board to have fully informed discussions and make better decisions on important organisational priorities we were considering at the time.

I think you did loads and it was brilliant. As a result of this process I now have a compelling strategy that was co-created with our stakeholders and is helping to unite and inspire staff, supporters and the amazing DofE network behind a clear vision and set of goals.What I really liked about your approach it is that it wasn't one size fit all. I really liked the idea you could pull together a project team that was bespoke to our requirements. Nobody else was offering that. Your model allowed you to have a lot of flexibility about the different expertise you brought to the project and meant the in-house team benefitted from working with experts in a really wide range of disciplines which was brilliant for their learning. I would thoroughly recommend this approach to others. As an added bonus, my leadership team has had hands-on practical experience of how to develop and deliver a strategy development process from the start to the end which has really enriched them and added value to the charity. They were supported by EP to learn and develop through the process and received bespoke coaching in a really wide variety of areas from impact measurement to change management to research methods and developing organisational values and behaviours which is just incredible.

We had an urgent need for a skilled and competent manager. Eastside People found somebody for us really quickly who met our requirements and they stayed with us 7 months. Speedy and expert help.

I have been really impressed with the service EP have offered us re: temp recruitment.  Alice did a great job as interim fundraising director and was a real asset to our organisation in the time she was with us - thank you! 

I cannot speak highly enough of the work Bernice and Paul have undertaken for Teamwork. They have fantastic complementary skills sets. Their work is very thorough and they can think laterally about candidates and have a profound understanding of the organisation and the applicants. They also have a talent for guiding organisations through decisions which they may make infrequently, enabling organisations to act in a decisive way. EP also represent excellent value for money.

We want to be the best we can be and lead the way on key aspects within our sector, such as GDPR compliance. The Wave Team is positive about the required changes we have identified for compliance and by utilising the professional GDPR services of Eastside People, I have no doubt that we will successfully reach our objectives. I would have no hesitation in recommending Eastside People GDPR consultant Mike Griffin, he is clearly very knowledgeable and experienced within the field of GDPR and has eased our journey towards compliance.

Very Impressed. It was all we hoped for and more.

I was very impressed with the professionalism, responsiveness and focus of Eastside People generally and specifically the consultant leading the search. They had a very deep understanding view of the brief, were very responsive in dealing with questions about the process and the informal and formal interviews were friendly while being searching and thorough.

Highly professional and responsive with a really good grasp of who we are as an organisation and who we were hoping to recruit to our Board. Kept in touch throughout the campaign and helped to streamline the interview process for us. An excellent service which we will use again and would highly recommend to others. Thank you for helping us to recruit 2 excellent new trustees. 

Bernice was amazing in her support and professional advice to us to recruit new board members; she was insightful and made the whole process simple and clear. 

Bernice and Paul quickly showed a real understanding of the environment and candidate we were looking for when recruiting for an Independent Chair of a new Governance committee. Their engagement with stakeholders was exceptional and ensured that the candidates they presented were of the highest calibre. Eastside People took what we thought was going to be a challenging role to recruit and made it successful.

Eastside People and their consultant Paul Venning helped Gambling with Lives to find and appoint a Head of External Affairs to our senior management team. They made sure they thoroughly understood our challenges, our strategic direction and the nuances of this role, and then produced a high-quality shortlist of candidates which allowed us to appoint an exceptional candidate who is the perfect fit for the charity and the role. I would thoroughly recommend Eastside People's recruitment service to any organisation wishing to hire great candidates with the right skills and relevant experience.

Excellent service, very much tailored to our needs and not the usual one-size-fits-all approach. I would highly recommend Eastside People's recruitment service to others and in fact have already done so.

Eastside People has supported Victim Support with a number of projects. For example, their consultant Rosie Chadwick provided support with some complex technical elements as part of a successful tender. Rosie made a vital contribution and we found her to be flexible, generous with her time and a brilliant support.

Eastside People recruitment consultant Marlijn Wijkhuizen was critical to helping us finding two new fundraising and HR trustees for our board, with a real dedication to work we do combatting poverty and homelessness, and did so at a time of growth and change for our organisation. I would thoroughly recommend this service. Eastside People and their consultant Paul Venning helped us to appoint two staff to our senior management team. Paul took the time to thoroughly understand our organisation, and also got to know each candidate well. EP's consultant Julia Perry then carried out psychometric testing for shortlisted candidates for two senior roles. Having these detailed reports challenged the panel?s gut instincts about candidates, which made the process more inclusive, and gave us a deep understanding of each person. I would thoroughly recommend this service to any organisation wishing to gain deeper insight into individuals or groups of people.

Eastside People provide an extra team when we need it giving us new ideas, skills, knowledge, and fresh thinking - particularly in development and growth areas. This gives the team confidence and reassurance in their own ideas and support to help us move from theory to practice. EP collaborates as a business partner and are careful to make sure that we own the solutions and recommendations.

As a chief executive with limited experience of mergers, I very much valued working with Eastside People. They allowed SRUK to tap into a range of expertise, gave us independent and unbiased assessments of the situation and brought to the table their extensive knowledge and insights from supporting previous mergers.

Action for Sick Children came to Venturesome at a crossroads, needing to change their business model and requiring an investment to do. Using the Reach Fund we were able to put the charity in touch with Eastside People to develop a robust plan for the future. Eastside People were able to respond quickly to the project and deploy consultants with appropriate skills to work closely with the charity. This resulted in a clear plan for the future without which we would not have been able to invest.

Eastside People helped us with an application to Homeless Link for social finance, which will be transformational for us and the young people we support. The support and expertise that Eastside People and their consultant Catherine Grayson have provided has been absolutely superb. I hope there will be further opportunities for us to work together.

I would like to thank Eastside People and their consultant Carolyn Hay, who has written an excellent evaluation report for the AWRC. It is an excellent document and I look forward to circulating to Reaching Communities and quoting it for funding applications that I write going forward.

Eastside People consultant Linda Holland really helped us with our business continuity planning during the COVID-19 lockdown. She helped us to review what we had in place, and identify not only improvements we needed to make, but also how we needed to do it. I'm very grateful for the support. There are 17 people in my team and she facilitated the session really well. Thank you again, it has been incredibly helpful.

Juliette provided an astonishingly good service for us. Her level of competence, strategic thinking and dedication to our work was unparalleled. I would highly recommend her and EP's offer to other social change organisations.

Thank you again for the work Eastside people have done with the board and the support you have given me personally over the past 2 years, which has been of immense help. Your incisive viewpoint, sensitivity and awareness of the issues combined with a calm and efficient delivery style have definitely contributed to the development of Cardigan Centre and I will miss your input. I and the board would be more than happy to recommend your services and skills to other people.

With Eastside People, we went from identifying the need for an interim Finance Director to finding a good candidate in a space of two weeks. Very high level of customer focus and getting it right for us.

Eastside People's help in recruiting new trustees for The River and Rowing Museum was invaluable; testing (and improving) the trustee specification, identifying strong candidates and managing the process efficiently.  I recommend them!

We approached Eastside People to support the Association in developing a five-year strategy. Eastside People has a practical approach and we benefited from the ongoing support we received after our initial away day to write our strategic and operational plans. EP's business model is such that they get to know their clients and then identify consultants that best suit the specific needs and culture of individual organisations. I would not hesitate to recommend them.

After Bowel Cancer & Research and the Bowel Disease Research Foundation merged, we were looking for a new CEO with empathy for both organisations, but also the drive to make the merger successful. The insights we received from Eastside People consultant Julia Perry about our candidates were very useful. We thank her for going above and beyond, particularly taking the time to talk through the candidate profiles with our various stakeholders Following the merger of Bowel & Cancer Research and the Bowel Disease Research Foundation we needed to appoint a Chief Executive to the new organisation. There was a great deal of complexity within our organisations with which Eastside People were always helpful and patient. They came up with an excellent list of potential candidates from which we eventually appointed one. We are tremendously grateful to them.

We recruited Eastside People interim Martin Hunt at a difficult time for our organisation - Martin proved to be right appointment and significantly exceeded the requirements of the challenge that we were facing. He grasped the priorities of his brief and engaged well with our stakeholders and beneficiaries, working to ensure that services and good governance were maintained, and made clear recommendations for the future of the organisation. We recommend him to any organisation grappling with challenging circumstances, as he is capable of providing strong leadership and has a broad set of skills and experience

We worked with Eastside People on a difficult merger and were delighted with the process they used and with the final report.  They worked to a tight timetable that we imposed and met every deadline.  They fulfilled the brief we set and engaged with all of the people/organisations we recommended.  I would use them again and would definitely recommend them to other charities.

The work Kevin Davey and Eastside People have undertaken over the past year has been of immense value. The financial model he authored directly informed the programme and design of our proposal for Wards Corner and helped us explore the viability of different potential schemes. Kevin's expertise has also proven invaluable in influencing the direction of our wider development strategy, something that has elevated our existing efforts and opened many new, exciting opportunities for the future.

I thank Eastside People for the opportunity to work with their consultant Jim Brooks under the COVID-19 business continuity programme. We had productive meetings that I thoroughly enjoyed, and the support provided has left us in a great position regarding our budget forecast for the year. The options it opened up for us have brought us more into line with the staffing position of other charities, we are in the process of recruiting a bookkeeper and I have a better grasp of our financial position. A very timely intervention.

With our Eastside People HR advisor Roy Grant, we have worked to ensure that every person in the organisation understands their role in delivering the three-year strategy. All work plans and organisational strategies are now directly aligned to this strategy, enabling staff to be able to track and evidence their progress towards this.

I want to say a big thank you to Eastside People consultant Lisa Lucas. She was really good at keeping us on track focused and organised. She also was really flexible and supportive with our needs.  Her approach was fantastic coupled with her patience and knowledge.  She was a really calming and clarifying force through times of change.

We are very grateful for the support provided by the Eastside People team. It is impossible to overstate how much the support has meant to us and how integral to our success it has been.  Being able to call upon such a supportive, knowledgeable, inspirational and patient group of people has been invaluable as our trust seeks to begin engaging with the public health agenda.

The support that Eastside People provided first of all helped us to take time out to think about where we stood as an organisation and how we could move forward. It then led to us developing strategies and processes in a range of areas that will better position us to deliver new services and help us express our social value in our local community in Redbridge, in line with our values.

Eastside People consultant Dave Garratt was really helpful, knowledgeable and supportive. He managed to pull off a very comprehensive report in a short timescale for us.

One of the best decisions we made was to commission an evaluation of our work. We hoped this would confirm our obvious successes and highlight areas needing improvement. We worked with Rosie Chadwick from Eastside People and the report which resulted has been an invaluable tool for us to use. We are able to use verified figures of achievement and production, hear third party opinions from our partnerships and real-time comment from our Volunteers. All of this really helps a small organisation like ours to progress with confidence.

We are very grateful for the support provided by the Eastside People team during the process of putting together of our 5-year strategic plan. They were able to put together a diverse team enabling us to benefit from their wide knowledge and skill base.

Following a period of successful growth, MSF were faced with the challenge of replacing a highly experienced, long-standing CEO who relocated away from Malvern for family reasons. We asked Eastside People to take on a difficult recruitment brief to find a first class leader with strong strategic, operational and financial management experience, experience of working with children and families and/or people with disabilities, and a proven track record in fundraising. Not only did their specialist consultant Paul Venning find a great and varied shortlist, he also worked closely with two of our Trustees every step of the way, including accompanying them at shortlist candidates interviews in Malvern and onboarding the successful Chief Executive candidate.

I can say that Eastside People consultant Adam Stebbings has provided tremendous support  and I would like to express my thanks to Eastside People for your part in facilitating his placement with us. Adam's assistance has been indispensable, and we are very grateful for it

We are a homelessness charity in East London and we recently brought in Eastside People's consultant Mike Griffin to support us to update our data protection policies and procedures so they are in line with the new regulation (GDPR). We have greatly appreciated Mike's knowledge and expertise on the subject, but also his ability to articulate recommendations in a clear, concise way. He takes the time to understand the organisation and provides very practical and pragmatic advice. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Eastside People to any other organisation looking for data protection consultancy.

Working with Eastside People was very productive for us. They were professional, efficient and the process has resulted in four new board members and a plan to transform our governance, bringing extra capacity to develop the organisation and sustain benefit for our beneficiaries into the future.

We set out to find a partner that provided both the infrastructure we needed to grow and synergy in terms of values and ambition. Without the support of Eastside People we would never have approached Community Integrated Care, who ended up being the perfect partner. Eastside People's initial research into potential partners was invaluable, and they have been professional, supportive and helped us to stay focused on our goals. This partnership will allow us to replicate the work we already do in our Blackheath centre all across the UK, dramatically increasing the number of beneficiaries we reach.

I had never been interviewed by a recruiter before, and Janet Tapsell made a potentially nervous situation enjoyable and conversational, yet rightly challenging. She offered me genuine feedback on my abilities, presentational skills, attributes and areas of weakness. Sincere thanks and gratitude for her management, professionalism and the supportive culture she and Eastside People created.

We really enjoyed working with Eastside People as we developed our three-year strategy. They quickly demonstrated they understood our needs and identified great consultants to work with us, who led us through the process and offered challenge when we needed it. Richard Litchfield and Jo Gratrick were highly knowledgeable and greatly skilled, and their input helped us achieve our goal of a strategy that is meaningful to our trustees, members and staff. I would have no hesitation recommending working with Eastside People and have engaged them again on another piece of work.

Our new chair of the finance committee is proving a great find and I would like to thank Marlijn Wijkhuizen and the team at Eastside People for finding the candidates and guiding us through the process. It is unlikely that we would have found such highly qualified and committed individual who is passionate about what we do - it was definitely worth every penny and has given me a very different perspective on recruiting trustees.

We were impressed with the way in which Eastside People worked closely with us, taking the time to understand our organisation and ensuring that the research they carried out into potential mergers aligned with our charity's core vision and values. They facilitated initial discussions with the highest levels of professionalism and efficiency, enabling us to build a strong relationship with Life Opportunities Trust, and ultimately achieve a successful merger.

I simply must send you our new Strategic Direction to 2030 published last month! The result of the work Eastside People did with us! You can find it here https://www.waterwise.org.uk/2022/08/24/influential-campaigning-organisation-waterwise/. We're proud of it! Definitely flexing our independence a lot more already. We launched it with a series of v short videos about aspects of it from the team and Tania - you can find them on the Waterwise LinkedIn page.