MEET OUR TEAM
MEET OUR CANCER CHAMPIONS
MEET OUR DIGITAL CHAMPIONS
Meet our Board of Trustees
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Stewart Manning – Chair
About Stewart
He is excited about achieving our goals to improve patient pathways and experiences, and bolster joined up services with staff, particularly at times when the NHS has been stretched during Covid.
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Deborah – Treasurer
About Deborah
Volunteers are at the heart of all charities and Deborah has worked closely with both service and fundraising volunteers to maximise their involvement and their contribution to the charities’ work.
She brings a wealth of experience of volunteer management and fundraising to Yorkshire Cancer Community and wants to be an integral part in the future development of an innovative and proactive charity providing a voice for those impacted by cancer in Yorkshire and the Humber.
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Helen Moss – Secretary
About Helen
Helen is excited to be a part of Yorkshire Cancer Community. Having worked alongside Jill in a previous role she was pleased to be able to continue to be involved with Yorkshire Cancer Community. Helen enjoy’s being part of a team that is dedicated, hard working and forward thinking. She looks forward to the continued success of the organisation.
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David Blunt
About David
During this time David volunteered as a patient representative for Calderdale & Huddersfield Trust working with Macmillan helping to set up and deliver various on line courses for patients and participating in many presentations locally and nationally. He has since joined West Yorkshire & Harrogate Cancer Alliance Patient Group and become a Cancer Champion for the YCC.
He very strongly believes that with the right support at the right time and with the right people, patients need not be as fearful of Cancer as used to be the case. As a patient representative his aim is to both support patients and also to influence clinicians in terms of making recommendations and suggestions for improvements and developments to enhance support for the patients.
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Louise
About Louise
Louise works for the Civil Service in Leeds. For many years she was a carer for her parents, looking after her Mother who had terminal cancer . She is passionate about making a difference and for the past 5 years has been involved with another charity with Stewart, our Chairman, The Robert Sinclair Davidson Foundation .
Together they have volunteered for several fundraising events for St Gemma’s , their local hospice.
She is especially interested in how cancer affects friends and relatives and wants to improve the support available . She believes that with our ‘CANCER SMART PROGRAMME ‘ we can reach communities who find it difficult to understand cancer and help them engage with available resources.
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Ric Myers
About Ric
Ric lives in Thorner, a small village to the east of Leeds, with his wife Chris and has three grown up children and four grandchildren.
He is a retired welding engineer and a lung cancer patient. Ric was first diagnosed in 2016, had surgery on his right lung and follow up chemotherapy followed by 2 years remission and then a second occurrence in his left lung. He then received 2 years of combined chemotherapy and immunotherapy which finished in July 2021 and he has now been in remission for more than 2 years.
Ric first became involved in the YCC after Jill gave a talk to the Lung Cancer support group he was a member of in Harrogate. Jill followed up this meeting by enquiring if anyone was interested in becoming a Cancer Champion to carry the Cancer Smart message out into the wider community.
Ric was very grateful that his cancer was spotted at stage one and he saw this as an opportunity to express gratitude for his luck by putting something back into the community and promoting early detection.
He has been a cancer champion for a few years now and has enjoyed every minute of it and has attended many events to either run an information stand or give a talk and presentation on the Cancer Smart message to disadvantaged groups. He finds his involvement very rewarding and was approached last year to become a Trustee of the charity, a post which Ric happily accepted and looks forward to be able to contribute to the continued success of the YCC.
During the last two years he has become involved in an immunotherapy research project and drug trial as a Patient Public Involvement representative on the management group and is now a PPV partner on the NHS National Cancer Program and sits as a PPV member of the Cancer Vaccine Launch Project (CVLP)
Meet our Employees
![Jill](https://www.yorkshirecancercommunity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Jill.png)
Jill Long
About Jill
Engagement & Communications Officer
Jill started working for the Yorkshire Cancer Community (then known as the Yorkshire Cancer Patient Forum) on 13 March 2017, based at Healthwatch Wakefield and funded by Macmillan Cancer Support for three years.
Her role was to support the Forum to enable the views and experiences of cancer patients, families and carers to be heard and used to improve the quality of cancer care in Yorkshire and the Humber. Together with a patient board of trustees, we registered as a charity and established a network of patients, carers and healthcare professionals.
From April 2020, our Macmillan grant came to an end and the West Yorkshire & Harrogate Cancer Alliance funded us to create a cancer awareness programme, which became Cancer SMART.
Jill became the first employee of Yorkshire Cancer Community, and although the plan was for her to remain based with Healthwatch Wakefield, Covid had other plans. The office was closed and from March 2020, she has worked from home.
YCC continues to work in partnership with the Cancer Alliance, and Cancer SMART has gone from success to success taking a cancer awareness message across West Yorkshire.
Before joining YCC, Jill spent 10 years as Manager and Company Secretary for Communities Who Can, the Tenants Federation in Kirklees, ensuring that tenants’ views helped to shape housing services and supporting more than 100 small community groups, known as tenant and resident associations. She spent eight years at Home-Start Kirklees, a family support charity working with 90 home visiting volunteers. Jill also worked alongside her husband, Pete, in their busy Post Office and newsagents near Wakefield, for a number of years. She is a journalist by training, having worked on local newspapers in Lincolnshire and West Yorkshire.
![Clare L](https://www.yorkshirecancercommunity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Clare-L.png)
Clare Lockwood
About Clare
Administrator
After several years of working in finance and accounts, Clare joined the Yorkshire Cancer Community team as their administrator. She has really enjoyed learning new skills, such as in marketing and design, and finds the role really interesting and varied. Most importantly she enjoys getting involved in such a worthwhile cause.
Like many families, Clare’s has been directly affected by cancer several times, so it is great to have the opportunity to be able to get involved in helping cancer patients to get the support and information they need at such a challenging time.
Outside of work, Clare enjoys growing her own fruit and veg on her allotment, helping run a litter picking group and helping at a local animal sanctuary by doing weekend maintenance, helping at events, and running their online shop.
![Lauren](https://www.yorkshirecancercommunity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Lauren-1.png)
Lauren Cross
About Lauren
Since 2018, Lauren has held clinical support positions in a variety of radiology scanning departments at NHS hospitals while pursuing a BSc in Integrated Health and Social Care. She has also recently completed her Mammography Associate Apprenticeship, during which she learnt a significant amount about cancer pathways and how they affect patients and caregivers. Lauren then made the decision to volunteer as a Cancer Champion because she wanted to continue sharing her passion and dedication to offering patient-centred care in the breast screening/symptomatic service after completing her apprenticeship. The skills she has gained from volunteering have not only helped her advocate for cancer support more broadly, but they have also fuelled her desire for advocating for holistic and personalised care and support planning within cancer services.
Since volunteering as a Cancer Champion, Lauren is now also the Community Panel Coordinator for Yorkshire Cancer Community in partnership with NHS West Yorkshire and Harrogate Alliance.
When she is not working, Lauren likes to spend time at the caravan along the stunning Yorkshire coastline as well as hiking in the Yorkshire Dales!
If you’re interested in becoming a trustee, we’d love to
hear from you, please email us