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'The appropriate advisor'
Karen, born and raised in Norwich, initially worked as an articled clerk for a firm of Chartered Accountants moving on to budgeting programmes for Anglia Television.
While taking a break to raise her family she fostered teenagers, a role she found both rewarding and challenging. This prompted her to study Psychology and she graduated as BSc. (Hons) in 1996. She then spent some time researching familial attachment patterns of Social Services clients. She was also the field leader for a BSc. Course in Psychology and taught cognitive and developmental psychology to undergraduates.
With a family relocation to Nottingham Karen volunteered as an Appropriate Adult for the newly formed Youth Offending Service — where she spent lots time waiting around in police cells. This led to further training to become a probation officer. After a period of generic practice she was seconded to work with the Youth Offending Service. Since then, she has worked in a variety of youth and adult criminal justice settings becoming highly experienced in offender and community risk management.
Before starting Gravitas with her partner John she was a consultant with the Manchester Multi-agency Gang Strategy promoting positive links with the Probation and Youth Offending Services under a Crime and Disorder Partnership umbrella. Having worked on several high profile cases in the Nottingham and Birmingham areas she brought her skills to a specialist team that were developing an innovative approach to managing gun crime in Manchester by working with gang-related clients.
Her work within Gravitas includes consultancy work that draws on her varied experiences, and training criminal justice workers in areas such as court skills, information sharing, residential social workers as Appropriate Adults, assessment and pre-sentence report writing. Other areas of work currently being undertaken include assessment skills audits, and advisory roles within Crime Reduction Tactical Partnerships. This all runs alongside the day to day business support necessary.
Karen is passionate about all things ethical, and is keen to support community groups that provide invaluable services for ‘hard to reach groups’ that would otherwise avoid intervention. Gravitas gives her the framework to make this possible. Karen and John have already started to collaborate — using their skills to promote effective practice through the application of modern IT development.
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