Human Behaviour Change For Life Online Learning

Human behaviour change is at the heart of all the work Jo undertakes in animal welfare. As co-founder of the social enterprise Human Behaviour Change for Animals alongside Suzanne, she is committed to making a difference. A life-long passion for animals has resulted in a career that spans nearly three decades working with and connected to animals. From its practical beginnings with horses who remain a constant, to developing and implementing international projects to deliver behaviour change to improve animal welfare, including the human animal.

Jo’s interest in behaviour led to an increasing focus on the role of the human animal in sustainably improving the wellbeing of animals. Using the principles and theories of human behaviour change within her work, including research, education, training, campaigning, communications, advocacy, project design, and strategy development. She has worked to deliver positive change through building capability, creating opportunity and developing motivation among the people and communities involved with animals.

Jo has an MSc in (Human) Behaviour Change, a Degree in Equine studies, a Certificate in Campaigns, together with varying practical equine qualifications. During her Master’s Degree Jo undertook research exploring the potential for human habit formation and change to deliver sustainable improvements for animal welfare; this research is now ongoing.

In 2001 she became Campaigns Manager for the then International League for the Protection of Horses, which went on to become World Horse Welfare. During her ten years at the charity she was promoted to the Senior Management Team as Director of Campaigns and Communications.

Jo developed and led a number of international welfare projects seeking improvements, through influencing and supporting change. Examples included the campaign to end the long-distance transport of horses and donkeys for slaughter. This work successfully delivered changes to legislation that improved welfare – including a reduction from over 160,000 to around 26,000 horses and donkeys being transported each year. In 2010 she was awarded the British Equine Veterinary Association Welfare Award, for her work on this campaign. Examples of others areas of focus include UK and EU animal welfare policy and legislation, work on equine disease and movement, capacity building in Romania, and the change process associated with rebranding World Horse Welfare.

Jo’s ambition of running her own company became a reality in 2011 when she set-up the social enterprise Progressive Ideas. She has since worked with a variety of UK and international NGOs, universities, policy makers, commercial organisations and individuals, covering a myriad of different animal welfare projects where understanding human behaviour and behaviour change is central.

Jane has 22 years’ experience in animal welfare, starting with an Equine Science background. She then qualified as a Veterinary Nurse, after some years in practice, Jane moved into teaching and working for Guide Dogs, before joining Cats Protection in 2012 as Head of Neutering. She joined with a passion to make a real difference to animal welfare, understanding that we have to change the hearts and minds, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour of humans to do that. To that end, Jane undertook the COM-B behaviour change Summer School in 2016 and is now working towards completing her Masters in behaviour change.

Jane created the Community outreach team at CP, developed the Cat Watch model, which is now published and was a co-founder of the Cat Population Control Group, responsible for writing the KiND resource. She has also learnt so much from knowledgeable colleagues whilst working on these projects, and feels privileged to have had the opportunity.

Jane's top tip is, don’t assume anything and refrain from making judgements based on your own biases about the audience you want to work with. Often what you think might work well, just won’t! Base everything you do on insights from consultation and co-design of interventions.

Anna is a community & education intervention monitoring & evaluation specialist. She is currently the Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) Manager for Manchester City Football Club foundation; City In The Community. Previous to this she was the Education M&E lead at Dogs Trust, where she worked for six years. She has lead on transformative overhauls of the implementation of strategic MEL processes for both organisations by developing Theories of Change, outcome frameworks and multiple large scale quantitative and qualitative impact evaluations with evaluation work published in academic journal PLOS-One.

She holds a Masters degree from UCL in Educational Planning, Economics and International Development with a research specialty in Theory of Change and impact evaluation. She has supported and consulted to multiple animal welfare education programmes in low and middle income countries.

Anna is passionate about the need for organisations to recognise education & community intervention as complex; requiring of and interdependent on the same level of strategic planning as more practical and immediate charity strategy. And has a vocation to drive the pressing need for structured MEL to be embedded as an intrinsic cog in the machine of all behaviour change seeking organisations.

She lives in Manchester with her partner and son, has a scruffy dog called Mo, and has a special place in her heart for Indian street dogs.