Carly is the Director of Capacity Building and Standards at Involve. She leads a variety of projects inside and outside of public institutions that aim to build capacity to embed the knowledge, skills, structures and cultures needed for effective public engagement in decision making.
Carly's work oversees the development and delivery training and mentoring programmes, strategic guidance for decision makers and organisations, good practice resources, standards, and thought leadership.
She is the originator of the School for Everyday Democracy, Involve's flagship community power programme, conceived and built from the ground up to equip individuals and communities with the participation, deliberation and organising skills to create lasting change where they live. She is also the Sciencewise Programme Director, the UK Government's leading public dialogue programme on science and technology policy and research.
Carly has played a leading role in a sector-wide coalition to co-create the UK's first shared standards for deliberative and participatory processes. She has shaped the Care Quality Commission's approach to assessing public engagement across systems — the first framework of its kind in the health and social care regulatory sector. She has led a variety of Involve's capacity building focused projects, including the Local Climate Engagement programme and the public engagement element of the Local Policy Innovation Hub as part of the levelling-up agenda.
Carly writes and speaks regularly on democracy and participation. In 2025, she gave expert testimony to the MHCLG Select Committee on community cohesion in relation to the 2024 summer riots. Her writing includes Building participation that promotes community cohesion, an opinion piece for The Management Journal (The MJ) on the role of sustained public participation as a long-term route to community cohesion (2024), and Democracy to the Rescue: Rebalancing the Scales of Inequity, an opinion piece for IPS-Journal on rebuilding public trust by sharing decision-making power with disengaged communities (2023). She co-authored Fostering Impact: An investor guide for engaging communities in place-based impact investing for place-based impact investors such as HSBC, Schroders and M&G (2023).
Carly has a youth and child participation background. Prior to joining Involve, she was Secretary General of IFM-SEI, the global umbrella organisation for progressive, non-formal education child and youth movements active across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. She represented the organisation on the Council of Europe's Advisory Council on Youth — a co-management body that helps shape Europe's youth sector priorities, policies, and budgets — and the associated funding committee, the Programming Committee on Youth. She is a former member of the EU Children's Rights Action Group (CRAG) and European Youth Forum's Expert Group on Erasmus+ and Funding. Before that, she held project management positions in youth and political organisations in the UK and mainland Europe, and has worked as a freelance trainer and practitioner in non-formal education for more than 15 years.
Carly holds an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Outside of Involve, she is involved in community campaigning in the east end of Newcastle. She has volunteered as a trustee, chair and vice/deputy chair for a number of local and national charities including Woodcraft Folk, British Youth Council and the Riverside Community Health Project.
