Emily Coatham

Hi! I love live music and going to festivals. I used to volunteer at festivals around the UK, I have also been to Glastonbury three times and I’m going again this year.

Well, I lived in Oklahoma for a year for a ‘study abroad year’. People are usually surprised about that!

So, I’m the Partnership Manger at the London Communities Emergencies Partnership (LCEP), which is co-chaired by London Plus and VCS Emergencies Partnership. We help to support voluntary and community sector emergency preparedness and response in London.

My role involves making connections with people and mobilising organisations during an emergency response.

Then there’s a lot that goes with that. For example, how do we strengthen those connections? Or how do we build the voluntary sector capability to make sure we are more prepared?

This could involve organising meetings to bring partners together, developing table-top exercises or representing the voluntary sector during London Resilience Group meetings.

My career has been very voluntary sector-focused, particularly within infrastructure charities in London. Before London Plus, I worked at Groundwork London on their voluntary services team.

After that I moved to London Plus as a coordinator. This was when London Plus was just starting up, so I was able to get involved in lots of different aspects of setting up a charity. I coordinated the creation of the website, set up various internal processes and systems, and generally supported all the different areas of London Plus.

Then COVID hit and I started to get involved in emergencies and resilience. We contacted every Volunteer Centre and Council for Voluntary Services and just asked them what they were seeing in their boroughs.

A lot of them talked about shortages in food banks.

We were able to help escalate this due to the way London Plus is positioned in the sector and the food banks in most need received food ahead of the upcoming bank holiday.

I also helped support the coordination of charities in London during the Afghanistan evacuation and following the start of the war in Ukraine. I really enjoyed this work and it led to me applying for my current role!

I spend a lot of my time meeting really interesting people from across different sectors.

It’s a real privilege to be able to chat to so many passionate people. I love that about my job. Also, I’m able to approach things creatively, which I really enjoy.

I love that we’re a small charity, and we’re all really passionate about what we do. We also have the opportunity to contribute to the progress of London Plus, no matter what our role is.

I think the culture at London Plus is also great, we’re open and flexible, which is something that others often comment on.

I think it’s important to have coordination. There are so many organisations doing incredible work, but having someone there to coordinate all these different groups and share information is crucial.

In an emergency, if organisations don’t communicate, response can be slower and services might get duplicated.

We are there to help join the dots and improve voluntary sector responses for Londoners.

The Horniman museum is really nice.

There’s quite a lot of natural history stuff there, among other things. It’s also in a beautiful park, they have markets there, a little farm. It’s just really lovely!