Board Members

Niti is the newly appointed chair of Sampad.

She chairs the board of Harbr, a London based health tech accelerator. She is Senior Digital Health Advisor for AXA Emerging Customers and was recently Medical Director to KPMGs Global Healthcare Practice. She runs a boutique health system consulting firm Health4alladvisory Ltd and sits on the board of the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital. Niti is immediate past President of IDF Europe.

Niti has worked with numerous charities in the health and social care space and has expertise on fundraising, governance and financial management of charities.

She is deeply interested in the arts both personally and professionally as a means to well being.

Niti is a senior Doctor who has deep expertise in Digital models of health care and funding of healthcare both from a public sector and private insurance perspective. Niti helped to build up the largest chain of primary care clinics in the UK – the Modality Partnership – and held several senior commissioning roles in the English NHS. She worked with HCL to operationalise their first healthcare venture.

Niti was Medical and Innovation Director of Emerging Markets for BUPA, where she helped to create an innovative model of micro-insurance in Bangladesh in partnership with Telenor, creating a digital front door to healthcare for 7.8 million people. She established and supervised clinics in China, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Hong Kong and helped create health benefit management systems in Saudi Arabia, UK, India, Hong Kong, and Thailand.

Niti has delivered universal healthcare work in India, Middle East , Kazakhstan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. She is currently working with countries developing mobile health propositions at scale that include financial protection models and new models of distribution and this has reached over a 11 million consumers in eight countries.

With Harbr, a wide portfolio of companies have been engaged and accelerated, a few examples being Drone delivery, fitness for endurance athletes, remote monitoring , digital pathology and biotechnology for COVID-19 testing ,genome sequencing, personalised cancer therapies, training and development of healthcare staff online. Currently, Harbr has set up a primary care accelerator in the NHS  working with over 600,000 patients.

Paresh Solanki is a passionate advocate for social change who uses media technology to amplify the voices of the marginalised and empower individuals and communities. He is a highly skilled and experienced communicator with a proven track record of success.

Paresh’s work is characterised by its creativity, innovation, and commitment to positively impacting people’s lives. His diverse projects have won numerous accolades in broadcasting, events production, project management and community cohesion. He holds a Fellowship of the Royal Television Society and The Institute of Leadership & Development.

His recent projects include:

Filming a series of testimonies of individuals directly involved in the expulsion of Ugandan Asians in 1972.

Filming a series of testimonies of people who responded to the COVID crisis in the UK.

Developing health campaigns including ‘Fighting Prostate Cancer’ clinics’; Long Covid Awareness series, Organ Donation in Asian communities’ Fighting against hate crime.

Paresh was a senior executive and producer/director at the BBC, where his roles included Managing Editor, Network TV BBC Birmingham; Chairman of the Board, BBC Relocation; Editor, Asian programmes; Executive Producer and producer/director of international documentaries, events & media campaigns. His biggest success was the creation of the BBC Mega Mela festival, which, for the first time, featured diverse Asian talent on national television and radio in multiple genres. Paresh also worked in BBC News and foreign affairs as a journalist.

After leaving the BBC, he was a Media Expert for the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Programme based in Strasbourg. He then was the Inter Faith Network’s Assistant Director, responsible for creating the National Inter Faith Week which incorporates over 600 events nationally and has been running for 15 years.

Paresh is a Trustee of the Media Diversity Institute (MDI), which works in conflict areas worldwide in campaigning and training for responsible media coverage. He is a former Trustee of Sandford St Martin Trust, which awards for excellence in faith-related broadcasting. He is a member of BAFTA, the Royal Television Society, the Royal Photographic Society, and the British Psychological Society. He’s held various positions in judging awards, including the BBC and National Faith through a Lens Photo Awards, and sitting on government-led committees.

Barry is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (qualified in 1971), a past President of the Birmingham & West Midlands Society of Chartered Accountants (2003-2004) and an ICAEW National Council member (2007 to 2015).

He also chaired the ICAEW West Midlands Regional (Economic) Strategy Board and through that has attended various local economic groups.

He is Chair of Governors at KE VI Camp Hill School for Boys, and Board member of the charities, KE VI Schools in Birmingham, and KEVI Academy Trust Birmingham.

In the 1970s Barry was the Hon Treasurer and Company Secretary of Birmingham Arts Laboratory, and after a career break in the early 1980s worked as the Administrator for that organisation and Birmingham Arts Shop. He returned to professional practice as a chartered accountant, but with a growing specialism in the accounting, taxation and audits of arts & media companies, most of which were limited by guarantee/ charitable trusts.

He retired from audits in 2009 and a couple of years later joined the Board of Sampad, previously an audit client for 10 or so years. He still deals with the accounts of a number of arts & community companies, usually in the Independent Reporting Accountant role.

Jon is a partner at Anthony Collins Solicitors LLP and has expertise in funding, particularly project finance and debt finance for housing associations.

He advises housing associations, financial institutions, social enterprises, local authorities and infrastructure companies. He has expertise in the financing of property development, infrastructure projects and social housing projects.

He is also an author of articles on finance and a conference speaker.

Dr Emma Margetson (1993) is an award-winning acousmatic composer and sound artist based in the Midlands, UK. Her work is recognised nationally and internationally, and was recently featured on the British Music Collection’s #AComposerADay series, which showcased the profiles of 31 female composers and their unique contributions to composition in the UK.

Emma’s compositional work is focused on developing novel compositional approaches that are actively geared towards increasing engagement with electroacoustic composition in order to reach wider audiences, in particular disadvantaged segments of the community, and younger people. Furthermore, Emma has collaborated with a variety of arts organisations across the West Midlands and beyond, and has extensive experience in multichannel composition, sound diffusion and interpretation for 2D and 3D audio.

Emma is currently a Lecturer in Sound Design at the University of Greenwich and also a Research Fellow for the AHRC Leadership Fellowship project, Audiovisual Space: Recontextualising Sound-Image Media. She is also a Visiting Lecturer for the Music Technology programmes at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Her work has been published with Urban Arts Berlin, Sonos Localia and obs акусма AUDIOR 068.

Beyond composition, Emma has considerable experience in the administration and coordination of events and projects within the arts sector, including working for many years as an administrator for BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre).

Emma’s first association with Sampad was through the SEPP: Digital programme in March 2015 where she worked on the STRP Festival in Eindhoven, Netherlands. After receiving training from the Young People on Arts Boards Scheme with Birmingham City Council, Emma relished the opportunity to join the board of Sampad and is currently chair of the Arts and Education subcommittee.

Gurdip is part of the BBC Academy’s senior team heading up Future Skills and Events. Under his portfolio he looks after the roll-out of training for digital skills; major Pan BBC strategic projects and external partnerships with Creative Skillset, National Film and Television School and the Arts Council.
Before working with the Academy, Gurdip forged a successful production career as a Executive Producer in BBC Factual; CBBC and BBC Worldwide.
As Head of Asian Programmes at the BBC, Gurdip was responsible for a number of network and international series including the award winning Arts and Culture show ‘Desi DNA’; landmark documentaries such as ‘Partition: The Day India Burned’; ‘Lost World of the Raj’ and BBC Two’s ‘Indian Food Made Easy’.
In addition to his career at the BBC, Gurdip was Senior Vice President & Head of Programmes for Sony Pictures based in Mumbai and led the creative renewal of Sony Entertainment India commissioning and adapting global entertainment formats such as ‘Dancing With The Stars’, X Factor and ‘I’m A Celebrity’.

Satnam Rana-Grindley was born and brought up in Wolverhampton. She graduated in 1999 and started her career at BBC Radio 5Live as a researcher before joining the Midlands Today team as a trainee journalist in 2002. She presented weekly radio show BBC WM ‘Midlands Masala’ and has also presented BBC Asian Network. Satnam has worked in several roles; as a producer, director and presenter on regional news and the current affairs programme ‘Inside Out’ in the West Midlands.

Satnam loves to share her passion for media with young people, talking to them about all of the possible careers available to them and inspiring them to follow their dreams. She has worked with the National Council of Journalists (NCTJ) to recruit future journalists onto the Journalism Diversity Fund and she has been a judge for their annual awards.

Satnam is on a career break from the BBC and is now the Head of Communications at Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership where their mission is to drive inclusive economic growth. Satnam says she is getting used to a career change that brings personal growth with a sprinkling of familiarity.

Away from work, Satnam does what she can to raise awareness of breast cancer following a diagnosis 3 years ago. She is vocal on social media about ‘self-checking’ and has done numerous talks about her experience. Crucially, she uses her recorded video diaries to campaign at a grass-roots level in south asian communities where the subject of breast cancer still remains ‘hushed’.

Dr Shahmima Akhtar is Assistant Professor of Black and Asian British History at the University of Birmingham. Her current area of interest is anti racist activism within British Bangladeshi communities in Birmingham in the late twentieth century with a focus on women’s activism.

Her first book Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970 traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally-connected state. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures.

Shahmima has worked at the Royal Historical Society to improve BME representation in UK History, working with schools and the curriculum, cultural institutions, community groups or other learned societies, and has also worked closely with museums and heritage sites as a researcher and consultant on shaping histories of the British Empire for today’s populace.