Celia Warrender

I am passionate about the role that the public and third sector have to play in building stronger communities and have dedicated my career to date, to work across this sector in a variety of roles.

My early career started in offender rehabilitation at HMP, working in education and employment before moving into accredited programme delivery, first as a Psychological Assistant and later as Deputy Treatment Manager.

Following this, I worked for many years in community substance misuse and floating support services, again specialising in work related to offender rehabilitation, as well as working to form better partnerships between substance misuse and other public and third sector organisations to improve outcomes. During this time I also completed a secondment at Birmingham City Council as lead for Domestic Violence, within their new homeless gateway service.

On my return from the council to substance misuse services, I worked as a performance improvement and implementation manager, supporting the transfer and increase in performance of new services into our organisation, finishing as team leader of a new floating support service for people with life-long illnesses.

On deciding to move on from front-line services and progress into a career of project management and agile transformation, I still wanted to be able to contribute to these services, taking my first role as an associate project manager with West Midlands Police and then moving across to social and affordable housing first at Midland Heart and subsequently to my current role of Scrum Master in IT at whg.