Hilary Burrage
Hilary Burrage is a consultant in strategic public policy. Originally from the South of England and then the Midlands, Hilary has for the past three decades made her home in Liverpool, where her husband is a long-serving member of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.
Hilary has been a Director / Trustee of organisations across a range of disciplines, from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, through the Merseyside Regional Ambulance NHS Trust to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society. She has also been a Lay Partner of the Health Professions Council and is an occasional Associate of the Centre for Local Economic Studies (CLES).
Hilary has a Master's degree in the study of science and society, and is a qualified teacher with many years' experience as a researcher, college lecturer and author.
She is a Member of the Council of Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a committee / steering group member of a range of arts, cultural and heritage voluntary organisations in Liverpool. She is elected chair of the Liverpool Riverside Constituency Labour Party and of HOPES: The Hope Street Association, Liverpool's cultural quarter regeneration charity, which she founded in the mid 1990s.
At a national level, Hilary holds a Ministerial appointment as Lay Member of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Science Advisory Council; she is also a Director of the British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA). Hilary is seriously committed to the idea of sustainable development, and to finding ways to deliver this.
Over the years Hilary has found that her interests have become both more generic and more focused on formal and informal knowledge. This has taken her to involvement in programmes as diverse as local community arts projects (e.g. Liverpool's annual 'Hotfoot on Hope Street' concert) and the (successful) 'big science' campaign to bring the Fourth Generation Light Source to the North West, rather than the South East, of England.
Increasingly, Hilary believes, what links these aspects of renewal and regeneration is a requirement for genuine communication at every level and between all sorts of stakeholders. Modern society is very complex and there is a pressing need to identify how the rich diversity of perspectives to be found in all regeneration programmes can be 'translated' between stakeholders. Hilary welcomes the challenges of this task.
Shared language is not the same as shared understanding. For regeneration and renewal to be successful, at every stage we need both.