Dr Simon D Hankins, Chief Executive Officer

Simon joined BS3 Community in 2011. The organisation had recently been through a process of re-focusing its way of operating to embrace and develop a social enterprise approach, moving away from grant-funding to income being self-generated through trading.

Through Simon’s leadership that model has been further developed, allowing the charity to achieve a better balance between its trading and public benefit work, with surplus from the organisation’s community business activities used to support charitable projects and public benefit services.

Simon Hankins “BS3 Community exists to improve the health and wellbeing of the people within the BS3 postcode area of south Bristol; as such, much of our work is focused on prevention and early intervention of issues; however, we also work with those who have issues that they find hard to cope with, and have little or no support to help.

We embrace partnership working, particularly to support specialist services in the BS3 area; we also support collaborations with our local universities in order to research and evidence the projects that we deliver.”

Simon initially moved to the charitable sector in 2005 taking the post of CEO at a small, and at the time, struggling bereavement counselling charity in Stoke-on-Trent. He managed to turn the charity around, lead it through a significant period of growth, and re-modelled operations to include a level of trading income plus re-position it into a highly respected organisation. Six years after joining the counselling charity, Simon returned to live in Somerset and was appointed CEO at BS3 Community Development.

Simon spent the first 17 years of his career heading-up research and development teams in three speciality fertiliser companies; the first a very small niche products company based in the UK; the second for a huge multi-national fertiliser company based in Norway and the last a SME in Canada.

Simon holds a 2(1) honours degree in Applied Biology from the University of Bath and a D.Phil (PhD) in Plant Sciences from Oxford University.