Staff & Supporters
Rebecca Murray
Rebecca has spent the past 14 years working in the voluntary sector and 10 years on the issue of access to Higher Education. In 2010, Rebecca founded Article 26 in partnership with Nicholas Sagovsky and is the project's Director, she became involved with the issue of access to Higher Education whilst managing Save the Children's 'Brighter Futures' project. Rebecca began her career in Welfare Rights, as a specialist in working with people aged 19 and under and young parents. During her 10 years with Save the Children, Rebecca focused on undertaking research, advocacy, the delivery of training and managing projects for children from abroad and indigenous young people experiencing severe and persistent poverty. Alongside her work with Article 26, Rebecca is currently undertaking an ESRC funded PhD at the University of Sheffield, her doctoral research seeks to explore how the marginalisation of refugees and asylum seekers is both enacted and resisted at the institutional level, through exploring the barriers faced by forced migrants who seek access to Higher Education. The UK & Sweden are the focus of a comparative study within the EU, into the impact of different managed migration regimes on forced migrants’ access to higher education.
Nicholas Sagovsky: Co-founder and HKF Trustee
Nicholas Sagovsky is an Anglican priest. His father's family were refugees. He holds professorial posts in Theology at two ecumenical universities: Liverpool Hope and Roehampton. He has been Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, William Leech Professorial Research Fellow in Applied Christian Theology at Newcastle University and Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, Chair of the West End Refugee Service (WERS) in Newcastle, a Trustee of the Frank Buttle Trust and is now a Trustee of the Helene Kennedy Foundation and a Board Member of CARA (the Council for At-Risk Academics). He was a Commissioner on the Independent Asylum Commission (2008), which engaged in the most comprehensive review of the UK Asylum System there has ever been. At that time, through Rebecca Murray, he met a group of young people who wanted to go to university but whose applications for asylum were not yet decided. Even if they were offered university places, they couldn't take them up because they had no access to student finance. Together, Rebecca and Nick founded Article 26 to help young people in this situation. Nick speaks and writes frequently about human rights, asylum and social justice.
Jessica Hope: Project Officer
Jessica has spent the past decade working and campiagning within the refugee and asylum sector and has worked with Article 26 since 2011. She is currently preparing to submit her PhD theseis at the Institute of Development Policy and Management (IDPM) at the University of Manchester and was recently appointed as a Teaching Fellow at University College London (UCL). Jessica is the Postgraduate representative for the Developing Areas Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and a news editor for Geography Directions, the RGS-IBG Journals and Geography Compass blog.
Hilary Turley: Project Officer
Hilary has spent over ten years advocating for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in a variety of different roles inthe UK and Zambia. She obtained a Masters degree in International Development from the Institute of Development Policy and Management (IDPM) at the University of Manchester in 2011 and currently works as a freelance social researcher, writer and community facilitator. She works in both academic and community contexts on projects which aim to explore and better understand the nature of social exclusion and discrimination. Hilary is a research associate at the Sustainable Housing and Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU), University of Salford and at the Gender and Participation Unit, Manchester and a Trustee of Womencentre, one of the largest women's organisations in the UK.