Meet the Project Team
Tony Hodder
My role is to lead, encourage and support the LEAF team in all the activities. I am an ordained Anglican Pioneer Priest and have helped bring about a unity across the different churches in Ledbury. Prior to ordination I was involved in several charities working in the areas of supporting young people, mental health and people with physical impairments. I am a qualified psychotherapist offering therapeutic support to people. I am also a qualified accountant and worked in industry for many years.
Malcom Laird
The heart of hope, joyful freedom and loving care which beats at the centre of this charity is not a system of beliefs but it is the wonder of a deepening experience in real time of a relationship with its source: God himself. My role is not only to help us as a team to keep this connection in all we do but to make it available to anyone and everyone who is looking for answers to the deepest questions and longings of life.
David Houghton
With 33 years of experience in Retail Banking, David heads up a small team looking after finance aspects of LEAF, including researching grants and funding providers. He is married to Val and has lived in the Ledbury area for the past 26 years.
Clare Porter
I'm Clare and along with Val we have responsibility for the Physical Wellbeing strand in LEAF. I'm a retired teacher and when not serving LEAF I can often be found walking Amber, my red fox Labrador, in the hills, or singing, or both at the same time!
Ali Bennett
Hi, I’m Ali and I have the privilege of overseeing the emotional well-being branch of LEAF. I have a background of working as a health professional, both in the NHS and for children’s charities. Some years ago I retrained as a counsellor and recently stepped out of my health professional role and into full time counselling. I love supporting and enabling people to find ways forward through their emotional challenges and I know that people’s emotional well-being is important to God too. I love to start the day by running through our beautiful local countryside before settling into work.
Val Bailey
I'm Val and I feel very privileged to be involved in this charity which aims to reach out to help those in need in my home town of Ledbury. Clare and I will be working together on several projects. One of the first will be linking with the national organisation Christians Against Poverty to offer help to people in debt. I have been retired since 2017. My working life was spent in the NHS, working in hospitals in Birmingham and Hereford.
Mary Anne Keyes
Christians in Ledbury are already working together to share the good news of God’s unconditional love with children, both by practical action and by telling the Christian story. LEAF will seek to help support existing activities and to encourage and enable new ones, and my role is to facilitate this by liaising with all involved in children’s work. The skills I bring to the team are those learned through many years as a primary school teacher and through experiencing a wide variety of young people’s activities in many different churches. I enjoy working with committed teams of people who long to share their faith in Jesus with children and their families.