“In 2009 one million people in the UK voted the far right. That day, for me, politics became a contact sport.”

Organise.

George was raised in Bath by a British documentary film maker and a Greek academic. He graduated from Oxford with 1st class honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics in 2008 and in 2009 saw the far right BNP elected to the European Parliament with over a million votes. Knocking on doors across East London he describes yes, hearing racist opinions, but beneath them hearing of pressing social problems and, beneath those, a sense of having been left behind. That felt like a problem that could only be solved with people, not for them, and so George joined Citizens UK and trained as a community organiser.

Over the following decade George built broad based alliances of faith groups, unions, educational organisations and charities training thousands of community leaders & helping them win fights to raise wages, tackle destitution, make misogyny a hate crime, change policing and more. Alongside this core organising George helped spark shorter term mobilisations, from work to hold banks accountable for the crash in 2008 to putting the rise of food poverty on the map in 2014. In 2015 he helped build the UK’s Refugee Welcome movement in response to the Syrian crisis and started Safe Passage to help create self and legal routes for child refugees arriving in Europe.

In 2018 George joined Meta’s Community Partnerships Team, working to make social media a space for more meaningful social connection and to empower digital communities to drive impact around the world. While working there he has been at the heart of supporting digitally enabled mutual aid efforts in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. He also helped launch the first ever certification in community management and partnered with the NYU GovLab team on this report on digital communities.

Outside of work George is a trustee of Make a Wish UK where he leads the CEDI Committee and sits as a Member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.