Melissa is Director of Training & Senior Programme Manager at The Partnering Initiative, where she has spent a decade helping individuals and organisations unlock the potential of working in partnership. She is passionate about supporting people on the front line of partnerships — the practitioners navigating the messy, rewarding, and often under-resourced reality of making collaboration actually work.

As Director of Training, Melissa leads TPI’s programme of tailored and open training courses, designing and delivering both in-person and online facilitated learning to a wide cross-section of sectors from across the globe, including the UN, business & the private sector, civil society, foundations and academia. A champion of online facilitated training, Melissa believes its rise is one of the most significant advances in the field — enabling TPI to reach more people, more economically, and from a far greater diversity of backgrounds and organisations. That diversity, she argues, makes the learning richer: courses benefit from more perspectives in the room, and organisations gain from the cross-learning that happens when teams from different countries and contexts come together. That said, there’s nothing quite like being in the same room, and Melissa is equally at home designing immersive in-person workshops and courses.

No two weeks are the same at TPI — and that, Melissa will tell you, is one of the things she loves most about it. From the UN system to business, civil society to academia, TPI’s breadth of clients and thematic work means the learning never stops.

As Senior Programme Manager, Melissa leads and co-delivers a range of organisational and partnership support programmes, including Fit for Partnering evaluations, needs assessments, partnership health checks and strategic reviews. She works both with organisations seeking to strengthen their internal capacity for partnering, and with partnerships themselves — supporting them to operate as effectively as possible, from governance and ways of working through to theory of change and strategic planning.

Before joining TPI, Melissa spent 13 years in corporate London across finance, analysis and compliance, before moving to Nepal to apply her skills in a humanitarian aid setting, where she gained first-hand experience of the complexities of working across local, national and international partnerships in the field.

Mel lives in rural Oxfordshire with her small dog, Sid and is an avid walker, musician and traveller.