Meet the Team

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  • Executive Director

    Laila is a Founder and Director of Project Phoenix. As Executive Director, she leads Project Phoenix’s development, strengthening organisational capacity, and guiding strategic planning, leadership, and culture, to ensure its impact aligns with its mission and values. She cultivates a national network of organisations and individuals working toward shared goals for animal freedom.

    Laila is a Co-Founder and former Director of Animal Think Tank where she served for six years. She is co-editor of the book ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture: New Ways Forward’ which envisions a truly just and sustainable food system. She is on the Advisory Board of Animal Advocacy Careers and The Empathy Project and a mentor for Kickstarting for Good. Laila has been involved in social change for most of her career having previously worked in international development for 15 years. She has a PhD in Development Economics (SOAS) and an MSc in Development Management (LSE).

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  • Community Organiser

    Tom is a Founder and Director of Project Phoenix. As Base-Building Lead he cultivates and empowers a national network of local grassroots groups to take strategic action for animal freedom. 

    Tom is a Co-Founder of the Southern Animal Rights Coalition and Dorset Animal Action. He has helped lead successful campaigns to close a military research laboratory and end deep-diving experiments on goats, secure the closure of three intensive egg farms, close a puppy farm, and expose cosmetic testing of Botox on mice. He also helped coordinate the international Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign, which brought Europe’s largest animal testing laboratory to its knees in the early 2000s.

    Tom is the author of ‘Your Neighbour Kills Puppies’, the gripping inside account of the SHAC campaign and the grassroots mobilisation against testing on animals.

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  • Natalie Braine, Narrative Power Lead (part-time)

    Natalie is a Founder and Director of Project Phoenix. As Narrative Power Lead she is focused on changing the narrative about our animal cousins and society’s relationship with them. She collaborates with other groups and organisations, co-creating narrative unity and determining the most persuasive communications for different audiences on specific issue campaigns. Natalie’s also focused on influencing how fellow animals are portrayed in entertainment and media. She's inspired by other movements who have influenced the wider culture and helped create social change through narrative change.

    Natalie has worked at Animal Think Tank for the past 4 years, leading their Narrative team, and before that worked in entertainment media. She was part of Animal Rebellion’s media team and is also a published fiction writer.

  • Joseph Smith, Northern Community Organiser

    Joseph is the Northern Community Organiser at Project Phoenix, where he builds and strengthens grassroots organising across the North of England, supporting local leaders to develop resilient campaigning groups capable of taking strategic action for animal freedom.

    He became involved in the animal rights movement in the late 1990s at the age of 14. After visiting Camp Rena outside Huntingdon Life Sciences, he began organising pressure campaigns against contract testing laboratories and vivisection breeders in the North of England. He was an early member and North East coordinator of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), later helping to co-organise the campaign nationally and internationally. He launched the successful campaign targeting HLS insurer Marsh & McLennan and later helped co-ordinate Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs, which forced the closure of a vivisection breeder.

    Alongside his campaigning work, Joseph co-founded one of the North of England’s busiest wildlife rescue organisations and has hands-on experience caring for wild animals.

Advisory Panel

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  • Kate Fowler has been an animal rights campaigner for 30 years. Her work has encompassed humane education, political lobbying, undercover investigations, global campaigns, celebrity liaison, film production, copywriting, grant-giving, and media and PR.

    She spearheaded the campaign to make CCTV mandatory in UK slaughterhouses, wrote the best-selling book How to Go Vegan, created Veganuary’s celebrity cookbook (their biggest driver of sign-ups), and launched headline-grabbing global campaigns.

    Today she works across multiple organisations to end greyhound racing and drive food policy change within environmental NGOs, producing a feature documentary and her first animation, and is also co-authoring a book.

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  • Tania Luna has founded and grown multiple companies, including Scarlet Spark, a nonprofit that provides free leadership and organisational health support to animal charities. She also co-founded LifeLabs Learning, a leadership development company that helps thousands of people become more capable and compassionate leaders.

    She is the author of several leadership books (most recently: Lead Together: Stop Squirreling Away Power and Build a Better Team). She is also a psychology researcher, educator, and TED speaker.

    She lives in a micro-sanctuary with 40+ animals and one human partner.

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  • Gill was originally called to the Bar more than three decades ago, and more recently became a Solicitor Advocate in order to be able to represent people in police custody. She has defended clients in the Youth Court; Magistrates Court; Crown Court and Court of Appeal.

    Due to her political heritage she has always been a champion of, and voice for, the underdog, which she says is a fundamental part of her DNA.

    Gill is a passionate defender of both the Rights of Animals, and also of those facing criminal proceedings as a result of activism. She advises both vegan activists and anti vivisection campaigners.

    She has defended in a number of high profile trials.

    It is of note that as a result of her support of campaigners against the MBR Acres puppy breeding facility, she faced Contempt proceedings in the High Court, brought by the Company.

    The case against her was dismissed and described by the Judge as frivolous and vexatious.

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  • Hilary Jones is the Ethics Director for Lush Cosmetics, spearheading campaigns that speak out on many issues around human rights, animal protection and preserving the environment.

    A lifelong social justice activist, Hilary is part of the Lush Prize management committee, an initiative launched in 2012 and the largest international annual prize in the non-animal testing sector, awarding those who have made significant advancements in removing animals from testing.

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  • Nicola is a director of communications and Vice President of Animal Save Movement. She has over 20 years of experience campaigning for animal freedom and climate justice. As a cofounder of the Southern Animal Rights Coalition, in 2006, she co-led an 18-month grassroots and political advocacy campaign which saw the British Government bow to pressure and end painful deepsea diving experiments on goats held in hyperbaric chambers. The campaign win also saw the permanent closure of the QinetiQ laboratory in Gosport, where Nicola helped secure the release of a dozen goat survivors to the safety of a sanctuary.


    As a campaigner for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, she received a 15-month prison sentence for her activism under controversial and undemocratic legislation targeting freedom of expression. She is a named victim in the UK judge-led Undercover Policing Inquiry in the miscarriage of justice category. 

    At Bournemouth University, Nicola studied Psychology and Computing, where she learned to apply our knowledge of human memory and information processing for application in effective communication, copywriting and user interface design.