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xThe Together Board currently comprises 10 Trustees, elected to the Board on a rolling basis.
Susan Hunter - Chair
Susan Hunter is the Chairperson of Together (Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights) and has been an active supporter of their work since 2015. Susan has volunteered as a trustee since 2020, and has been the organisation's Chairperson since September 2024.
Susan is a passionate advocate within the third sector, having worked in senior leadership roles since 2014. She has a professional background in Community Education, with more than 20 years of experience working with young people, with a particular focus on community-based youth work, youth participation, and children’s rights. She is committed to models of practice that promote and foster collaboration and partnership. She has worked in several membership organisations, regionally and nationally, and brings a breadth of relevant experiences to the Together board.
Susan is employed as the Chief Executive Officer of Befriending Networks, the membership charity for befriending services across the UK.
Cate Nelson-Shaw - Trustee
A marketing and communications specialist, Cate has worked across the public, private and third sectors, at both executive and board level. Over the last few years she has been working as a Fractional CEO in the arts, transport and economic regeneration sectors. Prior to this Cate held senior marketing and communications roles in the private sector across a diverse range of sectors and founded and ran her own consultancy business.
Currently a Board Member of Dance Base, Cate has also served on the Board at Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector, Changing the Chemistry and the Public Sector Body Creative Scotland. She began her career with The Boots Company PLC on their Graduate Programme.
Cate loves the arts and creativity, is a keen traveller and is learning to row. When she’s not wild swimming with the Blue Tits, her and her husband run a complimentary taxi service for their two teenagers.
Mairi McReynolds - Treasurer
I have over 25 years experience in voluntary sector finance. I have been working more recently as the Director of Finance & Corporate Services at Children First for a year and a half. This is a strategic leadership role so I have skills and experience in this area as well as finance. I have been the Treasurer at Together for 3 years and prior to that I have acted as Treasurer at Home Start and Families Outside so I have a number of years experience acting in the role of Treasurer. I was involved with Together prior to taken up the treasurer role as I acted as their independent examiner on their annual accounts.
Laura Pasternak - Trustee
Laura Pasternak is passionate about human rights, equality and empowering children and young people, and adults, to know about and access their rights. This interest was sparked by a Lessons from Auschwitz project at school and her late Grampa who was a Polish Prisoner of War, which led her to volunteer as a Regional Ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust from 2014-2020.
Laura is the Policy and Participation Manager at Who Cares? Scotland, a rights-based membership charity working with people with care experience through advocacy and participation to help create a lifetime of equality, respect and love for Care Experienced people. In her role she represents the CCPS on the UNCRC Strategic Implementation Board and manages various rights-based projects.
She previously worked as Senior Associate for the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK, working for the Scotland policy team on issues such as the First Minister's Advisory Group on Human Rights Leadership, fair work, mental health, women’s issues and social care. She also consulted for the Commission developing an early version of what is now their Human Rights Tracker.
In her previous role in the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP)’s staff team as Policy and Public Affairs Manager, Laura worked collaboratively to deliver an ambitious youth-led public affairs and advocacy strategy, designed to ensure that politicians and policymakers hear the views of a diverse range of Scotland’s young people.
Laura sat on the Scottish Government’s Child Rights Working Group in 2019-20, empowering young people to feed in their views on UNCRC incorporation. She provided rights expertise and training for the 2017-18 National Campaign on young people’s rights, ‘Right Here, Right Now’, which helped influence the First Minister to commit to incorporate the UNCRC.
With a keen interest in human rights education and training, immigration and asylum and climate change, Laura has worked on these issues through various opportunities at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Vilnius and Odessa, the UN in Geneva and the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka. While studying she provided research to a child psychologist expert witness in child protection and asylum and immigration cases.
Laura has a Masters in Human Rights Law and speaks French and Spanish. She runs a weekly 5-a-sides and loves dancing - occasionally at the same time!
Paul Sullivan - Trustee
Paul’s career is based around upholding children’s rights and involving them in the design and delivery of the services that affect them. As Director for Children, Young People and Communities at Sistema Scotland, Paul’s role involves working alongside children, young people, families and community networks to ensure their views, ideas and experiences have direct influence on Sistema’s Big Noise programmes. As well as line management for the Heads of Big Noise Centres, Paul also works externally with local and national partners to strengthen Sistema’s work around inclusion, child poverty and equality.
Prior to Sistema, Paul led policy, participation and sector engagement at CELCIS, based at the University of Strathclyde. This involved managing the policy and participation team, working alongside Government and the wider care sector to help implement policy at a local and national level; for example, in reducing poverty and inequality, as well as complex change agendas such as the incorporation of the UNCRC. Paul’s work included establishing the first participation network in Scotland, as well as exciting creative-based research with young refugees, through a project called Drawing Together.
Paul also led the participation work at the Independent Care Review, helping over 5,500 people have their voice heard. As well as policy and participation experience, Paul has strong experience in grant fundraising, having been Head of Bid Development at the Prince’s Trust, and also grant-making, as Funding and Programme Manager at Life Changes Trust.
In his spare time, Paul is Chair of a charity called The Sound Lab, which provides free music and arts tuition to communities of young people who are often denied the right to participate in cultural activities. At Sound Lab, Paul is responsible for the overall leadership of the charity, as well as all grant fundraising and governance. Through Sound Lab, Paul co-created Musicares, the first national music service for care experienced young people in Scotland. As well as Sound Lab, Paul is a trustee of United Glasgow and volunteers with a number of other grassroots charities supporting young refugees.
Paul loves all things music and sport, so outside of work and family life, can often be found at a gig or a game!
Cameron Wong McDermott - Trustee
I am a Lecturer in Social Change and Clinical Legal Education at the University of Glasgow, based within the Glasgow Open Justice Centre. Here, I lead the development of law clinic projects and partnerships, guided by a mission to empower communities to use the law to access justice and achieve social inclusion.
My current work is directly informed by my career in human rights litigation and policy advocacy. Before moving into academia, I served as a legal officer at the European Court of Human Rights, working on a wide range of cases involving children’s rights and asylum. This international experience is grounded by my legal and policy work here in Scotland for both the Children and Young People’s Commissioner and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
In my research, core teaching, and law clinic practice, I explore the possibilities and limitations of using the law as a vehicle for progressive social change. I am particularly interested in understanding and exploring how movement lawyering, whereby lawyers support marginalised communities to build power and work towards achieving systemic change, relying on a diverse range of legal and political tools, can be applied in Scotland. For example, in partnership with Clan ChildLaw, I co-developed a training programme for students on child-centred lawyering skills, addressing the culture change needed in the legal profession to make children’s rights under the UNCRC a reality. I also co-supervise a new Racial Justice Clinic, where we critically examine the lawyer's role within social movements and explore how to use law as a tool to address racial inequality.
In addition, I am a co-investigator in a new Centre for People's Justice, a multi-partner consortium bringing together civil society and academic institutions. Within the Centre, I am leading a stream of work focused on connecting law clinics to social justice research and methods, with children's rights being one of our key themes.
Katrina Lambert - Trustee
Katrina Lambert BEM has been an activist and human rights defender tacking issues of equalities, children’s rights, and youth voice since the age of fifteen. She has been extensively involved in the UNCRC incorporation campaign for several years, working closely with the Children and Young People’s Commissioner and other young activists to lobby for incorporation. As part of this work she became the youngest person ever to present evidence to the UN Committee Against Torture in 2019, where she highlighted Scotland’s record on children’s rights and incorporation. She was also part of the youth-led group SQA Where’s Our Say which highlighted the children’s rights violations which occurred during the alternative assessment process in 2020, successfully securing a U-turn from the Scottish Government on algorithm assessed marking.
Aside from her work on children’s rights, she has led campaigns on topics including period poverty, violence against women, and youth sector funding. This has involved working with both the UK and Scottish governments as well as close collaboration with organisations including Girlguiding Scotland, Young Scot and the #iwill Movement. Since 2020, Katrina has also been a trustee at Volunteering Matters, the UK’s largest volunteering charity, and sits on multiple subcommittees.
Katrina has been recognised internationally for her work, receiving the Point of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister (2020), the prestigious Diana Award (2021) and most recently was awarded the BEM in the Queen’s Platinum Birthday Honours (2022) for services to young people, as one of the youngest on the list.
Katrina is a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE) where her degree in Politics and International Relations specialised in public policy analysis and international governance. Her dissertation explored the reasons for variation in UNCRC incorporation across England, Scotland and Wales.
Natasha MacKinnon - Trustee
I have over 10 years’ professional experience in fundraising, currently working at Save the Children UK as the Trusts & Strategic Foundations Lead. I'm also seconded as Head of Funding Strategy, focusing on growing income for our systems change and collective impact work tackling child poverty in the UK. This includes improving funding processes so more funds reach children directly, and building internal capacity to raise, secure and monitor our funding.
I also represent Save the Children UK on the Global Foundations Leadership Group, a movement-wide initiative tracking global fundraising trends, coordinating relationship management on some of the biggest global philanthropic funders, and contributing to a community of practice.
My passion lies in embedding child voice and participation into project development and fundraising. At Scotland’s Armed Forces Children’s Charity, where I was Fundraising & Communications Development Manager, I co-created organisational values with our Youth Advisory Boards and secured the largest gift in the charity’s history to co-design a pioneering Wellbeing Service with children from Armed Forces backgrounds.
I have extensive experience developing and delivering successful fundraising strategies. At Scottish SPCA, Cornerstone, and Scotland’s Armed Forces Children’s Charity, trust income grew significantly under my leadership. At the latter, I led an ambitious growth strategy that resulted in a 92% income increase over two years, and tripled targets by Year 3. A personal highlight was raising 98% of the previous year’s total income from grants alone.
Previously, I was a Trustee for 3.5 years at Play Midlothian, a place-based charity supporting free play for children in deprived communities. I sat on sub-committees including People, Policy and Organisational Development.
In the last 5 years, I’ve served as a Panel Member with the Children’s Hearings System Scotland. It grounds my understanding of children’s rights and continuous improvement in practice.
Martin Canavan - Trustee
Martin graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a BA in Education and Social Services. He has worked in the third sector for 15 years, working with adults with disabilities before moving to the children’s sector.
He joined Aberlour in 2014 with a focus on developing volunteering opportunities and supporting the participation and engagement of young people at Aberlour. In 2016 Martin moved into a policy role as Aberlour’s Policy and Participation Officer.
Martin sat on the Scottish Government working group for the development of the National Mentoring Scheme for Looked after Children (now Intandem), and was the participation lead for the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Task Force.
Martin became Aberlour’s Head of Policy and Participation in 2020. Martin leads Aberlour’s political engagement, influencing and campaigning work, which includes a specific focus on tackling child poverty, disadvantage and discrimination. He represents Aberlour as a member of the End Child Poverty coalition in Scotland.
Martin has developed and led Aberlour’s campaigning work focused on elevating and amplifying the voices of children, young people and families. This has included the No Place Like Home campaign, urging more support for parents with learning disabilities and their children to keep families together, and Aberlour’s national campaign to end school meal debt in Scotland and tackle hidden school hunger.
External and media engagement is a key part of Martin’s role. He regularly speaks and presents at events, conferences and at the Scottish Parliament to highlight Aberlour’s work.
Rhona Matheson - Trustee
Rhona began her career working in Scottish Theatre, before joining children’s theatre company Wee Stories in 2003. She then became the project manager for the pilot Starcatchers project in 2006 focusing on arts and creative experiences for babies and young children. For the next 19 years, Rhona led the development of Starcatchers from a pilot project to an organisation that is rooted locally, works nationally and is connected internationally, becoming an expert in the field of arts and early years.
In May 2025 Rhona stepped back as Chief Executive of Starcatchers into an advocacy role and began working with equity catalyst Elevate Great advising on participation in early years.
In 2023 she graduated from Queen’s University Belfast with a MSc in Children’s Rights where her dissertation focused on the invisibility of babies within children’s rights policy and practice. In September 2025 she began a PhD at Queen’s where she will continue her research around babies’ rights in Scotland.
Rhona has sat on a number of boards in the past including Branar Children’s Theatre Company in Galway, Ireland, SmallSize International Arts and Early Years Network and was Co-Chair of the Federation of Scottish Theatre from 2019 - 2023. She is currently the Chair of the Advisory Board for Playground, an arts and early years initiative in Kent and is delighted to have been elected on to the Together Board for the next three years.