Together's Trustees

The 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

Cate is the CEO of Impact Funding Partners, Scotland's pioneering relationship fund manager. A marketing and communications specialist, Cate has worked across the public, private and third sectors, at both executive and board level, has 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 and Together, 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 is a keen rower and traveller and loves the arts and creativity. 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.

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 tackling issues of equalities, children's rights, and youth voice since the age of fifteen.

She was extensively involved in the UNCRC incorporation campaign over several years, working closely with the Children and Young People's Commissioner and other young activists to lobby for incorporation, including becoming the youngest person ever to present evidence to the UN Committee Against Torture in 2019. She is currently a member of the Council of Europe Advisory Council on Youth, one of its statutory youth bodies, where she leads the work on children's rights.

Aside from her work on children's rights, she has led campaigns on topics including period poverty, violence against women, and youth sector funding, working with both the UK and Scottish governments and organisations including Girlguiding Scotland, Young Scot and the #iwill Movement. She also served as a trustee of UK charity Volunteering Matters for over six years.

Katrina has been recognised internationally for her work, receiving the Point of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister (2020), the Diana Award (2021), and the BEM in the Queen's Platinum Birthday Honours (2022) for services to young people as one of the youngest recipients that year. She is a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE) and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Human Rights and Democratisation at the Global Campus of Human Rights.

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 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.  

After stepping back from her role as CEO of Starcatchers in May 2025, Rhona began a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast where her research focus is on the realisation of babies’ rights in Scotland.  Alongside this study, Rhona provides consultation and support to a range of arts and voluntary sector organisations.  She is evaluating a Creative Europe project looking at arts practice in childcare settings in The Netherlands, France and Catalonia.  She has also joined the Early Years Forum of the Start Strong campaign which is seeking a fairer start for all babies and young children across the UK.

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.

Donna Martin- Trustee

As a ‘unfeartie’, Donna’s career has been shaped by creating opportunities for children to claim their rights while building adult’s confidence in understanding and implementing a children’s human rights-based approach. In the third sector this has included roles with Children First, NSPCC Scotland and Who Cares? Scotland, while in the public sector with local government, Children’s Hearings Scotland and Scottish Government.

In working directly with children and young people, volunteering as a sports coach led to college then university to complete her degree in Sport in the Community. This period of study included 4 summers coaching at camps in the USA and travelling round the world then coaching in Australia. Further experiences as a volunteer befriender and supported carer for a young person has deepened her knowledge in the impact to children’s lives when their rights have been denied, driving her passion to influence systemic change.

As a trainer, she has enjoyed many ‘lightbulb’ moments when content clicks and people recognise just how important their roles are in affecting and improving children and young people’s lives. Consulting with organisations has supported developments of internal structures and processes to centre around a child human rights approach becoming everyday practice. And in previous trustee roles with Scottish Women’s Football and Children in Scotland, Donna has applied her safeguarding knowledge, supported by her PgCert in Child Protection.

Donna’s proudest achievement is being mum to her three children. As they now become young adults, parenthood has ranged from cheering at the sidelines with her twin daughter’s football to navigating and challenging the education and health care system for her AuDHD son. She is excited to join the board at Together and looks forward to contributing over the next three years.