James Partridge OBE

Founder and Chief Executive of Changing Faces

James Partridge is Founder and Chief Executive of Changing Faces, the leading UK charity supporting and representing people with disfigurements (www.changingfaces.org.uk). He is also founding Director of Dining with a Difference, a disability consultancy company.

Before Changing Faces, James worked as a health economist in public health in the NHS in the ‘70s, and established a dairy farming business and taught A’ level economics in Guernsey in the ‘80s. Badly injured in a car fire in 1970 when he was 18, James used his experiences to set up the charity in 1992 to improve the psycho-social help available for people with any kind of disfigurement and to combat the taboos and challenge public attitudes about the subject.

Building on ideas first put forward by James in his book of the same name (Penguin 1990, available from the charity), Changing Faces quickly established a reputation for pioneering, providing and proving new ways to help children, young people, adults who acquire a disfigurement, and their families, to come to terms with its psychological and social impact. The help was focused on teaching effective communication skills to manage other people’s reactions to an unusual face, complemented by counselling, advice and sharing experiences with others. The charity is now contacted by over 500 new clients annually and counsels and supports many more including through its websites.

After their success campaigning for people with disfigurements to be covered by the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, James and Changing Faces have successfully worked in the last 5 years with many schools, employers, health and social care professionals and policy makers to ensure a culture of inclusion for people with disfigurements. The launch of the Face Equality campaign with its challenging posters has underpinned this effort.

Changing Faces is now a £1.5m organisation with a 30-strong staff team – see www.changingfaces.org.uk – and James now writes and presents widely on disfigurement, disability, inclusion and social entrepreneurship in the UK and internationally.

In November 2009, he was a guest newsreader for a week on national TV (Channel Five News), an appearance designed to foster acceptance and inclusion of people with disfigurements in society. In March 2010 he won the Third Sector award for Most Admired Charity Chief Executive 2010 following nomination by Dame Mary Marsh, Director of the Clore Social Leadership Programme. More recently in October 2010, he also won the The Beacon Prize for Leadership.

He is a long-time Associate of the Employers’ Forum on Disability and holds various honorary posts such as: member of TreeHouse’s Development and Public Affairs Committee and of the Department of Health’s National Burn Care Group, Chair of the Department for Work and Pensions’ Employer Engagement Steering Group. He previously served on the Appraisal Committee of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the Chief Medical Officer’s Expert Panel on Cosmetic Surgery.

Married with a ‘grown-up’ son and two daughters, James lives in Guernsey and London. He was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 2005 and has Honorary Doctorates from both of the Universities in Bristol, his birthplace.

Academic: Visiting Fellow, Centre for Appearance Research, University of the West of England.

Read James' blog here.