A Place at the Table & Partners;

Persia West is one of the co-founders of A Place at the Table in 2003 (see below). Persia has been involved in training and development since the early 80's, in Japan, the USA and Europe. She is a writer and public speaker who specialises in inclusion and diversity, with a focus on gender and sexuality, as well as communication, story telling and self-development, which comes from her initial training within the Human Potential Movement. She is also a teacher of meditiation.

David Pollard brings more than twenty years experience in International Banking to The Conscious Edge, with Commerzbank and ING, where he became Head of European Affairs before leaving to begin his own consultancy, C-2-C, in Amsterdam in 2009. He is also Executive Director of Workplace Pride in Amsterdam. For more about David click here.

Janie Kavanagh co-founded A Place at the Table with Persia in 2003. She brings a lifetime of skills in start-up and management, often within dance and the arts, as well as a variety of business organizations, which give her a wide range of experience in management.

A Place at the Table was the name of our successful first conference in 2003, focused on inclusion in the workplace.  It swiftly became our business name as we moved into diversity training on gender, LGBT and transgender issues within a wide range of private and statutory organisations throughout the UK.

In 2004 we started the first LGBT recruitment fairs in Europe - initially in Brighton, and then also in London in partnership with The Independent newspaper and the support of the Mayor of London. The LGBT JobFairs moved the boundaries for LGBT people at work, and helped organisations demonstrate their support for this community.

Training and LGBT JobFair clients include Acas, Accenture, Allen & Overy, American Express, Barclays plc, British Airways, Citigroup, Clifford Chance, Companies House, Crown Prosecution Service, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, HBOS plc, Hilton, HM Prison Service, KPMG, Marks & Spencer, Metropolitan Police Service, Morgan Stanley, National Audit Office, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and University of Sussex.