Beyond the Streets Trustee Philippa Bonay Awarded OBE

Philippa Bonay has been Trustee for Beyond the Streets for nearly 4 years, and we have benefitted from her integral support during the growth of the organisation over this time.

The team at Beyond the Streets are delighted and proud to find out that Philippa has been duly recognised with an OBE for her incredible contributions in the public and voluntary sectors. As an organisation, we continue to be grateful to Philippa for sharing her expertise, experience, and wisdom, as well as her commitment and energy in supporting our cause.

Read Philippa’s OBE Citation:

Philippa Bonay has transformed the people capability of public service organisations in which she has led and in her spare time goes above and beyond to make exemplary contributions to wider public life and the charitable sector.

In her current role as Director for Operations, the National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, states that she has transformed the delivery of people services at the ONS. She has done this through her personal advocacy for inclusion and diversity, leading by example in ways that go above and beyond what is expected for her role, through speaking regularly across the whole organisation. She single-handedly changed the conversation on menopause support, bringing it out of the shadows and personally leading the work to provide access to a leading menopause App to all colleagues. This has received very enthusiastic feedback from many women who have described it as life-changing.

Her work overall has resulted in the ONS being the first and only Civil Service department to make it onto the list for the Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards for the UK’s Top 50 Best Places to Work in 2023, since the award started 9 years ago – and one that is unique in being formed through employee nominations.

Her contribution to wider HR leadership across government, outside her core role, has also been highly impactful; the Government Chief People Officer has stated that her work to develop an overall People Data Strategy and common and consistent dashboards has led to better decision-making and an ability to measure the effectiveness of People strategies across government.

She is also the very first HR Director for the Analysis Function across government (some 25,000 people), an additional role she took on voluntarily, identifying a gap that no-one was filling. Her work has defined and measured the function, identified the capability needs, personally convened the analytical heads of profession to address these gaps, and this has led to more fluid models of resourcing across government.

Beyond government, she was sought out in 2022 by the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development to lead a session on managing diverse workforces at their annual conference. She provides insightful and practical thought leadership to the wider Profession – such as the podcast interview she gave this year to HRDConnect on ways organisations can improve their inclusion and diversity.

But she also displays an inspirational personal touch and it is the combination of her contributions at both the profession, organisational and the individual level that is so unique. All colleagues that join her team of several hundred receive a handwritten note of welcome. Her mentoring of individuals from all backgrounds has seen them grow their capability and gain promotions.

Voluntary and charitable services

Beyond paid work, in her spare time, Philippa volunteers as a Trustee for Beyond the Streets, a UK charity that works to safeguard vulnerable women experiencing sexual exploitation. Her contribution has been both practical—providing management support, delivering HR training, arranging succession planning, and trustee recruitment—and strategic—providing wise counsel and advice to the executive leadership team on complex HR issues. Her contribution has directly increased the quality of staff wellbeing and provided the platform of People policies and processes from which the organisation can continue to grow.

Philippa has also continued to contribute to the Armed Forces, building on her previous role as Deputy Director for Defence Equipment and Support. Now, on a purely voluntary basis, she is a “Regimental NED” for 4 Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps; she has worked with the cohort of Service Women in the Regiment, challenging the status quo to address their key issues and concerns and provide a role model by being an accessible senior woman. This has given Service women a greater sense of confidence and opportunity to express themselves. Even more practically, a conversation with one of the Regimental soldiers led to her recently setting in motion the establishment of a bespoke breastfeeding facility for new and expectant mothers at Dalton Barracks; this represents one of only a few dozen such rooms across the entirety of Defence.

Again blending individual with organisational level impact, and once again unpaid, she has also been the driving force behind ground-breaking work in Defence Support to promote the values of respect, trust, understanding, and kindness as those essential to promote collaboration and high performance. Lt Gen Richard Wardlaw OBE comments that through working with his Values Ambassadors over the last 6 months, Philippa has brought together theory and practice to extraordinary effect, turbo-charging the pace and effectiveness with which they have effected cultural change across the 700 person organisation; he commented that in his 32 years of Service he had never seen such an immediate and tangible impact effected by one person.

Philippa’s impact has been externally validated by professional and charitable bodies; under her leadership, her teams have won awards from MIND The Mental Health Charity, Working Families, and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Personally, she has also been recognised as one of Women of the Future’s 50 Leading Lights of Kindness & Leadership in 2021.