Community Audit & Evaluation Centre

Our Members

Carol Packham is Director of the Community Audit and Evaluation Centre.

Carol is also the course leader for the BA in Youth and Community Work. She had published on community auditing and had ten years experience of training youth and community workers to undertake participatory research. She had undertaken participatory baseline audits with young people in an SRB area, and with a range of voluntary organisations. She currently co-manages an inner city voluntary youth organisation and is vice chair of a Community Forum.

Kimberley Osivwemu

Kimberley is a non-practicing Barrister with a Certificate in Youth & Community Work who has worked in a variety of community settings since 1982. Her practice in anti-oppressive community work led her to be part of the City of Liverpool Community College team at Liverpool 8 Law Centre which won the Equality of Opportunity Award give by the CRE in 1995. In 2000 she was part of the team awarded a prize by the Progress Trust for “Recognising the Voluntary Contribution”. She is currently engaged in research into community participation commissioned by the Community Audit and Evaluation Centre in the Department of Applied Community Studies as well as teaching at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

Carolina De Oteyza

Carolina has been a lecturer in Community Audit at MMU since 2003. Previously she worked with the Manchester Women's Network as a research coordinator involved with the Gender and Community Engagement in Manchester (GEM) Project. Other work in the North West has included working with the Community Pride Initiative.

Carolina has also spent considerable time working in her home country of Venezuela. This work has been varied; however the main focus in recent years has been as a consultant dealing with local democracy, participatory research, capacity building, development, women empowerment and gender for several international Education and Development NGOs.

Lydia Meryll

Lydia has a community development background and worked in Hackney, East London, Bradford and inner city Leeds before she was appointed as Head of Youth and Community Work at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1987. She has taught management and inter-professional courses with participants from statutory, community and voluntary sector and has studied the dynamics of Partnership as part of her own continuous professional development and achievement of an MBA.

She now heads up the Connections Training Unit and is particularly interested in the effective working of inter-agency networks. Her recent research for the Community Audit and Evaluation Centre include a study with young women, who are lone parents, called “What Stops Us Getting On? Lone parents, aspirations and opportunities.” She worked closely with the study of primary care health service delivery and the needs of young people and is currently working on research with the South Manchester Healthy Living Network, reviewing with them the effectiveness of their work.