Saboohi joined the team in May 2024. She brings 25 years’ experience of place-based work in the third sector working directly with disadvantaged care groups and excluded and underserved communities across London. With 15 years’ work in the disability space and lived experience of caring for a disabled non-verbal family member, amplifying seldom heard voices and championing communities in the lead is close to her heart.
Previously, she has incubated, set up, and led a user-led social enterprise as the subsidiary company of The Advocacy Project, where she led on their business development to grow and scale advocacy and user involvement services across London. More recently she was Head of Social Innovation Lab at TSIP, where she led a community co-designed funding model, The Giving Lab, in partnership with Southwark residents. The Giving Lab pilot experiments with participatory grant making and participatory budgeting in its model and is codesigning its transition pathway to community ownership. Saboohi also manages an overseas charitable trust in her spare time.
Saboohi is passionate about addressing the power inequities inherent in our system, in which philanthropy has a unique and important role to play in embedding people-centred and community-led approaches like participatory grant making. She is particularly interested in seeking ways to make funding more accountable to the beneficiaries whose lives they set out to improve.
Ask Saboohi about: the development of our new resource Hub for place based giving and anything to do with our London’s Giving programme; or using participatory and community-led approaches to make funding more democratic, inclusive, accessible and equitable.
Saboohi’s hidden London gem is: hands down the best middle Eastern cuisine I’ve had is from Palestinian/Lebanese restaurant Hiba Street Food in Tottenham Street.