Our Life, Our Way!

Hildegarde was elected as a TD in 2016, and was member of a number of Oireachtas Committees, including: Communications, Climate Action and Environment (Chair); Future of Healthcare; and Budgetary Scrutiny. Hildegarde was a primary school teacher and previously served as a member of Galway City Council in 2009 and was Mayor of the city in 2011/2012.

Everything Mark Pollock does is about inspiring leaders and their teams to build resilience, optimise performance, and collaborate effectively so that they achieve more than they thought possible.

Unbroken by blindness in 1998, Mark became an adventure athlete competing in ultra-endurance races across deserts, mountains, and the polar ice caps including being the first blind person to race to the South Pole. He also won silver and bronze medals for rowing at the Commonwealth Games and set up an international professional speaking business.

In 2010, a fall from a second story window nearly killed him. Mark broke his back and the damage to his spinal cord left him paralysed. Now he is on a new expedition, this time exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide to cure paralysis in our lifetime.

Chairman of Collaborative Cures and founder of the global running series Run in the Dark, Mark has been involved in catalysing collaborations worth over $100 million on his mission to cure paralysis.  He was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, served on the Global Futures Council on Human Enhancement and the Advisory Board of Cybathlon. In addition, he is a Wings for Life Ambassador (Europe) and was on the Board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (USA) for a decade.

Currently Mark is pursuing a Professional Doctorate in Elite Performance (Sport) at Dublin City University, he is author of ‘Making It Happen’ and is the subject of the acclaimed documentaries’ Blind Man Walking ’and ‘Unbreakable – The Mark Pollock Story’. Mark has been awarded honorary doctorates by The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and also from Queens University Belfast. Furthermore, he holds a diploma in Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century from Harvard University, degrees from Trinity College Dublin and UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School.

Helen Sanderson is an internationally recognised leader in person-centred practices, psychological safety, and innovative approaches to team development. With a career spanning over two decades, she has worked across health and social care systems to support more compassionate, collaborative, and high-performing teams.

Helen’s purpose is to demonstrate new ways of working, where the wellbeing of people and colleagues’ matter, in ways where communities benefit. This has to start with compassion, for ourselves, each other and together in communities.

Helen is the founder of Wellbeing Teams, an award-winning model inspired by Buurtzorg that reimagined homecare by embedding self-managed teams, person-centred practice, and strong relational foundations. Under her leadership, Wellbeing Teams received national recognition for their values-driven culture and recruitment, and was rated Outstanding by CQC.

Helen is one of 50 New Radicals in the UK and is award winning for innovation in health and care and value-based recruitment. Helen was the Department of Health’s expert advisor on person-centred approaches for 10 years, has a PhD, is the author of over 20 books and is a TedX speaker.

Helen’s current work focuses on building psychological safety through practical tools like team agreements, reflective practices, and strengths-based supervision. She supports organisations to shift from compliance to collaboration, from top-down command to co-created cultures of learning.

Tricia began her career in 1989 as a teacher of children with learning disabilities. This early experience made her passionate about inclusive education for all children. She is a long-term avoider of mental health services and has a history in the mental health survivor movement.
 
She has worked in the advocacy sector, running Skills for People, a user-led organisation in Newcastle upon Tyne, and she was part of the national Valuing People Support Team, working as the Northeast Regional Advisor and holding the national lead role for Advocacy.
 
As people started getting interested in the ideas around self-directed support and personal budgets, she moved to the Department of Health Personalisation team and worked on personal budgets, developing the Citizen Leaders and Having a Voice programmes which explored how people who draw on support can contribute genuinely and effectively as policy is both written and put into practice. She worked on the Getting a Life programme; the precursor to Preparing for Adulthood.
 
Since 2008, Tricia has worked for herself, exploring how we can organise support so that people really do get Gloriously Ordinary Lives. Tricia is committed to the principles (and practice) of building genuinely inclusive communities. She has a foster son who loves drawing and foster daughter who is a princess, both of whom happen to be autistic. She loves sunshine, cats, swimming in open water and a great book.

Tony O’Brien has 30 years’ experience in the health and social care field in Ireland, leading services in the voluntary, public and private sectors. Tony has been CEO of three state agencies, including the National Cancer Screening Service Board, The National Treatment Purchase Fund and the HSE.

Tony serves as a board director or board chair of a number of healthcare-related companies in Ireland and internationally, and acts as strategic advisor for several healthcare leaders, including Dovida.

He also chairs the boards of two leading charities in the health and social care field. Tony is the health analyst for the Sunday Independent and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Centre for Health Policy in the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin.