Our board of trustees have provided external support to our teams over the years. They possess a varied and best in class range of expertise, which enhances the success of the FRC Group of businesses.

Our board of trustees are each appointed for their varied range of specialisms and expertise, as well as their desire to help add value in our mission to End Furniture Poverty.


Each and every one of them are highly accomplished and extremely valued by the FRC Group team. They meet at least four times per year to provide support to the FRC Group.


We’ve provided individual profiles for each member of the board of trustees below. We are proud to have such high calibre trustees to aid our journey to End Furniture Poverty through sustainable social business practices.


Find out more about the extended FRC Group Team, what it’s like to work at FRC here and our Current Vacancies.

Our Board

Nick Spruyt - Chair of Board of Trustees

Nick was Senior Executive Projects at Princes Ltd – the Liverpool based international food and drink group where his career spanned 34 years. He was an executive Director of Princes for 15 years and has wide experience with an international track record of driving growth, integrating acquisitions, creating customer and supplier relationships, leading large and diverse teams and planning and implementing major investments.

As his long career with Princes has ended, he is in a position to share that business experience and leadership with the FRC trustees and team to help accelerate our mission to end furniture poverty. After years of working in the corporate world he is now enjoying the opportunity to contribute to a charity based in the same city.

Claire Dixon

Claire has worked in social housing for over 20 years, starting her career on reception at a local housing office. She has achieved Chartered status with the Chartered Institute of Housing, is a qualified company secretary and most recently completed her coaching qualification.

 

Her current role is Deputy Chief Executive at Plus Dane Housing, having responsibility for a number of departments including Development, Finance, Governance & Assurance and People.

Claire is an experienced non-executive in the charities sector having previously served as a trustee for Blackburne House for six years, spending four years as Chair of Finance, Audit & Risk Committee. She joined FRC in 2024.

Alli Courtney

Alli is a Director at MUFG Corporate Markets, a division of MUFG, one of the world’s leading financial groups. Previously, she held the position of COO at Omexus Group and prior to that COO at Volkswagen Financial Services, where she was also responsible for transformational change.

Alli’s career has been focused on leading and delivering service excellence to clients and end customers across a number of industries, including telecoms, financial services, debt management and energy, in organisations including Virgin Media, British Gas, Capita and Volkswagen FS. Her teams have won multiple awards and accolades, including several for vulnerable customer strategies.

Dr John Hines

Dr John Hines has served on the board since 2008. Having gained his D.Phil in Chemistry at Oxford University, John joined Unilever R&D in the UK. He has worked across all Home and Personal Care categories and on innovations for global brands including Dove, Skip and Axe.

Following a brief spell heading up a leading materials technology consulting business, he joined SC Johnson Professional as Global R&D Director in 2010. Since then he has led delivery to market of award winning innovations in Healthcare and Industrial & Institutional skincare.

Fatima Vepari

Over the course of her career, Fatima has led the development, design, and delivery of culture change, learning and organisational development and change across the wider public sector. This work has included complex change and transformation programmes, strategic people strategies, leadership and management development programmes, and talent and workforce development initiatives.

In 2008, Fatima moved into working independently as a consultant, executive coach and in interim roles within local and central government both in the UK and Malaysia, national charities and in the last five years has worked with small and midsize charities, on board development. Fatima is a Non-Executive Director with British Textile Biennial and Interim Chair of the Board at Rosetta Arts.

Jeff Vernon

Jeff has served on the board of FRC Group since 2005.

He is the Finance & Banking Director of Rathbone Investment Management (RIM). RIM is a leading provider of discretionary investment and wealth management services for private clients and trustees. He also has operational responsibility for Group Treasury, Banking and regulatory reporting.

He qualified as an accountant while with Royal Insurance (now Royal SunAlliance) where he also gained an MBA . Having spent over 7 years with RSA in a variety of finance based roles, he joined Rathbones in 1999 and was appointed to the RIM Board in November 2000.