Lamees Hafeez is the Director of Strategy and Communications at Muslim Aid. She has worked in international development since 2008, starting in campaigns, advocacy and development education, and has a Masters in Humanitarianism and Conflict response. Like most, she began her career as a volunteer with a passion being fortunate enough to be able to support people from the Philippines to Nigeria. She is committed to capacity building, partnerships and working local. From 2013, she worked extensively on the Syria response based mostly in Turkiye and Iraq, with travel across the region. During this time she established field offices, worked extensively on cross border programming, institutional donor funding and partnerships, LNGO/CSO capacity building and advocated on behalf of Syrian NGOs. She was a founding member of the Partnerships Initiative and the Syrian NGO Alliance. More recently, she has worked at HQ level in the UK on programmes in Yemen, Palestine, and Bangladesh, as well as the Turkiye/Syria earthquake response. She is UK based but enjoys travelling extensively for work and in her spare time. She is also a gender and climate advocate and believes strongly in ethical, sustainable living – living that vegetarian/vegan life! She believes in living our values and leading from the front, but we can only make change together.