Meet the trustees

Cathy Phelan-Watkins

Chair

Cathy Phelan-Watkins

As a visual artist, Cathy is known for her challenging explorations of gender stereotypes and has been involved with arts charities for 30 years. Further to her exhibiting record, she has experience both in fundraising and arts educational projects and has contributed to initiatives on a local community, national and international scale.

As a trustee of Tate Members, she served on the Tate St Ives advisory board and chaired the Tate St Ives Members Committee from 2004 to 2010 working to further public engagement and understanding of contemporary art.

Closely associated with Civil Society Media for 25 years, Cathy became director/owner of the company in 2015, on the death of her husband Daniel Phelan.

She has written movingly about her experience of bereavement in her book ‘On a white horse’.

Matt Nolan

Treasurer

Matt Nolan


Matt has spent the majority of his career in publishing. Having graduated with a degree in international business, he moved to Australia and worked in finance for a global recruitment firm. He returned to the UK three years later first working for VRL Financial News as a management accountant. He achieved ACCA membership four years later. He was appointed Finance Director of Civil Society Media in 2011, progressing to CEO of the company in 2019.

Matt was fortunate enough to work closely with Daniel Phelan for a number of years and to consider him a mentor. Throughout that time, Dan’s passion and dedication to strengthen civil society made a lasting impression on Matt, and it is this vision and these strong values which continue to inspire his leadership.

Delroy Corinaldi

Trustee

Delroy Corinaldi

Specialising in strategic partnerships and communications, Delroy’s career path has taken him on a diverse and interesting journey from politics to the corporate and charitable worlds, as well as consultancy for well-known brands.

First in his family to go to University, Delroy actively supports impactful diversity and inclusion for under-represented groups and much more in his existing trustee roles at the Terrence Higgins Trust, New Philanthropy Capital and as co-founder of the Financial Inclusion Centre.

He is currently Director, Simire Consulting and Action for Financial Inclusion.

Matthew Riviere

Trustee

Matthew Riviere

Matthew is an accomplished marketing expert who has worked across a number of industry sectors. Throughout his career Matthew has shown the ability to formulate and craft impactful marketing strategies, while priding himself on building and developing teams.

After attending The Charity Awards, Matthew was inspired to launch a social enterprise, Good People Productions in 2020. The organisations dual focus is to bring together creatives and provide professional training opportunities for underrepresented communities in Matthew’s hometown of Birmingham and the West Midlands.

Dan speaking1
Dan speaking1

About Daniel Phelan

Daniel Phelan launched Civil Society Media, then Plaza Publishing, in 1990 and grew it into the only media, events and training company dedicated to serving the UK’s charitable sector.

He started NGO Finance (later Charity Finance) magazine that year and was editor for its first seven years. In 1999, he founded The Charity Awards, the annual UK-wide programme recognising excellence in charity management. In 2005, he launched Governance, the UK’s foremost magazine for charity trustees.

Dan believed passionately in the power of journalism to champion under-represented communities and causes, hold leaders to account and expose wrongdoing. An avid reader of Charles Dickens, he cared greatly about those with limited opportunities and devoted his life’s work to supporting people and organisations that sought to make a difference.

The second-eldest in an Irish-English family of six who spent their early childhood in a two-room ground-floor dwelling with no hot water in Acton, West London, he won one of only two annual Middlesex scholarships to Christ’s Hospital school.

After graduating from Durham University with a literature degree, he had a colourful stint in the music industry, including as co-founder of a record label named Malicious Damage and a tour of the US as manager of the punk band Killing Joke. But he was attracted to the media and landed a job at Pigeon Post, which also published Balloon Europe, and then decided he should launch Balloon World. His first voluntary sector magazine was Assembly & Association, a title drawn from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provided a forum for representative and membership bodies throughout the not-for-profit sector.

Until shortly before his death from cancer in 2015, he was a trustee of StepChange Debt Charity, Britain’s largest debt counselling charity, and Alliance Publishing Trust which publishes Alliance, the global philanthropy magazine.

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