CORE TEAM
George Hutchinson
CEO and Founder
George set up River Effra with a vision to bring an exceptional understanding of risk and an unrivalled team of advisors together, to solve reputational crises.
He has deep expertise in risk and crisis management, acting as an adviser to companies and organisations over the past 30 years, when facing the toughest of challenges. This has included the BSE crisis and McLibel trial, 7/7 bombings, global criminal and regulatory investigations as well as integrity issues facing leadership.
He currently coaches a risk advisory module for the MBA course at Imperial College London.
Rachel Hunter,
Managing Director
Rachel has more than 25 years’ experience advising senior leaders on taking informed, risk-based decisions in high-pressure situations, honed in sectors including FMCG, healthcare, education and travel.
As well as heading international teams from the UK, she has worked in markets including India and China, helping multinational businesses to manage mergers, transformations, incidents and crises; respecting local cultural context, while always delivering to global governance and compliance standards.
She has led issues management for major incidents, product recalls, business change, acquisitions and divestments and prepared leaders to engage customers, employees, government and business partners through significant challenges.
Holly Winfield,
Account Director
Holly’s experience spans multiple advisory firms and counsel to some of the world’s leading organisations on risk and crisis management.
She is a crisis preparedness specialist and has worked with senior leaders to develop programmes which build, establish, and test best-in-class crisis governance structures and response protocols.
Her work has successfully supported clients preparing for high-impact, disruptive events, including business-critical cyber-attacks, major supply chain disruptions, employee fatalities, and systemic integrity issues.
She holds a BA in History and Politics degree from the University of Oxford.
Tom Yeldon,
Account Manager
Tom joined River Effra as an Account Manager, having spent much of his career working in British and European politics. He worked in the European Parliament prior to the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and in the House of Commons for a Conservative MP. In between, he worked at a public affairs consultancy in Brussels, specialising in energy policy. In this role, he advised clients on the implications of EU decarbonisation initiatives, and how they should shape their engagement strategies in the disruptive context of the European Green Deal.
He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from King’s College London and The London School of Economics and Political Science respectively, as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Law.
Alicia Alli,
Account Manager
Alicia joined River Effra as an Account Manager in May 2023. She is a motivated and energetic corporate affairs professional with experience in external communications and public affairs. Prior to joining the team she worked for international investment and property group Lendlease, and Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good. In her previous roles she honed the skills vital to managing corporate risk and crises, bringing together communications, story-telling and strategic partnerships to help organisations navigate reputation risk.
Alicia holds a BA History degree from University College London.
EXPERT PANEL
The River Effra expert panel, an unrivalled team of reputation risk and crisis management professionals. Dedicated individuals drawn from across a range of sectors and specialisms, including former journalists, leading PR practitioners, and lawyers, who bring deep experience of major incidents, investigations and crises.
Simon Benson
Previously a special advisor to Cabinet ministers. Crisis clients have included Emirates Airline, the International Cruise Line Association, Tata and Starwood.
Simon has also provided counsel to high-net-worth individuals and the political office of an EU Prime Minister.
Amanda Coleman
Amanda has more than 20 years’ experience in ‘blue light’ services and led the law enforcement comms response to the Manchester Arena attack.
She is the author of Crisis Communication Strategies and is an advisor for the Resilience Advisors Network, a senior associate of the Centre for Crisis and Risk Communication and the Chair of the UK’s Emergency Planning Society Communication Professional Working Group.
Tom Conway-Gordon
Tom is a brand reputation expert with more than 20 years in global agencies in London and the Middle East.
Experience in crisis began with the Inquiry into the Marchioness disaster, through General Motors Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Adidas on the pandemic impact on the European football season and Olympics.
Katie Kershaw
Former head of communications easyJet UK and specialises in the travel sector handling crises from air space closures to terrorist attacks.
Katie has a particular skillset in business resilience and ISO22301 Business Continuity Management audit. from University College London.
Stephen Lock
Stephen is a former investment banker whose career spans Russia, Turkey and Brazil, focusing on crisis, regulatory and sovereign state disputes along with 20 IPOs and mass fatalities.
His practice is international corporate criminal defence including sanctions non-compliance, corruption, INTERPOL Red Notice appeals and corporate killings.
He advised the Republic of Indonesia on litigation PR at an ICSID arbitration and in the first successful ICSID arbitration against China.
Sharon Prosser
Sharon qualified as a solicitor before moving into banking.
She worked for 13 years for NatWest, delivering transformation in culture, strategy and process and leading on external engagement with Parliament and the FCA.
Sharon also spent two years as chair of the reputational risk committee within the commercial and wealth divisions of the bank.
Tim Reid
Former BBC journalist, 15 years as political correspondent and prior to that Radio Clyde and the Daily Mirror Group.
Before launching his own practice, Tim was Director of Communications at two environmental NGOs.
Alisa Charkova
Alisa is a crisis management leader, crisis simulation architect and coach who works with organisations to build their resilience. Throughout her career, Alisa has advised leaders on situations that threatened viability and integrity: repeat mass fatalities, sexual misconduct and harassment, natural disasters, cyber-attacks, corruption and misappropriation of funds, and operational safety incidents. As part of her work, Alisa delivered the risk and crisis management mandate for the UN Refugee Agency, coaching senior leaders, risk advisors, and communications colleagues on risk and crisis leadership.
Alisa works with some of the world’s largest companies in heavy industries: mining, oil & gas, chemical manufacturing, as well as operations in extreme remote environments. Alisa has cross-cultural fluency and is globally trained with work experience in 18 countries.
SCIENTIFIC TEAM
River Effra has partnered with performance psychologist, Dr Matt Barlow and his team of internationally renowned sport psychologists, who have applied their insights into optimising performance under pressure to create our Elite Performance Programme, which aims to transform organisational crisis response capability.
This team led the personal performance psychology provision for the World Cup-winning England cricket team and continue to develop their world first approaches with some of today’s best-known sportspeople and teams.
Individually acclaimed in their own fields, River Effra’s Scientific Team have decades of experience of working with some of GB’s greatest athletes in Olympic and international sport as well as using their learnings to develop leaders in the military and major businesses.
Dr Matt Barlow,
River Effra Scientific Team Lead
Matt leads the Scientific Team, working in partnership with academics from Bangor University’s Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance (IPEP).
Matt has a PhD in Sport Psychology and has pioneered new thinking on performance in elite sport for the past 15 years, conducting groundbreaking studies of some of Britain’s most decorated and recognisable sportspeople.
His research has been published in the world’s top social psychology journal and he now builds personal performance strategies that help both elite athletes and business leaders to excel in high pressure environments.
Professor Tim Woodman
A Professor of Performance Psychology, Tim is world-renowned for his work on personality, stress, and anxiety. As well as working with Olympic and World Championships athletes, he was Director of Psychology for the British Gymnastics Association for several years.
Today, Tim is a lead member of Bangor University’s IPEP, Head of its School of Sport, Health, & Exercise Sciences and a member of the Editorial Board of The Sport Psychologist and Psychology of Sport and Exercise scientific journals.
He developed a theory of risk-taking that places risk at the centre of human endeavour, including in elite sport, and has applied his expertise to support the development of senior executives in international businesses over many years.
Professor Lew Hardy
One of the UK’s first professors of sport psychology, Lew served three Olympic cycles as chair of the British Olympic Association’s Psychology Steering Group (from 1989 to 2000). He is also one of few people to have given keynote addresses at all major global sport psychology conferences.
With more than 100 research publications to his name, Lew’s central research interest is the psychology of very high-level performance, including the effects of stress, mental toughness, motivation, the use of psychological skills and strategies, transformational leadership, and teamwork.
He has extensive applied experience across military, business, and sport domains. Although now retired from his academic role, he remains a key research collaborator of the Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance.
Dr Andy Cooke
Dr Andy Cooke has helped elite athletes in a
range of sports to optimise their performance in
top competition, applying his research into the
psychophysiological mechanisms that underpin
human performance and how to enhance them.
As well as delivering presentations on performance science around the world, he guest edited a landmark special issue the Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology journal that showcased psychophysiological research in performance science.
Andy has a BSc in Sport Science from Bangor University and a PhD in Psychophysiology from the University of Birmingham.