Lucy Peake joined Kinship (formerly Grandparents Plus) as Chief Executive in September 2015. Since then, she has led the charity’s work to raise awareness about kinship care, influence policy change and to transform support for kinship care families through an expansion of evidence-based programmes. During the covid-19 pandemic, Lucy focused the charity on understanding and responding to the specific needs of kinship care families. During the pandemic, Kinship grew significantly to develop and deliver new support services across England and Wales.

Lucy is a member of the Adoption & Special Guardianship Leadership Board, the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory Stakeholder Advisory Council and the Kinship Care Alliance. She has been interviewed recently on Sky News, Channel 5 News, BBC World at One, BBC Five Live and Radio 4 Women’s Hour. In 2019 she was honoured to take part in a month-long kinship care knowledge exchange, meeting kinship carers and other kinship care experts across Australia.

Previously she spent 11 years at The Fostering Network where she was Director of External Affairs and then Director of Development. Her team led the successful Staying Put campaign which means young people are now able to remain living with their former foster carers beyond the age of 18.

She has a PhD in women’s political representation from Southampton University where she worked as a researcher on the British Representation Study 1997 and other projects focusing on gender politics.