Laura Winningham OBE

Laura Winningham (OBE) - is a skilled entrepreneur and business development professional. She is founder of Winningham Impact Ventures which provides strategy consulting to early-stage non-profits and companies with impact deeply embedded in their business models. Laura, with unique expertise in building social ventures, guides founders to scale up effectively and mitigate risks, prioritising robust infrastructure, data-driven strategies, and team development for sustained success.

Being on the TimeGivers team inspires me because I believe it changes who children become - you can teach empathy in a classroom, but you can't embed it there. When a child hands food to a hungry family, sits with a lonely elderly person, or plants something that will outlast them, the emotional learning is visceral and permanent. It bypasses the intellect and goes somewhere deeper. And it doesn't stop there - when children take that sense of commitment back to their friends and families, the ripple goes further than any of us can see.

Laura was co-founder of City Harvest which has built a sustainable way to address two of London's greatest issues: hunger and waste. Under her direction, City Harvest has connected food for 85 million meals at no cost to those facing hunger. 
 City Harvest helps make the planet more sustainable whilst helping London’s most vulnerable including the homeless, disadvantaged children, refugees, people facing social isolation and domestic abuse. For her contributions, Laura received an Order of the British Empire from King Charles.

Prior to founding City Harvest, Laura was an investment manager at CRI Media Partners in Hong Kong and New York focused on technology, media and telecommunications and managed public and private equity portfolios at two family offices. Laura began her career as an investment banker with a specialty in alternative energy.

Laura has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BSc in Economics from Cornell University.