Danielle sharp
narrative summary
Danielle has over 16 years experience of working within the public and non-profit sector.
She is passionate about creating effective solutions to complex social issues. Her primary area of expertise is interpersonal violence with considerable experience working within the fields of exploitation, domestic abuse, sexual violence and youth violence.
Starting her career working with young people described as ‘disaffected’ she worked in a variety of settings including youth offending, residential youth work and teaching within a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU).
Through these roles she designed and implemented responses, tools and resources around serious youth violence, healthy relationship and sex education as well as sexual and criminal exploitation.
During her work with young people she became interested in addressing the contextual and familial factors impacting young people’s lives, thus moved on to work developing one of the country’s first Family Intervention Project’s (FIP) and subsequently delivering the Governments ‘Troubled Families’ programme within an Intensive Family Focus team in North London.
Having worked with families that would often be described as ‘complex’, she believed it was in fact our systems and the way we work with families that was complex. She decided the only sustainable way to achieve positive outcomes with families and communities was to create tangible changes to the systems themselves.
Focussing on the issue of domestic abuse, she began working in a strategic capacity to understand the system factors that made an impact on reducing domestic abuse. She has worked across three Local Authority areas to develop robust systems responses to domestic abuse including developing multi agency partnerships, strategy, policy, commissioning services and developing monitoring frameworks.
More recently Danielle has worked for the national organisation SafeLives, as the Head of the Knowledge Hub. During her time at the organisation she worked on various projects including; strategic design for a number of local authorities, development of a county wide commissioning strategy, led the national One Front Door pilot, conducted the first year evaluation for the Drive project, evaluated a police force resolution centre, worked on the Comic Relief funded Tech Vs Abuse research as well as contributing to Home Office national commissioning toolkit. She has subsequently worked as an associate developing their Public Health Approach delivery model for local areas.
Since setting up Davis and Associates, Danielle has been able to work on an array of exciting projects which have included working with international non-profit organisations (Plan UK and Ruhama) as a policy and strategy advisor in the areas of prostitution, trafficking and sexual harassment in public spaces. She has worked on evaluations with organisations such as Safer London, evaluating their group intervention for young men displaying harmful sexual behaviour and Surviving Economic Abuse to edit their final Economic Justice Project evaluation. Her particular area of expertise is in population based enhanced needs assessments combining data and the voices of those with lived experience to understand how to strengthen responses. She has conduced needs assessments with over a dozen Local Authority areas in relation to domestic abuse and sexual violence.
She works independently as a Domestic Abuse Related Death Review Chair, as well as an associate for Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse. To date she has been the Chair for 10 reviews, her first receiving no substantial ammendments following Home Office quality assurance with the remaining reviews awaiting publication or ongoing.
Danielle currently volunteers as a Trustee for the non-profit organisation Justice Is Now. She achieved a BSc Psychology from the University of West London and is a member of the Chartered Management Institute with a Level 7 Certificate in Leadership and Management.
achievements
Author of Research in Practice ‘Coercive control: Impacts on children and young people in the family environment: Literature Review’
Steering group member for Public Health England and Business in the Community’s ‘Domestic abuse toolkit for Employers’
Researcher for the Comic Relief project Tech Vs Abuse quoted in The Telegraph
National lead for the Government funded One Front Door pilot - a systems thinking solution to child safeguarding and domestic abuse
Expert advisory panel member for the development of consultation options for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government ‘Support for victims of domestic abuse in safe accommodation’ consultation
Contributor to the Home Office ‘Violence Against Women and Girls: Commissioning Toolkit’
Author of St Helens ‘Tackling Domestic Abuse Strategy’ following completion of a strategic needs assessment
skills
Strategic needs assessments
Organisational strategy
Coproduction with lived experience groups
Policy development
Research
Evaluation
Audits and reviews
Public speaking