Network members
Meet our brilliant Migrant Champions
Dr. Alex Bulat
Cambridgeshire County Council
Dr Alex Bulat is a migration researcher and project manager who has been representing Abbey Ward on Cambridgeshire County Council since May 2021. Alex is a dual Romanian and British citizen and has been campaigning for migrants' rights for over five years, including on access to settlement and citizenship and voting rights. She co-founded the Migrant Democracy Project with Lara Parizotto, a fellow councillor in London, campaigning for migrants' democratic participation and representation.
In less than 2 years since being elected, Alex has worked on successful motions including committing Cambridgeshire County Council to local-level support for EU citizens applying to the EU Settlement Scheme, to symbolically endorsing residence-based voting rights and to calling on Government to provide adequate local-level funding for migrants and asylum seekers making their home in Cambridgeshire.
Doina Cornell
Stroud District Council
Councillor Doina Cornell has been a district councillor for the Gloucestershire town of Dursley in Stroud District since 2012, and was council leader from 2018-2022. Formerly a Labour party member, she now sits as a Community Independent and is part of Stroud District Council's Cooperative Alliance which has led the council since 2012.
Stroud District Council has always been supportive of refugees and migrants in our district, and when the role of Migrant Champion was created, Doina felt her background was a good fit to take on the role. Her Romanian father arrived in the UK in the 1960s, and she has lost family to the Holocaust.
Outside of her council work, she helps run the family business publishing reference books for sailors, and she has written a memoir of her sailing childhood, Child of the Sea.
Heather Staff
Islington Council
Heather was elected as a Labour Councillor for Laycock Ward, London Borough of Islington in May 2022. She took up the Migrant Champion role alongside her fellow ward Councillor, Ilkay Cinko-Oner, after the election. She is a policy advisor for the RAMP project, which supports MPs and Lords on refugee, asylum and migration policy, and has worked on a number of Immigration Bills in Parliament.
Heather also spends time working on projects in the Balkans, including conflict resolution and refugee integration programmes, and has a background in Law and Development.
She is committed to being a Migrant Champion who challenges systemic injustice, stands with refugees and migrants and never gives up fighting for a fairer system.
She is proud to be part of a council that stands up for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.
Dr Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini
Oxford City Council
Hosnieh is a consultant anaesthetist at Oxford University Hospitals, and is Oxford City Council's first Migrant Champion. She is the co-founder of the Migrant Champions Network.
Hosnieh is the daughter of a political refugee and arrived in the UK from Iran at the age of 13 speaking almost no English. Hosnieh is a trade unionist, a campaigner and an advocate for the rights of displaced people. Her work focuses on removing practical barriers to accessing public services.
The ward Hosnieh represents is one of the most deprived in her city of Oxford. This, together with her own background, drives her to fight to amplify the voices of the marginalised and work to remove structural daily barriers, so that all our residents can live a dignified and fulfilled life.
Ibtisam Adem
Lambeth Council
Ibtisam has been the Migrant Champion for Lambeth Council since October 2022. She is a Labour Councillor for Knights Hill Ward, elected in May 2022. Ibtisam came to the UK as a refugee from Eritrea.
As someone with lived experience of being a refugee, she was motivated to become a Migrant Champion to raise the issues refugees and migrants living in Lambeth face as a result of the hostile environment, and to support the work of Lambeth Council's Sanctuary Services.
She is proud that Lambeth has become the second borough in London to become a Borough of Sanctuary.
Ibtisam has worked as a Youth and Community Worker for 17 years. She currently works as a Youth Caseworker at Daaro Youth Project, providing casework and advocacy support to young refugees and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa.
Kim Bryan
Machynlleth Council
Kim Bryan lives in Machynlleth in West Wales, where she was elected as a Labour councillor in May 2022. She is an active member of the local community, supporting recently-arrived families and organising donations of much-needed items for camps.
She works as an Associate Director of 350.org, a climate change charity.
She is mother to three wonderful gremlins and loves mountain biking, hiking, swimming and dancing.
Sue Lukes
Sue has been working to secure rights for migrants and support their organisations since the 1970s. She is now a consultant, trainer and researcher, a director of Migration Work, a not-for-profit consultancy working across Europe to make migration work for everyone involved, and advises many cities on that.
She also trains people on housing and migration law, co-edits the Housing Rights Info website and supports, develops and evaluates projects.
Until May 2022 she was a local councillor in Islington, London, where she became the UK's first Migrant Champion councillor and co-founded the Migrant Champions Network.
In her spare time (!), Sue co-founded and still chairs Hear Me Out (Music in Detention), and sits on various boards, steering and advisory committees and panels including her local synagogue and the Strategic Legal Fund.