Tom’s Trust CEO, Rebecca Wood, has been shortlisted in the CharityComms Inspiring Communicator Awards 2025 for their ‘Strategic Leader of the Year’ Award.
Rebecca is being celebrated for her work at Tom’s Trust, that is now the UK’s leading charity dedicated to providing psychological support to children with brain tumours and their families.
Run by the UK’s membership organisation for charity communicators Charity Comms and sponsored by creative agency Creative Concern, the awards celebrate inspiring charity communications and the people behind it.
Before joining Tom’s Trust, Rebecca achieved great things as CEO at fast-growing charities. Whilst CEO at Alzheimer’s Research UK, she grew the organisation from a team of 2 to over 70, leaving them a multi-million-pound income charity, and having funded £53m of UK-wide innovative dementia research. Rebecca has also headed up Blue Smile, a children’s mental health charity, where she introduced a new service and oversaw doubling of income.
Her vision for Tom’s Trust has been no less ambitious. Rebecca joined the charity after being inspired by Debs and Andrew (charity cofounders), passionate vision – but immediately saw how to achieve it faster.
We now provide clinical psychology services to 20% of impacted families across the UK, and Rebecca has recently steered the development of a new five-year strategy that aims to enable the charity to reach the remaining 80% of impacted families.
Since joining in 2020, Rebecca has transformed the originally small local organisation into a national- facing charity. The expansion allows us to reach hundreds of children and thousands of family members.
She’s also instigated new team roles, which will have a huge impact moving forward, elevating our work with families and what we offer in services. We funded and launched the UK’s first ever Sibling Toolkit under Rebecca’s championship, and she passionately advocated for our first ‘Better Together Camp’, which saw 15 girls aged between 8 and 12 years old, all who are currently living with a brain tumour, go on an adventure weekend to make friends, improve self-esteem and experience new things – Rebecca even joined them!
Her hard work didn’t stop there, though. Rebecca used her previous experience of the importance of professional expert Networks to meeting the challenges of serious conditions, by bringing Tom’s Trust support to the Paediatric Neuro-oncology specialist interest group (PNO-SIG), a national network of clinical psychologists. By investing in training and meeting costs and offering a flexible fund to help clinical psychologists with equipment, professional development and other initiatives, the aim is to support them to best support families affected by brain tumours, wherever they are in the UK.
Debs Mitchell, Co-Founder of Tom’s Trust, said: “Rebecca’s visionary approach has led to ground-breaking changes in Tom’s Trust and her leadership has grown us into a nationally recognised entity. Rebecca absolutely deserves this accolade; we are so lucky to have her leading our team.”
The award ceremony is set to take place on 10th December. Find out more about the awards and the event here – https://bit.ly/3KCBCV3