Jill Manthorpe is Emerita Professor of Social Work at King’s College London and Visiting Professor at Queen’s University Belfast and the London School of Economics. She has contributed to a range of social work training programmes most recently for internationally recruited social workers in the UK. She has also evaluated many social work practice initiatives and explored multi-disciplinary working especially around risk, care-giving and safeguarding.

𝐊𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐥 𝐃𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬 is Associate Professor in the Master of Social Work at the University of Antwerp, lecturer in the Bachelor of Social Work and Senior Researcher at the Research Centre for Social Inclusion of Karel de Grote University of Applied Sciences and Arts (KdG) in Belgium. She coordinates Bind-Kracht, a training organisation on poverty and social work, recognised by the Flemish Government. The organisation empowers social professionals and volunteers to work in a strength-based, connecting and dialogue-driven way, with a focus on the experiences of people living in poverty. Bind-Kracht combines academic and methodological/practice based knowledge with experiential knowledge and promotes the meaningful involvement of experts by experience in addressing poverty and social exclusion.

Her research and practice focus on poverty, social exclusion, client perspectives in social work, empowerment, participatory research methodologies, and the integration of experiential knowledge into education, research, and policy. Throughout her career, she has been a strong advocate for approaches that recognise people experiencing poverty as knowledgeable partners whose lived experiences are essential to effective social intervention.

Professor Driessens has authored and co-authored numerous books and publications that have shaped social work practice across Europe. Her recent work includes Involving Service Users in Social Work Education, Research and Policy: A Comparative European Analysis and contributions to international scholarship on social innovation, relational social work, migration, and participatory education.

Beyond academia, she has led impact evaluations for social welfare organisations and public authorities, contributed to European Erasmus+ and transnational projects, and served as Convenor of the Special Interest Group on Service User Involvement in Research and Education of the European Social Work Research Association (ESWRA). She is also actively engaged in editorial, advisory, and governance roles across a range of social work and anti-poverty organisations.

𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚 𝐕𝐚𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐲𝐜𝐤 is expert by experience in Bind-Kracht (Karel de Grote University of Applied Sciences) in Antwerp/Belgium. She works in tandem with lecturers in Social Work. She is a co-lecturer on theory courses on poverty and social work, on training modules on communication in social work and on courses for social care professionals. She is also volunteering in ‘Recht-Op’, an Association where People in Poverty Take the Flour in Antwerp, participating in policy work in the local community. In tandem with Kristel Driessens she will present the keynote: The transformative power of cooperation with experts by experience.