Sarabajaya Kumar

Dr Sarabajaya Kumar joined the UCL School of Public Policy in January 2010 as a Teaching Fellow in Voluntary Sector Policy. She holds post graduate degrees - an MSc and PhD - in Public Policy and Management from the University of Aston, and a BA (Hons) in Sociology and Religion from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London.

Sarabajaya was a Lecturer and Programme Director of an MSc at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (2000-2007). During this time she also served as an advisor to the Home Office as a member of the Governance Strategy Group - set up to advise and oversee the development of an integrated Governance Strategy for the Third Sector - and was the series editor and editor for the LSE’s Centre for Civil Society Voluntary Sector Working Paper Series - funded by the Charities Aid Foundation. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CCS/publications/vswp/Voluntary_Sector_Working_Papers.htm.

Between 2007 and 2009 Sarabajaya held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Saïd Business School’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. She is currently an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford, where she is researching ‘Social Capital in UK Public Policy’ for the ‘Social Capital and Competitiveness: New Perspectives Project’ and is an active member of the Governance, Accountability and Innovation (GAIn) network. http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/insis/research/Pages/gain.aspx.

Sarabajaya’s research interests are: Accountability, Participation, Social Capital, Social Exclusion, Governance, State -Third Sector Relations, Public-Private Partnerships, Third Sector Organisations, Organisational Theory, Qualitative Research Methodology, Action Research and Grounded Theory. Her doctoral research considered inter-organisational accountability relationships between government, the voluntary sector and users of contracted out health and welfare services.

Sarabajaya served as a Trustee for a social justice charity for five years http://www.praxis.org.uk/ and is currently a Governor of an inner-city, community, secondary, state school (Mulberry School for Girls) http://www.mulberry.towerhamlets.sch.uk/, a member of Future First’s Advisory Committee http://www.futurefirst.org.uk/About/AboutFutureFirst.aspx, a member of the Institute of Volunteering Research’s Advisory Group http://www.ivr.org.uk/, and a member of the National Council for Voluntary Organisation’s Advisory Council http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/.

Prior to academe, Sarabajaya worked as a volunteer co-worker with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and with lay health workers in West Bengal, India. She was also the founder worker for a community organisation working with the Spitalfield’s community on public health issues in the East End of London, and responsible for partnership working between the charitable voluntary sector, local government and the NHS in the London Borough of Haringey.