Meet the team behind CREN

PENNY SOUTHGATE – Founder, Director

Penny has worked as a producer/presenter at BCfm Radio in Bristol for over 10 years and been a climate activist since the IPCC declared a global emergency back in 2018. She created the award-winning environmental show, One Love One Planet, on BCfm, and the annual, UK-wide community radio event Our Earth Week, also nominated for an Arias Award.  

She is passionate about the role of community radio in communicating the climate crisis and our nature-connectedness, and also the importance of community radio in providing support during times of crisis and emergency.  She created CREN to provide somewhere central where radio stations, producers and anyone working in the field of sound could gather to support each other to do this, in a myriad of different ways.

She has a background in television as a producer and director and also in front of the camera as a presenter and voiceover artist.  Her favourite things? Music, film, nature, and celebrating life with family and friends.

AGATHE DIJOUD – Trustee

Agathe’s two main passions being radio and the environment, it felt ideal to be involved in the Community Radio Environment Network. She has an academic background in environmental politics, so can always help with understanding the complexities of that world.

They currently work at Radio Platfform, a youth-led radio station in South Wales, as studio coordinator, where they got involved in Our Earth Week 2023 by putting on an event relating to the role of young people in the environmental movement.

When not in a radio studio, you can find Agathe enjoying a walk in the beautiful city of Cardiff, listening to Billie Eilish, or at a pub quiz!

XAN PHILLIPS – Trustee

With a passion for both the environment and radio Xan Phillips sees great value in the role Our Earth Week is having in the community.

Currently Station Manager at Voice FM in Southampton, he has been presenting Your Green Voice since November 2020, so it was obvious that OEW would help like minded radio presenters join forces and encourage more to be aware of what is required.

The week of radio inspired Xan to present a green breakfast show, possibly the only one worldwide, which continued into COP28, and then up to Christmas and became official in January 2024.

Xan has been in radio since the year 2000, before that he was working at Sky News as a video editor in Westminster until 1997, then becoming an webmaster in 1997. As a podcaster he covered the first Climate Change Demo in 2005. 

JO VALE – Trustee

Jo has a background in media and law. She started working in television in London in the 1990s and worked for Channel 4, ITV and the BBC, latterly as an executive producer in Bristol. 

Retraining in law in her late 40s, Jo has gone on to work as a media lawyer advising programme makers, on law and regulation. 

Jo loves music and cycling, her friends and family and is a convert to the uniqueness and eccentricity of life in Bristol where she has lived for 24 years.

KEVIN TINSLEY – VOLUNTARY SECRETARY TO THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Kevin, now retired, is a former Government economist, who has come to the conclusion that conventional, so-called ‘value-free’ economics is a nonsense that has failed the planet and the people. People now serve the economy rather than the economy serving the people, and the inability of the economy to allow for pollution, climate change and the value of nature means we are facing the possibility of human extinction. The planet will survive, but will we? Kevin acts as a voluntary secretary to the CREN board of trustees, but when not behind a desk he could be walking, running, going to the cinema or listening to the greatest band in history, Prefab Sprout.