Joanne Anderson served as the Mayor of Liverpool from May 2021 – 2023, marking a historic milestone as Liverpool’s first female Mayor and the first black woman to be directly elected as a Mayor in the UK. As Mayor, Joanne focused on climate action, ensuring decisions supported the city's net-zero goal and benefited residents through her triple-lock on people, planet, and equality. Under her leadership during a challenging period, the council achieved significant improvements in various areas, including governance and financial stability. Joanne's role in bringing Eurovision 2023 to the city highlighted her impact, yielding a £20 million return from a £2 million investment and expecting a £250 million return for local businesses. Joanne has nearly three decades of experience as an equity, diversity and inclusion practitioner through her company Innervision, and is passionate about social enterprises and businesses with purpose. Joanne has also worked as a civil servant as the community engagement policy lead within the Crown Prosecution Service. Recently, Innervision has been commissioned to provide business support to Black, Asian and Minority-led businesses and set up BlaST as a standalone Black Asian and Minority-led social investment fund. Alongside her mayoral election, Joanne has also been responsible for a string of ‘firsts’: she launched the first Black-led social enterprise in Liverpool. She has an internationally recognised reputation through her work around equalities and spearheaded Liverpool’s international profile in her role for Liverpool City Council. Alongside Eurovision, the Liverpool Against Racism festival was the first of its kind globally, a thought-provoking, entertaining, empowering, and educational week, described by one participant as an “intellectual Glastonbury”. Utilising the national influence held in the field of Social Investment, Joanne has been working with regional and national partners to introduce a social investment pathfinder to Liverpool with the ambition of raising £50 million of place-based social investment. Joanne has also been commissioned by Social Enterprise UK to champion the Social Value Roadmap to advocate for its adoption by policymakers, emphasising the merits of integrating social, economic, and environmental factors into public spending.