Professor Carolyn Wilkins OBE serves as the chair of trustees at the Centre for Local Economies (CLES), bringing more than 30 years of public sector experience across local, city‑regional, and national levels. In this leadership role, she champions CLES’s mission to support progressive, community‑focussed approaches to local economic development. She has long valued CLES’s work helping places and communities thrive, and her strategic oversight strengthens the organisation’s position as a national leader in community wealth‑building.
Alongside her CLES role, Wilkins is a professorial fellow at the Birmingham Leadership Institute (University of Birmingham), where her academic work focusses on leadership for complex public challenges, systems thinking, and the relationship between trust and control in organisations. Her extensive executive background includes serving as a chief executive in both metropolitan and district local authorities, as well as holding senior national roles such as expert adviser for health and care at Number 10 and director of contain at NHS Test & Trace, where she led national-local coordination during the COVID‑19 response.