Meet the team
At Horizons Research we are an associate company, we rely on blending our individual expertise and experience in design, leadership, policy and research.
Robert Rae
Robert founded Horizons Research in 2011. Since that time he’s led countless research, evaluation, policy, leadership and design projects within education, social care, health and children’s services.
Robert is also a Senior Associate at the Staff College, Associate at Dartington Service Design Lab and Chair of the Board of Trustees for Vox Liminis, an arts based organisation working in and around the criminal justice system.
Lewis Bloss
Lewis Bloss is a skilled and versatile researcher with an MSc from Leiden University and an MA from the University of Edinburgh, where he specialised in areas including UK devolution, direct democracy, and party systems across Europe.
He has also led policy research projects for organisations including Common Weal and the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association.
Lewis enjoys utilising a wide range of different methods to conduct research, and has experience both in qualitative methods such as interviews and in quantitative methods including the statistical analysis of large amounts of data.
Gregory White
Dr. Gregory White is a Research Associate in the Centre for Health Services Studies at the University of Kent. He is currently working on adult social care policy, and, specifically, the Care Act (2014).
He recently completed his ESRC-funded PhD in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York, UK. The research focused on the relationship between social policy and social movements in a post-economic crisis context. His research interests include the study of contemporary social movements, the economic crisis and social policy and political sociology.
He authored a research report in 2014 – funded by the ESRC – on the impact of welfare reform on third sector organisations in Scotland.
Gregory is a Research Associate at Horizons Research and involved in a number of live research projects in social services.
Livia Rae
Livia is Chief Illustrator and photographer at Horizons Research! She loves drawing, playing the violin, cycling about and is a green belt in Taekwondo.
Livia’s role is to draw pictures and take photos of cool stuff to make this website more interesting. Hope you like them.
Our services
- Creative engagement and facilitation
- Research & Policy
- Evaluation
- System leadership
- Futures thinking and scenario planning
Creative engagement and facilitation
Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve worked hard to ensure all our projects have progressed online, including all our engagement work.
We’ve experimented and learned quickly how to engage groups of people online in new interactive and creative ways. Designing online activities is very different from face-to-face interactions and we are increasingly being asked to support our NHS and local authority clients with virtual facilitation and based on our work during the pandemic. We are now set up to:-
- Design, host and facilitate interactive meetings, workshops, large group work, small group
- Develop and move traditional resources, materials and face to face activities into online learning resources.
- Provide back end technical support and facilitation to ensure smooth online sessions, webinars and meetings
We can host your engagement events, meetings and workshops using a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom and a range of interactive software to make sure your event moves past the normal boring video call.
Having someone else deal with the design and facilitation of your events, takes away a lot of stress and ensures your event goes off smoothly.
Research & Policy
Futures thinking and scenario planning
Evaluation
Evaluation is a real growth areas for Horizons Research