WLUK Mentoring
Women Leaders' Mentoring Programme 2025
One-to-one sessions with experienced and supportive mentors
Build confidence
Expand networking options
Access to our knowledge hub
Here at Women Leaders, we decided during COVID to launch our first ever mentoring scheme for women working or living in Milton Keynes. This slowly became Career Connect and is still going strong.
We aim to support any women within Milton Keynes (and occasionally beyond) who asks for support in their working life. We can provide experienced mentors either within or outside of your specialty, who will provide five sessions. Those sessions are guided by the mentor and mentee equally and can span over as long a tome period as is required.
To date we have supported over 120 women and have utilised mentors from a team of over 40 – all volunteers and all dedicated to supporting and encouraging women to flourish.
We would like to encourage individuals who need our support to contact us at admin@womenleadersmk.co.uk.
We would also like businesses across the City to consider how they can help us to help their future female leaders – please contact us if you are interested in sponsoring some mentoring or indeed becoming a mentor?
In 2025 we have been delighted to receive a community fund grant from Milton Keynes Community Foundation to help us to organise this service. We would like to thank them for their continued support to us and to the women in Milton Keynes.
Get Involved
Become a Mentor or a Mentee
Please click here to tell us a little about yourself and what you are looking for
Click HereMeet our Mentors
Sarah Watt
Sarah Watt is a multi-award winning international property entrepreneur, angel investor and investment coach for women. After immigrating from Australia to the UK, Sarah understands the difficulties of re establishing yourself in a new country and building a business from the ground up.
Having pivoted her own career from the commercial accounting world to running her own property business to be financially and time free, she now helps other women do the same by scaling their investment portfolios and career prospects so they can build their own future. She also helps female scale up business founders to gain investment by refining their pitch and offer to angel investors.
Susan Izadkhasti
Susan is a scientist with a doctorate (PhD) in coronavirus vaccine development and a qualified Leadership Coach and Consultant. She is a founder of Engineered Life by Design™, a transformational framework for high-achieving leaders who want to thrive with purpose, energy, and resilience.
With over a decade of experience in sales, marketing, and business development in the corporate diagnostics world, she brings a unique blend of scientific precision, commercial insight, and holistic leadership mastery.
By combining neuroscience, DISC profiling, positive psychology, and body-energy alignment, she helps leaders engineer a life and career that’s not just successful—but sustainable, grounded, and deeply fulfilling.
Antoinette Oglethorpe
Antoinette is an award-winning consultant, coach, speaker, and author with a passion for career development and mentoring. As the founder of Antoinette Oglethorpe Ltd., she has spent over 25 years helping individuals and organisations unlock potential and achieve success through meaningful career conversations and leadership development.
She is the author of Confident Career Conversations and Grow Your Geeks, and has worked with global organisations including the World Health Organization, NHS, and UN agencies to implement impactful career and mentoring programmes. Her work focuses on increasing employability and enjoyability by supporting people to take ownership of their careers and thrive at work.
Antoinette is known for her engaging, practical approach and her ability to create space for honest reflection, growth, and change. She’s also a seasoned speaker who regularly shares her insights at conferences and events, inspiring others to embrace adaptability and take proactive steps towards fulfilling, purpose-driven careers.
As a mentor, Antoinette offers a supportive, down-to-earth space where you can explore challenges, build confidence, and shape your next steps, whatever stage you’re at in your career journey.
Susan Helman
Susan is an ICF Certified Coach who supports women as they navigate the twists and turns of caring responsibilities alongside their professional lives.
In her early 20s, she was a young mother, married with dreams.
By 29, she was navigating single parenthood, raising a daughter with special needs and learning disabilities, one day at a time.
In her 40s, she faced the unknown, building courage and finding her footing.
At 50, she decided it was time to pursue a master’s degree. Now in her 50s, she is living life to the fullest and helping others to do the same.
Susan has had the honour of coaching incredible women through unthinkable struggles—divorce, parenting an autistic child, losing a child, or losing a job—and guiding them to reclaim their freedom so they can spend more time doing the things they love while continuing to grow their careers.
In her mentoring conversations, Susan focuses on her clients’ goals to help them develop greater awareness and understanding. She provides fresh perspectives to resolve challenges, achieve goals more effectively, and ultimately grow in confidence and own their space.
Gamiel Yafai
Gamiel Yafai, a respected Diversity & Inclusion Strategist and author, brings nearly two decades of dedicated work to building inclusive workplaces across the Globe. His influential career began in publishing, where his work on the Race Relations Act ignited his passion for diversity. He later founded his Diversity Marketplace, an Award-winning global DE&I practice and team of Diversity Strategists, Analysts, Researchers, Auditors, Facilitators and trainers, delivering impactful programs for prominent organizations, including Imperial College London and The Victoria and Albert Museum, Channel 4, dnata Travel Group, Yamaha Music and the Civil Service.
Beyond his professional contributions, Gamiel is deeply committed to social impact. He serves as a Trustee for Women Leaders UK, An advisor to The Inclusion Foundation and the MK International Festival and a founding member of the MK Ethic Business Community, which is a network of over 400 Ethnic Minority Led Businesses.
Kelly Palmer
Kelly is a Chartered Physiotherapist, Teacher, Mentor, Soul Guide, and Energy Healer with a passion for helping people realign with their purpose, passion, and power. Through her unique blend of clinical expertise and intuitive healing, she supports professional men and women to move out of physical pain, emotional stagnation, and mindset blocks — so they can feel free, fulfilled, and fully themselves again.
Kelly runs her own therapy space — a peaceful log cabin sanctuary — and also works globally through her thriving online business. She hosts transformative workshops and soulful retreats, offering deep guidance, movement, and mindset tools that create lasting change.
With decades of experience and a holistic toolkit, Kelly mentors clients through both personal and professional challenges, helping them reconnect to their body, their energy, and their truth. Whether you're feeling stuck, burned out, or simply seeking more from life — she helps you move, heal, and rise.
Nikki Ross
Nikki has worked in the public sector for her whole career. She started working for the police in 1984 as a typist and later, in the control room. In 1988 she joined as an officer and went through the ranks at Thames Valley Police before retiring from policing after 35 years' service. At the time of her retirement, she was an Assistant Chief Constable having worked in uniform and detective roles and was an experienced operational commander managing risk. Following her retirement, Nikki went on to be the CEO of a Criminal Justice charity, working with her teams to support anyone who was impacted by the Criminal Justice - be they victims, offenders, young people and families.
Nikki retired for ill health reasons in 2024 and now sits on several boards of trustees where she continues to make a difference to others. She is the mentoring lead for Women Leaders and has always been passionate about mentoring and how to get the best from mentoring relationships in order to achieve your goals. She says, 'I have the most amazing mentor who challenges me in ways I would never do myself. Over the years we have achieved so much, and I would never have done so without his support!'
Nikki balanced a huge career with being a single parent of twins and can help you with work life balance, mummy guilt and confidence boosting, amongst other things.
Susan Popoola
With a first degree in Social Sciences, Diploma in Systems Thinking & Masters in HR Strategy & Change, Susan works with established and emerging purpose driven leaders to create Harmony, Impact and Legacy, for a Mosaic World in which everyone is valued for who they are and what they have to offer.
Her deep rooted belief in human value, and her ability to understand and connect with people from a rich diversity of backgrounds enables her to support leaders in optimising and bringing out the best in people and organisations. Her belief in human value is reflected in her podcast, “Leading in a Mosaic World, and her books: Touching the Heart of Milton Keynes: A Social Perspective, Consequences: Diverse to Mosaic Britain, and Male Perspectives on The Value of Women at Work. She is also the creator of the Legacy Alignment Programme that enables senior professionals to design a legacy plan that ensures their work is extremely fulfilling and makes a positive impact now and into the future.
She has extensive cross-sector and international experience working with organisations and delegates from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, China and the US. She is also a South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership Ambassador, Royal Society of Arts fellow, Good Work Guild member, and former Fellow of Windsor Castle’s Society of Leaders. She was recently designated a Black Female Pioneer by Milton Keynes City Council. When she’s not working with organisations, you are likely to find her on the Golf course, working to support young people who have been in the care system, or working on her latest book on multiculturalism
Ruby Parmar
Ruby is an experienced business advisor and has worked in professional services firms for over 30 years, the last 20 as a partner at PwC before retiring in 2019. She now wears many board level hats supporting the private, public and charitable sectors including as a trustee of Women Leaders UK. She continues to mentor individuals and is passionate about her community volunteering roles.
Sarah Thorne
Sarah is a strategic leader in programme and project management with over 20 years’ experience in the construction sector. She has successfully delivered initiatives ranging from fast-paced retail roll-out programmes to large-scale public-sector infrastructure projects. Skilled in leading multi-disciplinary teams, Sarah brings expertise that translates across industries and enables organisations to deliver with impact.
As a mentor, Sarah is passionate about supporting women to thrive in leadership. Having navigated her own journey into senior leadership, she understands the challenges of balancing career progression with personal transitions. She brings a blend of strategic insight, practical experience, and empathy to her mentoring, helping others build confidence, resilience, and the skills to lead effectively.