She has now been in post just under three years and has led initiatives on culture and organisational development within the National Church to support and enable the mission and ministry of the church on the ground.
In the last year she has led the development of a significant programme called Pathways, which has been launched to help increase the number of people coming forward to ministry and lay vocations, as well as finding candidates for vacancies.
Pathways will enable hundreds of church organisations to access digital recruitment – and reach the full diversity of the communities they serve – in a way that is currently not available to them. This includes launching a new online jobs board for employed, ordained and voluntary roles; introducing an applicant tracking system using TribePad software; and rolling out a national clergy transitions service to support clergy moving between roles and in and out of CoE ministry. This project is in a pilot phase until October 2017 but is expected to roll out quickly beyond that.
Foster has also been leading work on church-wide people systems and data strategy. This involves working with broad sets of stakeholders and highly complex data pathways across many organisations.
Foster continues to support and enable work on culture and transformation within the National Church Institutions. This forms part of the wider church’s renewal and reform programme that is ensuring the CoE contributes to the common good, facilitates the growth of the church in numbers and depth of discipleship, and re-imagines the church's ministry for today’s world.
Prior to this, most of Foster's career was spent across the businesses at publisher Pearson. Her most recent posts were global HRD of Pearson’s English language education businesses and business adoption lead of the global back office infrastructure programme of change. Foster was also a parliamentary candidate in the 2010 general election.
Foster is a trustee of Livability (a disability and community engagement charity) and St Petcock’s, a charity for homeless and the vulnerably housed.
Foster is also a partner in the farming business that she and her husband have built since his retirement from the military. This aims to fulfil their belief in self-sufficient, high welfare and low environmental impact farming.
Recommended content
http://pathways.churchofengland.org/
