New Year honours for our finest
ABLOOD donor and an advocate for tenants are among four Stockport people to be recognised in the New Year’s honours list.
Lesley Walker, who lives on Queens Road in Cheadle Hulme, has been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for her voluntary services to the NHS in donating blood and platelets.
Jenny Osbourne, of Bakewell Road, Hazel Grove, a board member at Stockport Homes and chief executive officer at tenant engagement firm, Tpas, received an OBE for services to tenant engagement.
Fellow Stopfordians David McDonald Watson, executive principal and chief executive officer at Changing Lives in Collaboration Multi Academy Trust, and Patricia Denise Kane, executive headteacher at the Education and Leadership Trust, have both received OBEs for services to education.
Lesley Walker, a 69-year-old grandmother-of-two, first began donating blood 48 years ago and has been a platelet donor for the past 25 years. She has made more than 1,000 platelet donations to NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT).
NHSBT operates a donation credit system whereby each blood donation equals one credit and platelet donations get two credits. Lesley, a retired IT consultant who has two sons, has amassed 636 credits and 18 whole blood donations.
Lesley said: “I’m a big believer that if you can donate you should. You never know when you might need it. When I found that my platelet count was so high I couldn’t not donate.
“It’s very, very humbling to have received the honour, it was a complete surprise – an envelope just dropped through the door. My husband and two boys are over the moon.”
Jenny Osbourne, who lives with husband Kent and has two stepchildren, Charlotte, aged 24, and Liam, 22, and a cocker spaniel called Coco, has been CEO at Tpas since 2014 and, before that, membership manager since 2002.
She said: “If landlords and tenants are working together in partnership it means better services and great efficiency. Recognising the importance of and need for social housing is so important.”
Jenny, 45, has also been a board member of Stockport Homes for three years. She added: “It felt really important to me to be part of helping the main social housing provider in the borough that I was born in, grew up in and now live in too.”