By Nathaniel Heller — March 31, 2014. 

I’m thrilled to be able to publicly celebrate the arrival of Alan Hudson to Global Integrity as Managing Director for Policy and Engagement. Readers of this blog will know we’ve been on the hunt for some time for a top-notch policy person to better frame Global Integrity’s involvement in the global policy agenda, and we couldn’t be more excited to have Alan join us effective today.

For the less familiar, Alan comes most recently from the ONE Campaign, where he led the organization’s work on transparency and accountability for three years. Prior to that, Alan worked on issues around governance, transparency and accountability with DFID, the Overseas Development Institute, the UK Parliament and, many moons ago, as an academic.

Alan’s role with Global Integrity will be about helping us to define our policy positions, to make sure that they’re informed by and supportive of real-world efforts to tackle governance challenges, and to engage with policy makers to feed our policy positions and evidence into key debates. While we’re still in the process of fleshing out Alan’s (enormous) policy agenda at Global Integrity, you can expect to see Global Integrity more regularly engaging and supporting other partners on a range of issue areas including fiscal transparency, beneficial ownership, contract transparency and open data, and around processes and advocacy opportunities including the G8 (or is it G7 now!?), the G20 and the Open Government Partnership.

You’ll also begin to see Global Integrity exerting more leadership in newer niche areas where we feel there’s a moment to push edgier “new frontiers” issues to the forefront, not least of which is political financing. Alan will also take over the management of TESTING 1 2 3: the Global Integrity Innovation Fund, linking it more closely to our research and policy priorities as part of a wider effort to strengthen the connection between our policy positions and practical action.

You can reach Alan at alan.hudson@globalintegrity.org and find him on Twitter at @alanhudson1 He’ll be moving to DC just as soon as he can get  a visa (late-May maybe). Welcome Alan!