Marion Baker – Vice–President for 2013

The General Assembly’s Vice–President for 2013 is Marion Baker who lives in Sheffield and is the wife of a Unitarian minister.

Until her retirement Marion was a career civil servant with the Department of Work and Pensions, latterly as a project manager working with US partners on Welfare To Work initiatives. These involved extensive travel around the UK and trips to Los Angeles, Oregon and Milwaukee giving presentations at US Welfare to Work practitioner conferences.

Always a strong advocate of life–long learning Marion combined full time work with part time study with the Open University attaining a BA honours degree in combined Humanities and Social Sciences subjects and an MBA.

Marion who became a Unitarian in her teens, is a member of the congregation at Upper Chapel, Sheffield and is the President of its Women’s League. She has a distinguished history of service to the Unitarian Movement: she was the national president of the Women’s League in 2008–9. She was for some years a member of the British Unitarian Choir, touring with them in the 1990s in Canada, Germany and the United States.

She has been especially dedicated to the Unitarian residential centre, now named the Nightingale Centre, at Great Hucklow in Derbyshire. Her long association with it has seen her as the secretary of its management committee and, since 2007, its chairman.

She is especially proud of the fact that the centre is run on eco–friendly standards and last year achieved the Peak District Environment Quality Mark. It also achieved a 5 star rating in Food Hygiene.

Marion’s husband, Ernest, was minister at Underbank Unitarian Chapel, Stannington, Sheffield, from 1981 until his retirement in 2006.