Zubeda is a founding director of ConnectFutures. She previously worked for over 15 years in the public sector as a senior member in a wide variety of local, national and pan-European policy-orientated projects on topics such as extremism, equalities and leadership innovation. She developed an operational accredited mentoring programme on behalf of statutory agencies and partners for individuals vulnerable to violent extremism during a two-year assignment with West Midlands Police Counter Terrorism Unit, and worked for Birmingham City Council delivering aspects of the Prevent strategy from 2007.

Zubeda is a current EU RAN expert. She is the author of Education and Radicalisation Prevention: Different ways governments can support schools and teachers in P/CVE with Professor Lynn Davies (2019), “Counter-terrorism as conflict transformation (Routledge, 2014) and Formers and Families -transitional journeys and out of violent extremism in the UK (European Commission, 2015). She is a Clore Social Fellow (2014/15), an alumni of the IVLP programme (Dept of State, USA) and was invited to the White House Countering Violent Extremism (President Obama) summit in Washington in February 2015 as a result of the specialist work of ConnectFutures in developing community and schools based programmes.
She graduated from the University of Manchester with a BA in Politics and Modern History and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies.

Dr Laura Zahra McDonald is a founding director of ConnectFutures and former academic at the University of Birmingham. After studying Social Anthropology with sub-honours in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of St Andrews, she completed her PhD at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York in intersectionality and Islam. Her post-doctoral work at the University of Birmingham investigated state-community engagement in the context of security and conflict post 9/11, within which she highlighted the importance of community partnership with leadership from young people and women.

She has extensive experience in innovative, critical enquiry and evaluation both as an academic and independent consultant for policy, practitioner and community-based organisations. She has worked to counter extremism, exploitation and inequality since 2003 in a range of roles within those sectors, engaging formally in understanding and developing preventative approaches to extremisms since 2005. This includes bringing young people together with the police for problem-solving in the community, and engaging ‘hard to-reach’ youth for dialogue and skills-building across diverse communities.

She has been a key developer – designing, testing and evaluating - in the OSCE’s new Leaders Against Intolerance and Violent Extremism (LIVE) initiative, which is a long-term training and capacity building programme for young leaders in Western Europe, the Balkans and Central Asia to tackle extremism in their local contexts. Laura has also contributed to the development of an online course for UNITAR around countering violent extremism within a human rights framework.
She has developed training modules for the HMPPS funded Way Out Project: Supporting Muslims in Prison (2018), an action research project based on lived experience of offenders. In partnership with St Giles Trust, she has been a key developer of the Building Resilience to Violent Extremism (BRAVE) programme for schools and colleges, and is experienced in evaluating the impact of different forms of intervention such as films and testimonials as well as social media and dialogue.

Lynn Davies is Emeritus Professor of International Education at the University of Birmingham, UK and Co-Director of the ConnectFutures. She has worked extensively in the area of education and conflict, and for the last 15 years specifically in education, extremism and security.

Major books in the field have been Education and Conflict: Complexity and Chaos (2004), Educating against Extremism (2008), and Unsafe Gods: Security, Secularism and Schooling (2014). Recent empirical research has included interviewing former extremists (far right and Islamist) about their family backgrounds for EU RAN (2018) and evaluating the Home Office funded Way Out Project: Supporting Muslims in Prison (2018), an action research project based on the lived experience of offenders. Recent reviews include the Review of Educational Initiatives in Counter-Extremism Internationally: What works? (2018),University of Gothenburgand this looked at 21 different types of initiatives in 23 countries and their evaluations. Another review is the Education and Radicalisation Prevention: Different ways governments can support schools and teachers in P/CVE (2019) for EU RAN This is a survey of 27 EU Member states of what their governments are doing in the area of counter-extremism.

She has acted as a senior consultant on areas of counter-extremism for a number of international agencies such as UNESCO, UNICEF, GIZ, OSCE and Club de Madrid, as well as the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network.

In 2014 she was given the Sir Brian Urquhart award for service to the UN and its goals by a UK citizen.