Robert Wilkes

Bob retired from over forty years as a Church Minister, including fourteen years of engagement in a range of Church and community development partnerships in the Middle East and Central Asia. These included, in Afghanistan, projects addressing mental health issues.  His last Church position was City Rector of Oxford, the city where he was a student and where he and his wife, Sheila, married.  He built relationships with the charity sector in the city and with the local authorities. Having himself grown through a period of anxiety depression, he is aware of the strength and awareness gained by working through a time of mental ill-health.  Invited to be a Trustee of Restore in 2013, he was keen to make his contribution to this charity, with its strong track record of supporting people into renewed confidence and of challenging the stigma often embedded in public attitudes to mental illness.