Nicky Dee worked at the Cambridge Entepreneurship Centre at a formative time, introduced a new business creation competition to the University with CUE, provided business support to new businesses, and managed a variety of enterpreneurship consultancy projects. Clients have included European Commission, Department Trade and Industry, Yorkshire Forward, Enecsys, Dwell Vent etc. She recently completed her PhD in Technology Management by Sustainable Energy Ventures at Cambridge University. More info here

Louise Norton is a Cambridge university social and political sciences graduate.  Previously Director of the Inka Porter Project, based in Cusco, Peru. She has fluent Spanish and a deep understanding of community and sustainable tourism and experience in entrepreneurship and environmental training. Previous experience includes researching a successful book on working conditions and project coordinator at Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre. She has attended the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Programme with a bursary from CMI.

Robert Norton is a graduate in Computer Science from the University of Cambrdige, still living and working in Cambirdge. He is a keen traveller and would like to see developing countries benefit more from the influx of visitors, who often place a great social and environmental burden on the countries they visit. He is also passionate about computers and open source software. He is very please to be able to combine these two interests by assisting the work of Leap Local. He is mostly responsible for maintaining Leap's server infrastructure and also participates in improving the website.

David Heath is a web developer. He studied Computer Science at Cambridge University. He has extensive experience in building web applications using PHP and the PostGreSQL database system e.g. a stand alone "Offline CMS Client" for OneWorld.net. This was based on an open source technology called PHP-GTK. He gave a technical presentation about the system at the fourth Open Source Content Management Systems Conference.

Belinda Dee:

I am Liles' younger sister and I have been keenly interested in Leap Local since the very beginning.  It is a real joy to see it up and running and I've been thinking about getting involved for some time.  Although my credentials are not particularly relevant when it comes to ethical tourism, I do have a marketing background which I hope will be a valuable skill to bring to the table.  I started out doing physiological sciences at Oxford (mainly neuroscience and psychology) then moved to London and became a new business consultant for marketing services agencies.  After a year I broke away from this company with two of the senior staff and set up a small start up consultancy called Teeming, doing the same thing.  A fantastic experience and I worked with some great people, however after three years I decided that my heart lay elsewhere and made a jump into brand planning (strategy) and started working for a relatively young, fast growing and dynamic integrated creative agency. I'm currently working on Leap Local whenever I can.

Simon Freytag offers us occasional technical support and traveller comments, many thanks.

 Technical advisor

Michael Wells is the Managing Director of Third Light and is a highly regarded expert in internet management systems. He has specialist background knowledge in internet infrastructure and information systems management, Michael founded Third Light in 2002 to cater for the explosion of digital imaging. Prior to forming Third Light, Michael was Principal Consultant at Zeus Technology, where he designed and lead projects in the internet service provider (ISP) markets in the UK and America.

Plus support from:

The Design Office continue to support Leap Local. We used to have a frog in our logo, which was cute but as they pointed out, didn't tell people anything about us! The Design Office helped us re-brand (an on going process), and add the pizzazz to our marketing material. In addition they offer valuable advice on how to reach people with what we are doing.

Dorsey and Whitney continue to give Leap pro bono support Dorsey & Whitney LLP is among the largest law firms in the world. With 18 offices strategically located and approximately 650 lawyers and 850 support staff.

Thirdlight are a software and internet services business based in Cambridge, UK. Their image library system has a highly acclaimed, easy-to-use web interface that is truly prized by our clients around the world. They provide Leap Local support such as free image library (from where we can launch a photo competition), hosting support, internet payment support etc.

Imaginative Traveller was established in 1991. It has grown steadily to become one of the world's leading operators of small group adventure tours. We have completed a number of volunteer projects with them, where we organised the building of composting toilets requested by a local village community in Peru.

Cambridge Humanitarian Centre are continuing support of Leap Local.