Danielle Sharp, Founder and Director

Danielle is the founder of Davis and Associates and has spent over 16 years working across the public and non-profit sectors to improve how we prevent and respond to violence, abuse, and harm.

Her work is grounded in lived experience, including as a sibling of someone with significant support needs, who has been subjected to repeated and life-threatening violence and exploitation. These experiences shaped her deep belief that the systems meant to protect us must do better, and that real, lasting change is not only possible, but essential.

Danielle began her career working in safeguarding and support roles with children, young people and families. In her early roles in youth offending, residential youth work, and teaching in a Pupil Referral Unit, she developed interventions around healthy relationships and sex education, and violence reduction. Her interest in whole-family approaches led her to work within one of the UK’s first Family Intervention Projects, and later to deliver the government’s Troubled Families programme in the second most populated London borough preventing families requiring statutory intervention.

Over time, Danielle’s focus moved beyond practice to the systems shaping people’s lives. She recognised that many challenges weren’t rooted in individual or family ‘complexity’, but in how fragmented and inflexible systems can be. This insight drove her work on domestic abuse and violence against women and girls strategy across several local authority areas, where she helped develop multi-agency partnerships, commissioning frameworks, and policy change, before moving into a national strategic role.

As Head of the Knowledge Hub at the national charity SafeLives, Danielle led strategic design, evaluation, and policy projects, including the Comic Relief-funded Tech vs Abuse research and contributions to the Home Office national commissioning toolkit. She led several national programmes, including the MARAC Performance and Quality Assurance Programme, Leading Lights Accreditation, the Spotlights series, and served as national lead for the One Front Door pilot. She also worked with the then CEO to develop SafeLives’ transformational Whole Picture domestic abuse strategy.

Since founding Davis and Associates, Danielle has worked across local, national, and international contexts supporting organisations such as Plan International UK, Ruhama, Surviving Economic Abuse, and Safer London, as well as dozens of public sector bodies to develop effective responses to reduce violence, abuse, and harm. Her expertise includes strategy, evaluation, and population-level needs assessments that combine data and lived experience to strengthen local systems and services.

Danielle is an accredited Domestic Abuse Related Death Review Chair, for Davis and Associates and as an associate of Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse. She has chaired 17 reviews to date. She holds a BSc in Psychology, and Level 7 Certificate in Leadership and Management.