Jody Bell

Social work leadership advisor and researcher Churchill Fellow 2025 Founder, Being Your Potential

Jody Bell is a Social Work Leadership Advisor and Researcher with 35 years of experience spanning frontline practice, senior executive leadership, and academia. As a 2025 Churchill Fellow, she completed research across nine countries examining how aspiring and early-career social work leaders maintain alignment with professional values as they move into leadership. That research, The Alignment Gap, surfaces what the profession most urgently needs to confront: the conditions under which leaders are made, or quietly lost, to the systems they lead.

Jody is founder of Being Your Potential, a social work leadership development consultancy, and a sessional academic at Queensland University of Technology. Her guiding conviction is straightforward: build a career you don’t need to recover from.