Ruth Runciman

Dame Ruth Runciman DBE (née Hellman; born 9 January 1936) is a former Chair of the British Mental Health Act Commission. Early life Hellman, as she then was, was educated at Roedean School, Johannesburg, and the Witwatersrand University, also in Johannesburg, where she gained a baccalaureate degree. She then matriculated at Girton College, Cambridge, in England Career Runciman became active in public life after marriages and children. In 1981, she was one of the founders of the Prison Reform Trust and was responsible for setting up a full-time Citizens' Advice Bureau in Wormwood Scrubs, the first full-time independent advice agency in any prison. She also became a Trustee of the Pilgrim Trust and the National AIDS Trust (now known as NAT), and chaired it from 2000 to 2006. For more than three decades, Runciman worked with the Citizens Advice Bureau and made significant contributions to work on drug misuse.