Alex Milner

Alex Milner is a multiple award-winning news journalist and editorial leader with extensive media industry and third sector experience in strategic and crisis communications. As a BBC News Editor and Story Teams manager, she deploys the organisation’s rapid-response specialist and regional journalists on the major and breaking news stories around the world.
 
As a SSAFA trustee, Alex sits on the Risk and Fundraising & Marcomms Committees, bringing her reputational and crisis communications judgement to the charity’s public voice. Having visited SSAFA’s team in Cyprus multiple times, she has seen first-hand the charity’s quality support of serving personnel and their families overseas.
 
Alex has run major news operations and reported from the front line alongside the military, including tours of Ukraine, Libya, Afghanistan, the Middle East and the Balkans, often embedded with the British Armed Forces. In the aftermath of the Iraq War, she helped to rebuild the BBC’s relationship with the MOD and government through the relaunch of its specialist defence and security unit, which had doubled in size by the time she left. Her commitment to the Armed Forces community is rooted in her immediate family, whose members have served as reservists in the Army and Royal Navy, and in her own experience of parenting an autistic child, which gives her a direct understanding of the pressures on families seeking and navigating care and support.
 
Before joining the SSAFA board, Alex was a trustee of NAPAC, the national charity supporting adult survivors of childhood abuse. She mentors emerging leaders through Women in Journalism, the John Schofield Trust and the BBC’s senior mentoring network.
 
Alex speaks four foreign languages and taught in the French West Indies while completing her MA in Modern Languages at Cambridge. Outside work, she enjoys skiing and portrait painting.