She has been a high-powered career woman all her working life - so much so that she delayed having her first baby until she was 40. Sheena Duncan, the feisty first lady of Glasgow, stepmother four times over and step-grandmother of five, also retained her maiden name when she married. So I'm curious to discover how this most modern of women views being the Lady Provost - a role she happily describes as "secondary and supportive" to her husband, Bob Winter, the Lord Provost of Glasgow and the most senior civic leader in Scotland.

"It is a bit old-fashioned, in that it's one of the few posts you're appointed to as your partner's wife," she agrees readily when we meet in the City Chambers. "You don't apply for it and nobody takes up references on you for it. My job is secondary to what the Lord Provost's agenda is, and I'm very happy for that to be the case: it's the way it should be. I wasn't elected - Bob was elected first by the people of Summerston, then by the Labour group and lastly by Glasgow City Council. That's a democratic process which I respect very much."

This warm and charismatic woman - who prefers informality and introduces herself as Sheena - is quick to point out, however, that while she has a clear role to play as Lady Provost, she is still "independent in life, in thought and in mind" and is very active in her own field. "I don't sit about waiting for things to happen with the Lord Provost. I have a very busy agenda of my own," she says with a smile.

Sheena's big interest is child care and child protection, and a desire to "help people who haven't had a chance". In this she had an influential early role model in her own mother, a hard-working and devout Church of Scotland Christian, whom Sheena describes as "motivated by a love of her fellow humans".

Sheena was born in Clydebank. She and her younger brother were brought up by their mother after their father, a session clerk at Kilbowie Parish Church, died of a heart attack when Sheena was just 13. Her mother continued her father's straightforward approach to life.

"Put it this way," she says. "I thought everyone went to school every day; I didn't know you could take a day off. I thought everyone went to church every Sunday; I didn't know you didn't have to go." But although her own working-class childhood was "supremely and profoundly happy", she did witness the ravaging effects of poverty and alcoholism across the wider community.

It was this that propelled her to study social work at Strathclyde University and social work management at the National Institute in London, before starting her career in Possilpark in the late 1960s. "There was abject poverty. I mean real poverty, where people had little electricity, fuel, and terrible trouble making ends meet." She pursued her career in Devon and then in Toronto before returning to Scotland, first becoming district manager of social work for north and east Glasgow before being made director of social work at Renfrewshire Council in 1995.

She joined the Labour party in 1978, a year before she met her husband, though her involvement has always remained at branch level.

Sheena is confident that her background and experience as director of social work will prove invaluable in assisting her husband in his mission to empower the people of Glasgow and to instill a sense of civic pride. "We share a great belief in the power of people and communities to be able to help themselves," she says.

While acknowledging that poverty is still rife in Glasgow, she feels its nature has changed because of drugs, which she calls the "scourge of society". "I think real poverty is still around but it's a different type, because people have basic benefits," she says. "It's a poverty of spirit, caused by drugs. Children who are living with parental alcohol and drug abuse are very vulnerable."

Equally, she believes that a recent report by Ian Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice, about Glasgow having more gangs than London, is frustrating and she has great sympathy for the people living in the affected areas. "If you ask them what they want, they want it to stop. The way in which you do it is by engaging with young people, having activities for them such as midnight football and getting people off the streets and not tormenting the life out of their neighbours. But there's no easy answer."

Since retiring early in 2001, Sheena has been on the board of the Talbot Centre, in Glasgow's west end, which helps the city's homeless. "The Talbot has changed out of all recognition," she says. "There are many young people with drug and alcohol problems at the centre. We get them fed, give them clothes, get their benefits sorted out. They are medically assessed, then encouraged to look at paths out of the way they are living. It's a long road, but for some - in fact for a number - it's very successful."

Sheena also works for the Scottish Social Services Council (the registration body for social work) and sits on the council of the Princes Trust in Scotland. She was on the board of East Park Home for three years until 2004 and was asked to run the charity National Children's Homes for six months after that. She only very reluctantly gave up her seat on the Quarriers Village board, and on the visiting committee at Polmont Young Offenders Institution, because it was becoming difficult to juggle all her commitments with the duties of Lady Provost.

It's clear she takes her new job extremely seriously. "The role of Lord Provost is massive and Bob has an excellent team working with him, but I do think there is a clear role for the Lady Provost," she says. Her husband works round the clock, and she says she relishes the non-stop round of weekend and evening civic engagements that have become part of their lives. "There's lots of social networking which I love because I adore meeting people," she says. But she works hard on preparation, memorising names and obtaining personal profiles of the important people she will meet, and reading up about them beforehand. Her job involves following up these meetings and exploiting her own network of key contacts in order to help her husband in his role.

She admits there is a huge amount of unseen work involved, but is not about to complain. "This is a privilege, it's absolutely wonderful and we're thoroughly enjoying it," she says.

Since becoming the city's first couple in May last year, the pair have travelled in delegation to Rostov-on-Don in Russia, the latest city to be twinned with Glasgow, to Sri Lanka for the 2014 Commonwealth Games announcement and to a Burns' Night in Nuremberg, which is also twinned with Glasgow.

Much of her work will be done in Glasgow. She is a great believer in Glaswegians' social conscience and its power to bridge the social divide. "A lot of people I meet have come from working-class backgrounds, have done well in their lives and want to give something back," she says. "In fact, I'd say that quite strongly. The Lord Provost has also seen that in his time: businessmen and people in the city are very interested in helping the less fortunate."

One of Sheena's predecessors, the late Peggy Lally, famously made the role of the Lady Provost, lasting four years, as charity-friendly one, and Sheena is keen to continue that tradition. But instead of the charity fashion shows so beloved by Lally, Sheena has launched a new series of Lady Provost's Charity Lunches. The first of these takes place on Sunday at the City Chambers.

All proceeds will be split evenly between two major children's charities founded by two remarkable women. They are Sense Scotland, founded by Gill Morbey to help deafblind children and those with sensory impairment, and Piggybank Kids, the charity for vulnerable babies and children founded by Sarah Brown, wife of the Prime Minister, following the death of their baby daughter, Jennifer.

It is rare for Fife-based Piggybank Kids to stage fundraising activities in Glasgow and Sarah Brown's rare presence at the lunch is a credit to Sheena's networking skills. All 280 tickets, priced at £35 each, sold out within a fortnight of the lunch being announced.

"I'm absolutely overwhelmed by the dedication of everyone who has helped in the lunch's organisation, fundraising and the fantastic auction prizes," says Sheena, while pointing out that it is no coincidence that Sunday's table settings will be in green, purple and white - the colours of the Women's Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, which was the most militant organisation involved in the suffrage movement. 2008 marks the 80th anniversary of women getting the vote.

"The common denominator between Sarah Brown and Gill Morbey is they both had personal experiences that could have turned them in on themselves, but which instead drove them on to look outwards to other people's situations," says Sheena.

"When I meet women like them I am amazed once again at the power of the human spirit."



Saving very young lives

Sarah Brown, a former PR executive who co-founded the highly successful company Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications, is Britain's first lady. Tomorrow she will attend the first of the Lady Provost's charity lunches in Glasgow, but most of the time she prefers to keep a low public profile and play a supporting role to her husband, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and look after her sons, Fraser, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, and John.

Sarah's life changed irrevocably in 2002 after the death of the couple's first baby, Jennifer Jane, when she was just 10 days old. Jennifer had been born seven weeks prematurely at Forth Park hospital, Fife, and suffered a brain haemorrhage.

This led Sarah to found the charity PiggyBankKids, which supports charitable projects that create opportunities for children and young people, and to launch the Jennifer Brown Research Fund to help seek solutions to pregnancy difficulties and save new-born lives.

Andrew Calder, professor of obstetrics at the Simpson Centre for Reproductive Health at Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary, and director of the Jennifer Brown research laboratory, is a grateful recipient of support from the Jennifer Brown Fund.

Since PiggyBankKids was launched in 2002, four doctors and one midwife have received research funding to work full-time with Professor Calder to investigate the causes and consequences of life-threatening complications during pregnancy.

"Around 7% of babies are born prematurely, and around 1% very prematurely at 24-26 weeks, where survival rate is severely reduced and the incidence of brain damage or handicap such as blindness is very high," says Professor Calder.

He says that the need for fundraising for PiggyBankKids is constant. "What Sarah is doing is absolutely wonderful, because pregnancy has been the poor relation of medical research for decades. Now it has been given greater prominence."

He is full of praise, too, for the Lady Provost of Glasgow, for her initiative in helping raise funds for the charity. "Glasgow City Council has always been very, very generous in supporting causes like this," he says.

"The Lady Provost's lunch is a very nice initiative."