I studied BA Geography at the University of Oxford (Keble College) - focusing on human geography and especially development, feminist and post colonial geographies. Plus did a lot of rowing and was the Keble College music scholar on the piano in my first year! 

After university, I volunteered in Calais with refugees for 5 months with the charity Refugee Info Bus before covid hit. After a couple of short charity roles, I moved to Accenture as a management consultant in their Health and Public Services practice and did various projects focused on digital transformation in public sector organisations like HMRC, NHS, University of Leeds and the Crown Prosecution Service. 

Ever since leaving university, I wanted to work in international development, so I left Accenture to work for Save the Children UK in 2023. Save the Children is a large INGO and the world’s leading children’s charity, providing humanitarian and development assistance in over 100 countries. As a simplified view of its model: aid programming is mostly delivered locally by ‘country offices’ of Save the Children International (which is headquartered in London), and then ‘member’ organisations like Save the Children. Save the Children UK’s main goal is fundraising as well as advocacy, campaigning and domestic programmes within a certain country. I joined Save the Children UK’s IT department as a Business Analyst before being promoted to Transformation Manager. At the end of 2024 I moved across to Save the Children International as a Regional Change Manager for Africa, where I would have been deploying transformation initiatives (like new systems and processes) to country offices in Africa. However, this was quickly overshadowed by an emergency restructure from January 2025 when the organisation lost 25% of its funding overnight, following Trump’s dismantling of USAID. I worked on the restructure as a change manager but was unlucky that my role was also made redundant during it. I was successful in securing a new role internally as a capacity building manager, remaining within the Transformation Delivery department.

My new team focuses on building organisational efficiency and effectiveness by providing professional development training and coaching in project and change management and stakeholder management, as well as bespoke training for particular teams or new systems. Next year, we will also play a significant role in training and supporting internal staff to use generative AI productively and safely. When training is part of a strong overall change management approach, all of this ‘builds capacity’ for Save the Children to be resilient, innovative and internally collaborative. 

I am enjoying using all of the skills that I have developed from management consulting and digital transformation to train and coach colleagues based all over the world and hopefully play a small part in Save the Children’s incredible impact, especially as it faces down growing funding and geopolitical challenges alongside the rest of the international aid sector.