Job title: Director at YSC Consulting. Malvernian Society Trustee
What does your job role involve?
I have spent most of my career in HR consulting, consulting across the breadth of the employee life cycle – recruitment, learning and development, workforce transformation, employee experience, and talent and development. I’ve moved into leadership strategy recently so this means I help leaders make sense of their organisations and themselves as leaders. I am passionate about people and about seeing people flourish.
I want to help make organisational impact and change, but more than that, to empower the people who are responsible for organisations to be able to do this and drive change, in many cases regarding sustainability. You are only going to see lasting change if it is driven from the top.
Where does your interest in sustainability come from?
I have a young child and I think a lot about the world I want her to grow up in. I know I was fortunate to ‘grow up’ at Malvern, in such a beautiful part of the world. I think about this through the lens of the longevity of that beauty. When you think about Malvern College at an environmental level, you can only be inspired to want to contribute to maintaining this. We are talking about buildings, but I think we’re also talking about playing our part to sustain the ecosystem that we have enjoyed. For those who are yet to attend, Old Malvernians need to ask what kind of Malvern are they going to attend? Are they going to attend a Malvern where because of global warming and temperature rises, this means the River Severn is going to catastrophically flood every year? We cannot let this happen.
From a business point of view, companies are shifting their business strategies.We need to have that golden thread of sustainability running through everything we do and that is hard when that is set against the context of rising costs and rising energy costs.
Why do you think Malvern College’s Green giving Day is so important?
The College’s motto is very appropriate: wise the one who looks ahead. Malvern is not an institution that likes to standstill, and it wants to be ahead of the curve. We are guardians of the College’s beautiful buildings, and it is vital we act; to not act would be irresponsible.
We clearly know that if we’re going to make our buildings energy efficient that is going to be a huge financial outlay. Thinking creatively about how we might do this without tapping into the existing balance sheet of the college is important. And I think that we need to take collective ownership of that, which is why, for me, Green Giving Day is such a great initiative and one that I hope will stand the test of time and be something that spawned something even greater than just the notion of just coming together to give. I think beyond the giving and believe it is about mindset; it is about focusing all our minds on something that is important. In our day-to-day actions, even in the little things that we do, this notion of green should become infused in our mindsets.
Whether we are the first school to do this or not, Malvern should be leading from the front. Our school colour is green so this whole notion of green should be embedded in our core.