My Story

After leaving my CEO role, I took a sabbatical to evaluate some different business options. During that time, I mentored six early-stage female founders for my accreditation with the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs. I also became a mentor for the Cherie Blair Foundation, because I specifically wanted to be part of eliminating barriers to entrepreneurship for women in low and middle income countries - enabling global economic gender justice. I was looking to connect what I'd seen on my travels with my Masters in International Development - where I’d learned how supporting women-led businesses reduces poverty and drives economic growth.

Working with those founders felt like the most natural thing in the world. If you've ever done something and thought "this is what I'm meant to be doing," you'll know that feeling of being in alignment with your purpose. The question was where that purpose came from - this instinct to support people who are building something meaningful in the face of real challenges.

To understand why, I need to take you back to where it started.

In the autumn of 1984, the BBC broadcast Michael Buerk's report on the famine in Ethiopia. Like most of the country, I watched it transfixed - images that went around the world and shook British consciousness in a way that few things have before or since.

I'd been exchanging letters with my friend Linda, who was teaching in Kitui, Kenya, with VSO. She'd written about the droughts - about poor harvests and the same fragility I'd seen in Buerk's coverage for the BBC. I wanted to visit before her three-year term was up. Live Aid followed - the concert that showed a generation what collective action looked like and made us believe we could actually change things. Out of Africa was in the cinemas - a sumptuous, visually magnificent love letter to the unspoiled African savannah, and I couldn't wait to visit my friend and see those majestic vistas for myself. I saved the money by working night shifts in a teabag factory on the East India Docks, flew SudanAir because that's what I could afford, and got on a plane to Nairobi.

What I found changed how I saw the world.

I spent time at Linda's school and saw first-hand what education could do - lifting children out of poverty, unlocking opportunities for girls, for children with disabilities, for displaced young people. I experienced the extraordinary generosity of people who had so little - a gift of produce presented in a traditional, handwoven bag from a community in drought, offered with a grace I've never forgotten. I saw the severe land degradation caused by erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts exhausting the soil's natural ability to recover. And in Garissa - now a key focal point in Africa's green transition - I saw one of the earliest "greening Africa" projects. I'd only recognise decades later that what I was looking at was permaculture. The seeds of an interest that has shaped my life were planted on that trip, though I didn't know it at the time.

The values that formed during those weeks have guided everything since. Compassion, understanding, fairness, justice, respect, empathy, hope. My interest in climate and permaculture goes back to Kenya. The social justice work that became a throughline in my career - including leading the implementation of the MacPherson Report in London's public services - comes from this. Everything I care about professionally traces back to a twenty-one-year-old on a SudanAir flight who knew she had to go, even though she didn't yet know what she'd find.

The trip led to a Masters in International Development. Then a career across the private, voluntary, and government sectors where justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion were the consistent thread - through every role, every organisation, every decision.

I started my business consultancy focused on female entrepreneurship, because that's where the connection between my experience and the need was clearest. My intention has always been to work across all the Sustainable Development Goals. The decision to evolve this into The Purpose Company came from understanding what this hinge moment in history requires - that we need purpose-led companies and trusted leaders building across the breadth of the goals, and that building a pipeline of both is one of the most important things we can do right now.

That's what The Purpose Company is. If you'd like to follow along as it takes shape, I'm sharing the journey on Instagram.

If you'd like to know more about who I am and where this comes from, read on. Or explore my services, my case studies, or book a call whenever you're ready. There's no rush. The right moment is yours to choose.