Vanessa is committed to designing and practicing work that integrates mind and heart, supporting people across sectors to move beyond the familiar into new possibilities.

Vanessa is a Partner in Reos Social Innovation based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently working with business, government and non-profit partners in two projects focused on addressing the challenges of children in difficult circumstances at national and community level, while concurrently developing new partnership projects related to the environment and climate change.

She has a diverse educational and professional background. Beginning life in the UK, she got her undergraduate degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford (1990) and a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (1998).

In the years between degrees, she lived and worked in the Netherlands and Ethiopia working on multi-stakeholder rehabilitation, development and civil society promotion programmes driven by local actors and she there saw the power and need for community processes that are designed to address what local people identify to be their priorities.

After her Masters, she moved into the private sector to join Mckinsey and Co. as an associate, and worked on a variety of strategic client engagements in telecommunications, mining, media and finance. In 2001, she joined FirstRand Group, a major South African financial services company, to design new approaches to financing previously disadvantaged entrepreneurs and later to promote sustainable business practices across the Group.

Her experience in these very different worlds revealed the challenges of trying to create change in large complex systems of all kinds and the need for approaches that directly address systemic issues. This, coupled with a decades-long personal journey to seek a holistic approach to work and life – bringing both left and right brain perspectives to bear – brought her to Reos.

Vanessa lives with her partner Paul off the grid on a farm in the Magaliesburg mountains near Jo’burg. She is a meditation practitioner and loves to read – particularly philosophy.