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 an Associate at Reos Partners based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently leading the Reos contribution to the multi-year Southern Africa Food Lab with Lab participation from academic, business, government and non-profit partners.
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 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 is a Buddhist Practitioner in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and is a trainer with Mindfulness Africa. She is currently midway through a 6 year Shedra Studies course through Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland and she is certifying with New Ventures West/The Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town as a Professional Coach (an ICF accredited qualification).