New York to Berlin, by way of a lot of proposal deadlines.

My career did not start in fundraising. It started in an ESL classroom in New York, teaching English to new arrivals at the YMCA's New Americans Welcome Center after I finished at Boston University.

Before that, at twenty, I spent a year on SIT's International Honors Program, Rethinking Globalisation, moving between the US, the UK, India, Tanzania, New Zealand and Mexico and looking at the same global questions from six different vantage points. I turned twenty-one in Maasai country. It rearranged how I thought about who gets to define a problem, and the direction I took afterwards was deliberate.

In New York the teaching led into the work itself. I supported asylum cases through Safe Horizon's legal centre, came to know the team at Bellevue's Program for Survivors of Torture, and worked alongside the Haitian community in Brooklyn. I also met someone from the International Rescue Committee there, which years later became the door into IRC when I wanted to leave London for field work.

Hinche, Haiti, in 2013 was my first international posting: a small school, a Haitian team of ten, and letters to a board in the US to keep it funded. That is where the job became clear. Someone has to make the case for the money, and the case is stronger when the person making it has stood in the programme.

Then a master's in Paris, three years in London on DFID bids, and Niamey, where I ran an $18M grant portfolio for the International Rescue Committee. Niger was reeling from several crises at once: armed conflict in the Diffa region, climate shocks and economic pressure, all of it driving displacement. Fourteen grants, five donors, and programmes that had to hold across it.

In 2020 I went independent, and spent two years working fast across eight organisations without an institution behind me, including nine months with Save the Children's Brussels office, done remotely.

Then four years in Berlin at Johanniter, which is the work I would point to first. I built the fundraising function and its systems from scratch, and used them to diversify a €30M+ institutional portfolio away from its two traditional donors, GFFO and BMZ, into EU mechanisms, US foundations and a wider set of government funders including Norad and DFAT.

I did an Executive MBA at Bayes alongside that role. It was a holistic programme that gave me a strong business perspective: organisational behaviour, human resources, financial accounting, strategy, executive presence and leading change, with a capstone on ESG benchmarking in the NGO sector. It changed how I run teams and how I sit in a room with a funder.

I am French and American, raised between the two, and I have lived in Berlin since 2022. I work in English and French, and I am always somewhere in the middle of learning German.

• 2026–Brightwild Ventures Fundraising strategy consultant, remote and Berlin
• 2022–25Johanniter International Assistance Head of Programme Funding, Berlin
• 2022–24Bayes Business School Executive MBA with Merit, ESG capstone, London
• 2021–22Save the Children International ECHO Partnership Manager, nine-month maternity cover for the Brussels office, remote
• 2020–22Independent consultant Eight international organisations, remote from Paris
• 2019–20International Rescue Committee Grants Coordinator, Niamey, Niger
• 2016–19Tetra Tech / Coffey, Crown Agents, DAI Business Development Specialist, London
• 2014–15American University of Paris MA International Relations
• 2013–14Center of Hope Haiti Executive Assistant, Hinche
• 2010–13YMCA New Americans Welcome Center ESL teacher, New York, alongside asylum case support at Safe Horizon
• 2006–07SIT International Honors Program Rethinking Globalisation, six countries