Save the Elephants has been busy restructuring and building our team to better handle the scale and significance of the current elephant crisis. Now more than ever we need to be able to respond fast to the diverse challenges that elephants are facing and make the most of any opportunities to change the situation.
In December last year Frank Pope came on board as our new Chief Operations Officer. A zoologist by training, Frank worked for several years as the Ocean Correspondent for the Times newspaper of London and many years running Oxford University’s Maritime Archaeology Unit. Seven years ago he married Saba Douglas-Hamilton, STE trustee and daughter of Iain, STE’s founder, and subsequently evolved into a terrestrial conservationist.
In January this year we were delighted to hire Dr Kathleen Gobush as STE’s Ivory Crisis Strategist. Kathleen did her PhD on the long-term consequences of poaching on African elephants and prior to joining STE was working as a research ecologist with NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Kathleen was a key member of STE’s team at CITES and is now forging solutions to the ongoing poaching crisis.
More recently we took on Trezer Oguda as our Communications Intern to handle our social media and manage our audio-visual libraries. As an experiment we advertised only using Facebook, and that’s how we met Trezer – a woman whose awareness of the power of branding extends to her own name. “Theresa felt too formal, so before I started my primary school finals I asked my mum if I could change my name to Trezer,” she said in her interview. “She listened to my arguments and finally said OK.”
Towards the end of last month Lesley Nalwa joined us as a new Administrative Assistant to STE’s founder and CEO Iain Douglas-Hamilton. Gemma Francis, her predecessor, has been promoted to Head of Donor Relations and will be starting this role on the 1st July. Lesley is already radiating a bright, positive energy in the office as she gets to grips with Iain’s daily avalanche of emails and the origami of his scheduling.
Finally, David Kimanzi has been hired as a Global Information Systems Researcher. GIS analysis is at the heart of our work saving elephants, for without persuasive and factually accurate maps we cannot communicate the developing situation effectively to governments, institutions and fellow scientists.
Welcome, all!