Conservationist and animal welfare advocate
Rosalind is a passionate champion for conservation and animal welfare – and for the people whose daily lives are entwined with these fields, however that may be. A courageous, well-regarded, empowering leader, she is fuelled by diverse experience gained over a globally-focussed career spanning nearly four decades. Her award-winning senior experience encompasses diverse theatres and governmental, NGO and private sectors. She is noted for her mature competency and motivational leadership of high profile projects and stakeholders, across multiple sites and cultures, engendering deep commitment to goals. Rosalind’s sincerity of nature is assuring to others; her life-long, deep passion for animal welfare and conservation of wildlife inspires and motivates through compassion and empathy.
Rosalind has powerful abilities to unite parties; a proven record of building trusting, reciprocal, enduring, collaborative working relationships and transboundary coalitions with people and organisations from diverse sectors, backgrounds and cultures – spanning governmental bodies at local, regional, national and international levels, international and national NGOs (covering conservation, animal welfare and human issues), private and business sector bodies, academic institutions and community-led groups and organisations. She has built, and ongoingly builds, many bridges and strategic relationships which endure and grow – and which continue to deliver benefits to animals and people alike, in many arenas.
Rosalind is an experienced change manager, a visionary thinker with a creative, bold approach, identifying ‘real-world’ needs and generating innovative, inclusive, holistic solutions. A powerful influencer, she harnesses intuitive diplomacy to galvanise investment and guide action from multiple parties towards mutually-beneficial goals. Keystones of all interactions are respect, making effort to learn others’ contextual situations and extending empathy. She is patient and persistent, particularly in challenging and crisis situations – and has multiple experience of working with communities in conflict around the world and navigating teams through wide-ranging complexities.
A compelling communicator, she understands the multi-faceted nature – and power – of true communication, adept across formal and informal communication platforms, and is an experienced media broadcaster and programme-maker. Rosalind is an ambassador for conservation and animal welfare, regularly conveying a message to people from all walks of life, from highest-level governmental scenarios to rural communities around the world, professional conferences, organisational and business scenarios, schools and universities.
Recognising that human-related dimensions are pivotal to all arenas, Rosalind specialises in leadership, empowerment, multi-party working and collaboration. With significant experience of multi-site, multi-party, multi-culture leadership, she is skilled at nurturing common ground, common ethos and common vision between parties. Adept across a suite of leadership styles, Rosalind harnesses positive, mutually-empowering practices that enrich individuals, boost organisational outcomes and bring wider holistic benefits. She is widely-recognised for her motivational nature – valuing all who she encounters, recognising their unique role in a collective mission. Key to this is generation of positive pride in wide-ranging scenarios – embracing empowerment as a core tenet to achieving and sustaining successful outcomes.
Strong global working links enable wide expertise-sharing; her integrative, transdisciplinary work spans research, policy and practice. Rosalind is an expert in conservation of felids (wild cat species), with specialisms in both biological and human-related aspects – harnessing expertise and effort for the larger, iconic species, such as snow leopard, to help the lesser-known/smaller-bodied cats.
Rosalind is also a skilled social scientist, with particular expertise in social organisation, multi-party collaboration, collective action and social capital (the collective benefits of cooperation) – transferable to any theatre. Over her lengthy career, Rosalind has developed leading expertise in social capital building and operation and partnership working, defining and delivering strategies that can be widely utilised globally on intricate problems with complex dimensions.
She conceptualised and led a globally-focussed UK Research Council-funded project, pioneering acutely-needed understanding of the complexities of the human dimensions of collaboration in conservation, in order to improve collective efforts to save endangered wildlife. Taking a model of exemplary transboundary, cross-sector, multi-background holistic efforts to save the endangered snow leopard, engaging leaders of international NGOs, national governments and multilaterals and conservation-involved organisations and people from all walks of life, her global initiative has made novel, timely contribution. It delivers deep insight to improve multi-party working to save endangered wildlife; defining pathways to empower personnel, build more impactful working relationships and unite diverse parties in collective action to achieve common goals – and deliver effective, impactful conservation outcomes.
Harnessing her own experience and that of many partners globally, through research driven by real issues, Rosalind defined a new best practice – deriving novel, practical routes to enhance collaborative working. She has authored the book, ‘Empowering Conservation Partnerships – a Toolkit for Multi-Party Collaboration’ – a living document delivering practical, timely, relevant, impactful solutions. The book, and Rosalind’s expertise, are requested by numerous organisations globally, in order to adopt recommendations for the human-related aspects of animal-related work. This has wide-ranging impact, helping conservation, animal welfare – and other arenas; big cats helping little cats, and beyond!
Rosalind’s leadership for conservation and animal welfare is underpinned by deep insight of key issues impacting companion animals, livestock and wildlife, gained from having encompassed the broad array of conservation and animal welfare effort over the years – including working with rural communities impacted by carnivores, leading field operations and building and leading collaborations embracing high-level governmental parties and bodies from multiple other sectors. She holds an MSc in Conservation Biology (Dist.) and a PhD in Biodiversity Management and has maintained a diverse, senior-level CPD program over the years. She holds advisory roles with varied conservation bodies globally.
In addition to leading ECP, Rosalind predominantly works at strategic level – with national/international conservation/animal welfare NGOs, governmental bodies, private and business sector, academia, communities and individuals – providing guidance to empower inclusive, innovative solutions to aid endangered species and animal welfare. She is recognised as a driving force and leader by many people and organisations in varied cross-sector, cross-culture coalitions. Intrinsic to development of key policy, protocol and collaborative platforms, her inputs are helping animals the world over; spanning research, policy and practical perspectives.
Rosalind is skilled at empowering stronger, more diverse collaboration, uniting varied parties and cultures – her expertise enables her to engender trust and confidence and to uncover pathways to integrate the benefits of diverse bodies and effort – ranging from that commonly-utilised within conservation and animal welfare to the more unusual within the fields – within visionary, powerful, cross-sector, transboundary partnerships. She takes pride in focussing on species and situations of critical need and those that currently pass ‘under the radar’ – working holistically to benefit wildlife, domestic animals, ecosystems and people.
In her leadership for conservation and animal welfare, she ongoingly catalyses impactful outputs, inspiring new ways to think, building critical capacity and capabilities to yield successful, impactful outcomes.
Like many of us, her love of animals, and empathy with them, is one of her earliest memories – the seeds of her animal welfare and conservation path were sown early – and firmly! For decades this has been evinced by tireless efforts, giving vigorously of her time and expertise to spread benefits widely to ensure no situation she can help goes without. In finding her forte as a leader, she describes it as her privilege and pleasure to mobilise the greatest influence she can for animal-kind, that her work and experience aids conservation of threatened species, animal welfare and beyond – and that it benefits both animals and the people whose daily lives are entwined with them.
Empowering Collaborative Partnerships 