I lead the Natural History Museum's Corporate Partnerships team in securing and managing a wide range of organisations looking to support the Museum's vital work. The role reports into the Executive Director of Development and is part of the Museum's Senior Leadership Team.

I managed the team responsible for securing relationships with corporate partners across a variety of different sectors to work with the Museum and deliver mutual objectives. Notable partnerships that we secured during my time in this role included Google sponsoring our Fantastic Beasts Exhibition, Lumix sponsoring Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and Adobe supporting our Digitial Collections Programme to name but a few.

Alongside managing the partnership with Comic Relief and coordinating the company's fundraising efforts for the charity, all of Sainsbury's other sponsorships were brought under my portfolio, including the British Paralympic Association, British Athletics and the School Games. I also managed the team that delivered the Sainsbury's Active Kids initiative. During this time I was also a consultant for Walgreens in the US, advising them on how to deliver the first Red Nose Day USA as the official retail partner in the States, and travelling to New York and Chicago when their 2015 and 2016 campaigns were live to observe their in-store activation, provide feedback, and meet with senior stakeholders.

I coordinated all fundraising for Comic Relief across the company, helping to raise over £37m for the charity over 4 years. This job touched every part of the business and involved organising all marketing activation and colleague fundraising activities across 2000 stores, 50 depots, and all offices around the world - from Holborn to Hong Kong, as well as engaging with Sainsbury's suppliers to provide pence-per-pack donations, overseeing the sales of the merchandise range, keeping track of all finances across fifteen different revenue streams, overseeing the ATL marketing campaign and branded activation at the Olympic Park (in the case of Sport Relief), and working with the Board to involve them in fundraising activities.

I was responsible for purchasing decisions and category strategy across a variety of different food categories with annual turnovers up to £500m, from frozen fish through to chocolate. The job involved working with suppliers around the world and during this time I often found myself travelling to locations ranging from mainland China to the Arctic (where I actually forgot to take a coat)

I was responsible for purchasing decisions and category strategy for small to mid-sized food categories (categories with annual turnover under £100m). It was during this time that I launched the only own-brand product that was my idea and still in stores to this day - the Taste the Difference Fish Finger, designed for sandwiches - yum! (everything else I came up with during my years of buying got delisted over time - including paprika-flavoured popcorn, which I still think was a good idea)

I joined Sainsbury's as a temp in January 2004 before being made permanent three months later. As a Buyer's Assistant, I was responsible for looking after the administration for buyers in health and beauty categories. This included setting up promotions, new lines, in-store marketing materials, etc.

Having left Barclays, I worked in a number of temporary positions for the next few months, still trying to decide what I wanted to do as a career. These roles included being a runner for a post-production house, a civil servant at the Court of Protection, a cashier for Abbey National (now Santander), and a data-entry officer at BT. My final temp position was joining Sainsbury's in January 2004, and the rest was history...

Having left university with no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I started temping at a Barclays call centre in Kings Cross, taking details of the international payments being made from branches ringing in from around the country. After suggesting a process to my manager to eliminate fraud and reduce data inaccuracies brought about through human error, Barclays hired me full-time to implement the process and put me in charge of the team of twenty phone-operators.