With the recent announcement about the NBN Trust restructure and other staff changes, four colleagues will now be leaving the charity. We wanted to say a massive thank you to them for all they have done over their time at the Trust and share some highlights from their individual contributions to the team.
Sarah Hyslop
Sarah joined the team in April 2011 as the Business Administrator and quickly established herself as the go to person for anything relating to finance, IT, HR, Governance and pretty much everything else business related! She managed two office relocations and even moved most of the equipment and files from one of the Nottingham offices to the next, on her own!
Sarah also saw the team grow from six core staff to 18, meaning that the draw on her time to manage the recruitment and onboarding of the new staff was considerable.
Employee numbers were not the only changes that Sarah experienced. Over the course of her 11 years, she looked after four CEOs, and two Interim CEOs, four Chairpersons and 43 different Trustees! One can only imagine the number of meetings she had to manage around this!
Despite an incredibly busy workload, Sarah also undertook an accountancy course to ensure that her skills and knowledge were the best they could be for the business. Not only did she achieve the Level 3 AAT Diploma, she did so with a Distinction.
We will all miss her dedication, sheer hard work, her “can do” attitude and her readiness to help others no matter what. But most of all we will miss her warmth, cheery personality and ability to make everyone feel important. Good luck Sarah and thank you for everything! We wish you all the best in your new role at The Lifescape Project.
Giselle Sterry
Giselle has worked for the Trust since 2015, when she covered Sarah Hyslop’s maternity leave. It soon became apparent that we wouldn’t want to let her go after nine months.
Giselle has always had making the Trust successful and financially stable at the front of her mind. From making early advances in our fundraising journey to managing the membership scheme and its various updates, she has continued to promote and champion the Trust and the Network throughout.
In 2016, thanks to Giselle, we took part in the Nottingham in Parliament Day, which saw us contribute to a BioBlitz in the green space around the Houses of Parliament and participate in a panel session at the House of Lords.
In 2021, she ensured that we became the UK node for iNaturalist and, in her role as the lead and champion of citizen science, we have seen the number of participants increase by 82,000! She has been a strong advocate for citizen science both in a professional and personal capacity, playing a key part in the City Nature Challenge for the City of Nottingham, as well as more broadly.
We will miss her ideas’ generation and ability to find creative solutions to a problem. We have no doubt she will be successful in wherever her career takes her next. Good luck and thank you, Giselle!
Purba Choudhury
Purba joined the Trust in 2015 to bring extra capacity to the Communications team. With a background in PR and communications, working for a university, the Arts Council of England and a local authority, we welcomed her wide-ranging comms experience.
Purba hit the ground running, helping to launch the NBN Awards (then called the UK Awards to celebrate biological recording and information sharing) at the NBN Conference in November 2015. She has since overseen the Awards to present day, including a thorough review of the scheme in 2023 and its relaunch in 2024.
Social media and media relations have also featured strongly in Purba’s work and we have seen successful increases in followers on all of the main social platforms. We have also seen the Trust or Awards gain traditional media coverage in publications including BBC Gardeners’ World, BBC Wildlife magazine as well as a brief mention on BBC Winterwatch.
Purba’s warm and positive nature will be sorely missed, but we have no doubt that her enthusiasm and experience will ensure a successful new career path ahead. Good luck, Purba!
Emily Baker
Emily joined the Trust in October 2023 as part of the Better Biodiversity Data project to support the team in its data strategy and visualisations as the Data and Digital Services Manager. Emily came with a wealth of knowledge and insights on how to make the most of data, having completed a PhD researching how to improve the processes around verification of ecological citizen science data, exploring how we can improve the efficiency of this process without compromising data accuracy.
Emily’s role in the BBD team has been instrumental in helping people understand the full benefits of sharing data into a collated portal by building demonstration dashboards and presenting these to potential clients. Using her spatial skills and understanding of biodiversity data Emily has been pivotal in the successes of the first phase of this project and will be sorely missed by the team.
Thank you, Sarah, Purba, Giselle and Emily from all of us at the NBN Trust and on behalf of the wider Network. We wish you all the very best for the future.