Advisory board

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Anji Hunter is a Senior Advisor at Edelman, providing strategic counsel to clients on corporate reputation building, crisis management and public affairs, as well as acting as a mentor to Edelman employees. She worked for Prime Minister Tony Blair MP for 15 years, both in opposition and government, eventually serving as Head of Government Relations in Downing Street. After leaving politics, she spent time as Group Director of Communications at BP Group, Head of Government and Social Affairs at Anglo American plc, and Director of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Anji is highly experienced in working with governments, businesses, NGOs and the media.

John Sawers is Executive Chairman of Newbridge Advisory, which he founded in 2019 to advise corporate leaders on geopolitics and political risk.  He is also a Non-Executive Director of BP.  He spent the bulk of his career in diplomacy and intelligence, culminating in being Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 (2009-2014).  Prior to that he was the UK's Ambassador to the United Nations, Political Director of the Foreign Office, Special Representative in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, Ambassador to Egypt and Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair. Since leaving public service he has been advising global companies and investors. John Sawers studied at the universities of Nottingham, St. Andrews and Harvard.

 

Lord Browne is Chairman of BeyondNetZero, a climate growth equity venture established in partnership with General Atlantic. He served as Group Chief Executive of international energy company BP from 1995 to 2007, having joined the company in 1966 as a university apprentice. He led BP through a period of significant growth and transformation, including a merger with Amoco in 1998. His landmark speech at Stanford University in 1997 established BP as a global leader in the way it thought about and sought to address climate change. In 2007, Lord Browne joined Riverstone, where he was co-head of the world’s largest renewable energy private equity fund until 2015. He is Chairman of Windward, a global maritime predictive intelligence company and Chairman of SparkCognition, and artificial intelligence technology company.

Lord Browne is independent co-Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology, Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a past President of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Tina Brown CBE is an award-winning journalist and author, and founder and CEO of Tina Brown Live Media, a company dedicated to summits, salons, flash forums and debates. For 21 years, she was Editor-in-Chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She also wrote The Diana Chronicles, the best-selling biography of the Princess of Wales, and launched acclaimed digital news site The Daily Beast. Tina was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to journalism and is currently at the helm of Women in the World, an annual summit focused on building better lives for women and girls.

Esther Odejimi-Uzokwe graduated from Oxford University in 2017 with a BA in Theology and Religion. During the second year of her degree, she founded a social enterprise called Opened Palm, which worked closely with state-comprehensive schools to increase the pipeline of Black students gaining admission into Oxford, Cambridge and Russell Group universities. Esther then joined Goldman Sachs in 2018 as an Investment Banking Analyst in their Structured Equity Derivatives team, where she stayed until 2020. She was then hired as Programme Director of 10,000 Black Interns, where she spearheaded the organisation's growth to its enormous scale - partnering with more than 700 companies across the UK, representing 24 sectors and facilitating more than 2,000 internship offers to Black students across the U.K. in the space of one year. Esther also sits on the board of Intermission Youth - a theatre company that uses the power of the arts to transform the lives of young people between the ages of 16-25, who are at risk, or have a history of offending.

Helena is well known for her work on gender equality. She founded the 30% Club, a campaign for more gender-balanced boards in 2010. Since then, the representation of women on FTSE100 boards has risen from 12.5% to 30.9% and there are now eleven 30% Clubs throughout the world.

Helena was CEO of Newton Investment Management for fifteen years, taking its assets under management from £20bn to £50bn.  She joined Legal and General Investment Management in 2017, leading a drive to engage the nation to invest more, with a particular focus on improving women’s financial wellbeing.

Helena has been named one of Fortune magazine’s World’s 50 Greatest Leader, the Financial Times’ 2017 ‘Person of the Year’ and recognised for her ‘Outstanding Contribution to Business’ at Lloyds Bank National Business Awards in 2018. She was appointed a Dame in the Queen’s 2017 Birthday Honours list.

Helena is a Philosophy graduate. Her husband Richard is a stay at home father and they have nine children, aged from 10 to 27 and one grandson. Her first book ‘A Good Time to be a Girl’ was named one of Forbes’ five most empowering books for women published in 2018.