Susie's strengths lie in influencing and advocacy work, using her exceptional and proven diplomacy and linguistic skills working for over a decade across cultures, countries, organisations, strengthening brands, strategies, facilitating networking and providing ambassadorial support. Combine this with her ability to achieve at the highest level of elite sport and she will support your business in it's growth and development in an inclusive and sustainable way. Susie has an excellent understanding of inclusion and diversity, having lived experience of disability from birth. Susie is a professionally qualified (through the Financial Times) and experienced Non-Executive Director with expertise in strategy development, concept creation, communication and policy development, diversity and inclusion and political lobbying. She is also a skilled public speaker, innovator and sought-after writer and guest panellist.

across cultures

Susie has experience working across cultures on projects incorporating bilateral and multilateral work, especially in the context of mainstreaming inclusion into economic development, global health and climate change work globally. She understands the need to speak a client's language and understand their background in order to work better with them. She studied Modern Languages at Newcastle University (French, German and Spanish) specifically because she believes in the importance of language learning to support economic development and political engagement. Susie recently represented the British Council and Sport at the 4th annual Meeting of the China-UK People to People dialogue. She has experience talking to people at all levels, on different agendas. Susie currently advises the British Council and other organisations on their global disability and inclusion work.

Leadership and director roles

Alongside her career as an athlete and her work for the British Council in the past, Susie has experience as a Director on several boards: previously on the board of the London legacy charity Spirit of 2012 for nearly a decade to 2023. She currently serves as a technical adviser on prosthetics for the ATScale partnership (UNOPs) and is an advisor for the British Council’s Global Disability Advisory Panel. Susie chaired a sub-committee for Spirit of 2012, the Spirit of Achievement panel, which specifically oversaw inclusive projects and grant programmes undertaken by the charity. She previously chaired the Athlete Advisory Group at the British Athletes Commission (a UK based Olympic and Paralympic athlete welfare organisation funded by the Government) and worked successfully for over four years on various athlete welfare and duty of care, working on sport cases and investigations. She has a decade of experience developing projects from working on pilot programmes, right through to fixed project cycles at the British Council and now advising the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on its global projects, policies, diplomacy and strategies in the areas of economic development, global health and climate action. She has worked extensively on risk, recruitment and monitoring and evaluation and governance throughout her career. Susie was selected as one of 100 Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum in 2018. As part of this prestigious selection, Susie completed a five-year guided international leadership programme with fellow YGLs and graduated to the alumni community in 2022. Her leadership programme included undertaking professional and executive education courses at Harvard Kennedy School (2021), Stanford University’s Sustainability Department (2020), Cambridge Judge Business School (2022) and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2021).

Motivational and Public Speaking

Susie is a talented motivational and public speaker on varied topics from inclusion, to climate change and other areas. She has spoken at the Women Political Leaders Summit in Iceland (2021), the SHE Community Gender Diversity conference in Norway (2020/21/22) where she spoke on a panel featuring former Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg in 2022. She has also featured at Women's Network events at Shell, client events for Samsung including Vodafone staff days, awards ceremonies for London Sport and GLL, as well as lecturing at schools and universities globally (Stanford and Loughborough Universities in 2023). She has spoken at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos (2019), facilitating a panel on Designing for All and hosting dinners alongside notable people across different sectors. She was a keynote speaker at the launch of the Inspiring Women programme in Beijing in 2016 at the British Embassy. Susie is a highly skilled communicator, capable of adapting her inspiring speech about performance at the highest level to a wide variety of audiences both in the UK and abroad. She has spoken globally at side events of the Global Disability Summit on Assistive Technology Access in 2022. She also facilitated a panel at the Harkin Summit in Belfast in 2022, discussing the mainstreaming disability inclusion and intersectional thinking. Susie is trusted and relied upon to facilitate, lead and contribute to panels globally on diverse themes and topics. An intelligent and thoughtful speaker who brings depth to discussions, provoking debate and action. Susie is also a speech writer and has written briefings and speeches for CEOs, chairmen and women and UK Ministers. Whatever your agenda for the day, Susie can work with you to incorporate key messages and to promote your agenda alongside discussing her inspiring professional career and athletic performance.