Lara Adamczyk
Fundraising Officer
Lara joined RFUK in March 2023 after completing a Master’s in Environment, Politics and Society at UCL, during which they specialised in Indigenous Ecological Knowledges and Indigenous-led activist movements in countries such as India and New Zealand. Lara has been involved in climate campaigning for several years and is particularly passionate about fossil fuel divestment, local-led solutions, renewable energy and pushing for policy shifts.
Jim Bishop
Office Manager
Jim has worked within the not-for-profit sector for 30 years, including a housing trust, social services, a membership body, several years at The Gorilla Organization and is secretary of a housing co-op. He joined RFUK in June 2020. He was born and raised in London. His extra-curricular interests include scuba diving and music.
Louise Cordery
Fundraising Coordinator
Louise is an animal biologist and experienced fundraising specialist with a background in research and conservation. She has spent the past eight years supporting charities working in the fields of forest and species conservation, animal welfare and women’s rights. Within the past four years she has combined her communication, relationship management and engagement skills to promote and secure high level support for welfare and environmental causes, recognising that environmental justice is not possible without social justice.
Lydia Dance
CF Project Officer
Lydia is a languages graduate with seven years’ experience within international NGOs, supporting and coordinating a wide range of projects related to social justice and human rights. In these roles she has worked closely with implementing partners and stakeholders to collaboratively ensure successful and effective programme delivery, in compliance with the requirements of institutional donors, as well as trusts, foundations and corporate funders. Lydia joined RFUK in March 2021 to support the delivery of the Forests for the Future project.
Alex Economou-Li
DRC Project Coordinator
Alex has a background in social anthropology and has worked on community-led development and humanitarian programmes for more than 10 years. He has been at Rainforest Foundation UK since 2019 and is currently leading projects on human rights and conservation around the Lomami National Park and the Community Forests database, both in DR Congo.
Joe eisen
Executive Director
Joe Eisen is Executive Director of RFUK where he has worked for well over a decade in defence of community rights in tropical forests. Prior to joining RFUK Joe studied Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and worked on social justice campaigns and projects with several grassroots indigenous, environmental and developmental NGOs in Guyana and Gabon and India. While at RFUK, Joe has been a leading force in our participatory research and mapping work and has headed up our research, policy and campaign team before taking on the ED role at the beginning of 2020.
Georges Thierry Handja
DRC Chief of Party
Georges Thierry is an international development professional with proven success in programme management, training, facilitation, and spatial information and communication management in relation to natural resources. He has a strong track record of working to support civil society organisations and promotion of forest communities’ rights in the Congo Basin with more than 15 years’ experience training, evaluating, and leading interdisciplinary teams from both civil society and government sectors.
GT (as his colleagues called him) has demonstrated skills in designing, managing and implementing medium to large scale projects, working closely with partner NGOs in-country from a variety of backgrounds and cultures; and monitoring multi-year technical projects funded through institutional donors. This includes empowering non-literate and marginalised peoples through technology transfer, low-equipped organisations support, and data management, manipulation and visualisation for the promotion of rights and justice for communities.
Emily Hodge
Finance Manager
Emily is an AAT-qualified finance & accountancy professional with an academic background in natural sciences and climate change. She has spent the last 10 years working for the Rainforest Foundation UK, managing all aspects of the organisation’s finances, from the organisational budget and cash flow to management and statutory accounting.
Fleur Gatineau
Head of Operations
Fleur joined RFUK in January 2023. She has worked within the not-for-profit sector for over 10 years, mainly in governance and operations roles. Outside of work, Fleur enjoys going to concerts and spending time with her dog Leeloo.
Jeanne Mangani
Community Forests Project Coordinator
Jeanne is an environmentalist with extensive project coordination experience in Central and Western Africa, as well as Latin America. For the last 16 years, she has been supporting community lead rights recognition and development initiatives, mainly through grassroots organisations empowerment and capacity building. She has worked on programmes essentially linked to forest protection, small-scale sustainable agriculture, or access to water and sanitation for international NGOs like OXFAM-Québec, Planète Urgence and RFUK.
Ana Osuna Orozco
Head of Programmes
Ana started working with RFUK since 2011, when she interned for the programme in Peru. After taking on different positions, focussing on policy and research and later coordinating RFUK’s work in DRC, she assumed the role of Head of Programmes in 2020. Previously, Ana worked for the Mexican Foreign Ministry on issues related to international development. She studied International Relations and an MSc in Environment and Development.
Marjolaine Pichon
Lands and Livelihoods Manager
Marjolaine graduated from Science Po Aix (France) and the University of London, with Masters degrees in international relations and human rights. She worked in/on Central Africa for 6 years, including on land and resources conflict management in eastern D.R. Congo, before joining RFUK in 2016, first as the Central African Republic (CAR) Coordinator, and specialising on Community Forestry.
Victor Milla Quesada
Senior Coordinator, Latin America
Víctor is an experienced forestry specialist. For the past fifteen years he has worked in the fields of forest governance, environmental policy and tropical forest management, by delivering impacts in collaborative programmes across 15-plus countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and South-East Asia. His main motivation is on empowering local forest producers and indigenous peoples around governance processes such as building social organisation, tenure rights and resource access allocation, implementing scientific-based forest management and using business models to locally controlled forest enterprises. He holds a MSc in management and conservation of tropical forests and biodiversity, and is in his final year of the PhD programme in forest policy and governance, both at CATIE.
Elin Roberts
GIS and Database Coordinator
Elin joined RFUK in 2017 as a GIS and Database Coordinator where she works as part of a small tech team responsible for leading the development of RFUK mapping, GIS and monitoring software projects. She has a background in Remote Sensing and GIS, and has spent the last eight years working within the environmental sector.
Maud Salber
Monitoring & Rights Manager
Maud is an environmental policy and human rights specialist with a background in research, advocacy and grassroots movement building. Passionate about putting human rights front and centre of the biodiversity and climate agendas, she’s spent the past 6 years at RFUK documenting and exposing the human rights and social impacts of fortress conservation in the Congo Basin, including through extensive field investigations, and lobbying governments, conservation NGOs and donors for change. Before this, she spent three years working with human rights and anti-corruption NGOs in Cambodia.
Stéphane Piedjou Simen
Developer, Monitoring Systems
Stéphane is a software engineer who has most of his experience in international NGO. He is passionate about tech for good and has for the past 8 years contributed to the development of software used by communities to help them protect and defend their lands. He enjoys sharing knowledge through training and capacity building workshops. He holds an MSc in Information Technology from Cardiff Metropolitan University as well as a Computer Networking Engineering degree from the National Advanced School of Post and Telecommunication in Yaoundé.
Robyn Stewart
Senior Coordinator, Real-Time Monitoring
Robyn joined RFUK in 2018 after completing her Master’s degree with her research focusing on land monitoring and its potential for achieving locally-managed ecosystems. She now coordinates RFUK’s Real-Time Monitoring project in Central and Western Africa, working with civil society organisations to deploy ForestLink as a community-based forest monitoring tool. Aside from her interest in land governance and forest monitoring, Robyn is a reader, runner, occasional climber and forever food lover.
She holds a BAH in Geography & Environmental Science from Queen’s University, Canada, and an MSC in Environmental Change and International Development from the University of Sheffield, UK.
Jak Wagnon
Communications Coordinator
Jak is an environmental anthropologist and strategic communications specialist with a background in research and advocacy in rights-based development and conservation. She has spent the last 7 years supporting grassroots organisations, and NGOs like People and Planet, Global Canopy, and Forest Peoples Programme, to centre questions around power, access, and representation at the heart of communicating for social and environmental justice.
Emily Wilder
Project Officer, Monitoring and Rights
Emily is a recent graduate in modern languages from Oxford University and part of the youth climate justice movement. She organises within an international grassroots solidarity network while supporting project administration part-time at RFUK. In her spare time you can find her stickering lampposts.
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