Who we are...

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 Suzie began doing conservation and community volunteer work after she completed her BSc in Zoology at the University of Leeds and achieved a First Class degree with Honours. She travelled to South America and lived and volunteered in Brasil, working at an ecological reserve and later volunteering at a school in one of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Her call to helping and volunteering started much earlier than this where she started fundraising for various community and animal charities at the age of 6 and her calling or purpose as she calls it, has continued as a primary influence in all that she has done. She first visited Uganda after volunteering and learning to teach yoga in Bali, where she then extended her stay to help when Mount Agung began erupting. She also extended her stay in Uganda after she had done a month volunteering with Project Uganda in the small town of Rukingiri in the west of Uganda, and saw a growing number of vulnerable children who were unable to pay school fees and were working or living on the streets; and so Be The Change began. 

The mission statement of the charity is aligned with her goals; 

“To help alleviate poverty through education, opportunity and support, and to help conserve the environment and the species within it through conservation work and awareness raising.” 

She hopes to grow the reach of the charity to include many more schools and communities, and to be helping to protect more of the world’s forests and the flora and fauna that inhabit them.

She is a keen learner and studied online for a Diploma in International Environmental Law from the United Nations Development Programme; an area she is keen to know more about and use her expertise in this area to help protect nature. She also talks Spanish and Portuguese and is learning Swahili, French and Arabic to enable her to connect with many more people all over the world. She teaches yoga and meditation; believing that healing of our world also needs to come from within and that the state of the planet would be much improved if we all felt how connected we all are, and how we are to nature, and had more inner peace - if you’re truly at peace, you can’t harm another.

She currently works alongside multiple other charities and attended the UN Biodiversity Conference in Egypt this year as a representative of Strong Roots, a Congo based charity that works to protect a sub-species of gorillas endemic to Eastern-DRC. She has volunteered in Congo for Strong Roots and works as their Communications Officer, helping them reach a wider audience in their plight to save the gorilla. She also continues her work with I am Somebody’s Child Soldier (IamSCS), a UK based charity that works with former child soldiers in the north of Uganda, to help them return to education and get support within their community. 

Working alongside other wonderful charities means we can all work together towards our common goal to change and shape the world into a place where less suffering takes place and where we respect and preserve the planet and its other inhabitants.