“We don’t really have a choice, but we do have the opportunity to restore our planet to make sure it is in much stronger shape for our children.”


She arrived intent on studying Marketing, Economics and Politics, and was attracted by the university’s flexibility and college system.


The first person she met on her all-girl corridor in Cartmel College became a friend for life. It was welcoming and fun, and she spent most of her social time hanging out with people from her corridor and friends from her course.


With friends in her first weeks, she set up an enterprise called the Pooh Bear Appreciation Society, which organised pub crawls and socials and made a fortune selling T-shirts for Great Ormond Street and filled her bedroom with T-shirts.


It was good practice for her marketing studies: “I loved the relevance of it, she says. “At the time it was so exciting. We did advertising and were thrilled by the fact that principals from London agencies like Saatchi and Saatchi came up to talk to the students.”


By the second year she knew that marketing was what she wanted to do. After graduation she chose to go into the tech side of marketing because she could see that in that pre-mobile phone era change was coming which would provide her with important opportunities to make a difference.


She worked in product development, marketing and communications in senior roles for Siemens and BT, which she loved. Then came the day that she picked up her sister Nikki Walsh (a Lancaster University law graduate specialising in human rights) as she returned from a work trip, who asked her: “When are you going to do something useful?”


Photo credit: David Bebber - WWF-UK


Tanya with Martine de Silva of the Mumbuca community on a visit to the Cerrado in Brazil


Tanya describes it as “a cold water in the face moment” which prompted her almost immediate decision to take a year out, unpaid, to volunteer with the Red Cross in London, despite colleagues who told her she was throwing her career away. After another short stint with a micro finance company in Kenya, she applied for jobs in the charity sector and landed one at Save the Children, three months before the tsunami in South East Asia in 2004, which she describes as “one of the most humbling and defining experiences of my career”.


Now at WWF she says her work is dominated by climate change and regenerating our natural world: ‘We don’t really have a choice, but we do have the opportunity to restore our planet to make sure it is in much stronger shape for our children.”


It’s a demanding job, using many skills she is grateful to have developed at Lancaster: “It taught me how to think, not just to learn. I was really shy, and it gave me confidence. The nature of the course I was on I had to present to 200 people and in doing so it forced me into a setting that I would not have experienced in an academic environment. It also gave me a sense of community. If you do not have those foundations, you cannot do the tough stuff. It gives you resilience.”


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