Thank you to everyone who applied for an Emerging Talent Award 2019.  It was a particularly strong field of applications and the AAG deliberated long and hard before selecting their winners.

In alphabetical order, they are Kate Bolshaw (LEH 2009-2016); Chanella Buck (LEH 2000-2007); Maria Charalambides (LEH 2008-2015); Hannah Congdon (LEH 2007-2014) and Madeleine Nutt (LEH 2014-2016).

Kate Bolshaw is currently working as an Audit Associate at KPMG and plans to use the award to help fund an overseas placement as a Volunteer Accountant for a social enterprise called Accounting for International Development. 

She said:  “LEH taught me to be ambitious, compassionate and bold.  My motivation for undertaking this placement is to share my skills to effect real change for an organisation that tackles issues I’m passionate about, supporting girls and their families to enable young women to get equal, sufficient and appropriate education.”

Chanella Buck works as a Global E-Partner and Retail Manager for Crabtree and Evelyn and is currently in a final fundraising drive to launch her own online beauty platform called On Beauté. Using AI, it will aggregate reviews sourced from industry experts to provide the definitive guide to best beauty buys, in effect, becoming the equivalent of rottentomatoes.com for the beauty industry.

“It will redefine how consumers research and shop for beauty,” said Chanella. “With such fierce competition, I am totally overwhelmed at having won this.  It brings me one step closer to the disruptive change I am aiming to bring to the beauty industry.”

Maria Charalambides is currently a student at Birmingham Medical School and plans to use the award to help fund an elective placement to gain both clinical and research experience into severe dermatological conditions such as atopic eczema, especially in children.

“I am absolutely delighted and extremely grateful for LEH’s support,” said Maria.  “This extremely worthwhile elective will challenge and inspire me, and equip me with a range of clinical and academic skills applicable to my future.”

Filmmaker Hannah Congdon works as an intern at the Teddy Award in Berlin and is going to put the Emerging Talent Award funding to good use, helping meet the post production costs of a documentary she has made called ‘Women Behind the Wheel’, about a 3,000km road trip through Central Asia.  The film was featured in the last edition of the Holles Connect magazine.

“We are hugely passionate about getting this film made,” said Hannah. “We want to shed light on a women’s movement that has never before been represented on screen, highlighting the often monumental barriers to emancipation these women face, while also celebrating the innovative and varied ways they are empowering themselves in the face of oppression.”

Currently in her second year, Maddy Nutt is a statistics scholar at UCL and has just been selected to compete for Great Britain in the standard distance, 20-24 age group, at the 2020 European Duathlon Championships in Punta Umbria, Spain, in March next year. She plans to use the award to help cover costs associated with the race. 

She said: “I am very humbled to have been one of the successful winners. I’m very thankful for my time at the school, and how it encouraged and inspired me to pursue anything I do with full commitment and aspire to do exciting things! It’s amazing that the school continues to give back and recognise its alumnae in this way.”

All of our amazing winners have agreed to write a report about their award-winning projects which will be featured in Holles Connect online and in print in the future, so stay please tuned for that.

If you think you might benefit from the support of the alumnae community, or would like to support a fellow alumnae for an Emerging Talent Award, applications for 2020 will open  in September next year.