Our staff, advisers and volunteers are based in the UK and US. Our UK trustees and US directors are responsible for strategy and governance, while our staff manage the international projects, fundraising and communications, and implement our strategy. We are greatly supported by our founder, who raises funds, awareness, and writes and edits materials. We are indebted to our volunteers, whose contributions include designing and delivering our counselling training programme in Uganda, training the staff in our Kigali workplace creche, selling products made by our project beneficiaries, designing promotional materials, providing business training to our beneficiaries, and helping with research. Our project partners are talented individuals, deeply committed to improving and serving their communities in challenging circumstances. We work with them on a daily basis, and they never fail to inspire us.
Annabel Harris, Chief Executive Officer
Annabel Harris joined Network for Africa in February 2011 and is responsible for strengthening its infrastructure, including fundraising, budgets, strategy, communications, governance and growth. She started her career at Amnesty International, where she set up their information office and managed their annual human rights journalism awards ceremony. She subsequently took up her post as CEO of the human rights charity Reprieve, joining in its early days and seeing it through a period of rapid growth during which it enjoyed a high media profile. She started working in international development when she was responsible for children’s charity Jubilee Action’s fundraising and communications. Annabel is particularly motivated by the difference that Network for Africa can bring to communities suffering the trauma of conflict and war.
Sophie McCann, Executive Director
Sophie McCann began working for Network for Africa as Projects Coordinator in January 2008. She is based in the London office and coordinates and manages the activities of Network for Africa in Rwanda and northern Uganda, working with our local partners to develop and expand their work. Her particular interests lie in the key role that women, girls and youth need to play to encourage equitable and sustainable development. She is also a passionate advocate of gender equality in all of the work in which Network for Africa is involved. Sophie read history at Newcastle University after which she completed a masters in Conflict, Security and Development at King’s College London.
Christa Bennett, Director of Network for Africa USA
Christa helped found Network for Africa in 2006. In 2007, Christa moved from London to California, where she oversaw the successful application for non-profit status for a US branch of N4A. She currently works from the US to help develop projects, research funding opportunities, and liaise with American supporters. Christa graduated with a master’s in international relations from King’s College London. Her primary interests are the recognition of women and children in global, national, and local politics and the development of communities in which all members have opportunities to thrive.
Liz Prinz, Research Assistant
Liz is a transplant from the US who moved to London in 2010. She has been part of the Network for Africa team since 2012. She recently graduated from University College London with a Master’s in Human Rights and wrote her dissertation about women politicians’ influence on human rights movements in post-conflict African countries. She is primarily interested in women’s rights and roles in developing societies.
Rebecca Tinsley, Founder and Trustee
Rebecca Tinsley founded Network for Africa in an effort to help survivors of genocide rebuild their lives.
Rebecca has a law degree from the London School of Economics. She is a former BBC politics reporter, and she stood for election to the UK parliament twice during the 1980s. She is a freelance journalist and a novelist; three of her novels have been published. Together with her husband Henry, she was asked by President and Mrs Carter to start the Carter Centre UK. She is on the advisory council of Bennington College, Vermont, and Antioch University in Santa Barbara, California. She is also a trustee of the Bosnia Support Fund.
Henry Tinsley, Trustee
Henry Tinsley is former chairman of Green & Blacks Chocolate and has spent most of his career in business. He now focuses on campaigning and philanthropic work. Henry is currently a trustee of Technoserve Europe, Carter Centre UK, Article 1 and The Belu Foundation. He is a co-founder & director of the campaigning group 38 Degrees. Henry has a Modern History Degree from Oxford and an Honorary Doctorate from De Montfort University.
Hillary Cannon, Trustee
With a day job in corporate marketing and communications, ex-Miami resident and gorilla enthusiast Hillary Cannon is now shivering her way around the wilds of London. Though she would love to ditch both job and current geography and run swiftly and permanently away to Rwanda, at this point in time all she is actually able to do is help coordinate the collection and shipping of goods to our various friends in the Land of a Thousand Hills. She has also tried her hand at coordinating visitor groups in Rwanda (rather quickly overcoming the terror of operating a motor vehicle in Kigali), and helps when and where possible to secure goods needed to support various projects.
Dr. Barbara Bauer, Counselling Team
Barbara is a psychologist who has been involved in the training of lay volunteers and mental health professionals in the treatment of trauma since 1995. As a member of the International Centre for Psychosocial Trauma, she made numerous trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Russia, Pakistan, and Palestine. In 2003, Dr. Bauer completed a five-month mission in Nepal with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), where her assignment was to train volunteers in trauma interventions to help women victims of violence, including those caught up in the civil war. In February 2005, she went to Sri Lanka and Indonesia to train tsunami aid workers. In coordination with the Tinsley Charitable Trust, Dr. Bauer has made six trips to Rwanda to train genocide survivors in trauma counselling. She has made seven trips to Patongo, Northern Uganda where, as part of Network for Africa, she has trained peer counsellors to work with former child soldiers and community members traumatised by the LRA.
Shelly Evans, Counselling Team
Shelly Evans is a Licensed Professional Counsellor with a Master’s in Counselling Psychology. She currently resides in Columbia, Missouri. Shelly has been a volunteer mental health trainer with Network for Africa in northern Uganda since 2008. Prior to becoming involved with N4A, she lived and worked in South Korea and China. She has been a board member of Step Up, An American Association of Rwandan Women and has travelled to Rwanda multiple times as a mental health trainer. At home in Columbia, Shelly works in a primary care setting with patients who have just begun risky substance use. She also volunteers as a group facilitator in a support group for women who have fled situations involving domestic violence. Shelly’s primary clinical interests include cross-cultural counselling along with trauma and its emotional consequences.