Anna Campbell will forever be a cheerleader for the Young Enterprise Scheme.
She took part in the long-running initiative, which aims to give students a taste of business, while attending Southland Girls’ High School.
On reflection, Ms Campbell (32) said it opened her eyes to the world of business and was one of the most useful things she had engaged in.
Last month, she was named the 2025 YES alumna of the year in recognition of her inspiring work around sustainable business, most recently as general manager of Te Tautiaki Hoiho Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust in Dunedin.
She participated in YES in both 2009 and 2010 and her team won the regional finals both years. She was awarded the Southland Young Entrepreneur of the Year and was selected for the New Zealand International Trade Challenge Team, travelling to Singapore in her mid-teens.
The New Zealand team won and, at that moment, she realised it was what she was good at. She loved presenting and pitching ideas: it merged both the creative and the nerd in her. It was also competition, something she was used to as a ballerina.
She started paying attention to female executives, watching the likes of former Telecom boss Dame Theresa Gattung, and listening to radio interviews and TedTalks.
She always felt supported and encouraged, others expressing their belief in her, and she had drawn on those skills she gained as a teenager throughout her career.
Leaving school, she had to choose between continuing to dance or academia and she opted for the latter, graduating from the University of Otago with a commerce degree majoring in international business and an arts degree in art history.
She spent the final semester of her double degree on an exchange in France at Grenoble Ecole de Management, obtaining a certificate in global management with distinction.
That was followed by the masters of entrepreneurship programme at Otago, after which she was decided to stay in New Zealand and use what she had learned.
She got picked up by Timely and worked for the Dunedin tech company as a graduate. She started in the company’s early days and was part of the high growth phase as it expanded into Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Timely, which produced a cloud-based appointment management system for businesses requiring scheduling of their staff and services, particularly in the beauty industry, was sold to Denver-based service commerce platform EverCommerce in 2021.
Ms Campbell became involved with the campaign to save the Ocho chocolate factory and wrote a business plan, keen to apply what she had learned through both YES and her tertiary studies.
It made her realise how entrepreneurial tools were powerful and she needed to use them for good and look at what else she could do, she said.
She then joined the Ocho team and had the opportunity to go cocoa sourcing in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea and later worked in marketing for the Marsh family’s Oakwood Group for three years and was recognised by several automotive brands for best practice.
Growing up in Invercargill, Ms Campbell recalled a "pretty awesome childhood" spent at the beach or in the bush and camping in the Catlins.
When she became a mother, she wanted to raise her children the same way that she was brought up. But heading to the beach, she realised it was not the same as it used to be, she said.
There were not as many penguins in the Catlins, it was not always possible to catch a fish, shellfish were smaller and not as plentiful.
She started to pay attention to what was happening in the environment and it made her sad.
She wanted better for her children and not to see dead wildlife washing up on the shores, she said.
Last year, she embarked on her doctorate at Otago, her research project titled "The Call of the Hoiho for a Sustainable Ocean: Landscape Pressures and Niche Environments in the Deep South — a Multi-Level Perspective Study".
Innovative methods were needed to better manage or solve environmental issues and the work had to be done collaboratively, involving the various stakeholders, she said.
For Ms Campbell, it was important to do something locally that might have global impact. The plight of hoiho was very important to the communities of Otago, Southland and Canterbury and to iwi, as it was a taonga species, and it showed the ocean was not well, she said.
The work the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust did on land was very important but there was still a very big job to be done at sea and she believed the social science lens was missing.
An active relaxer, Ms Campbell said she had always been a busy person and she was motivated.
"Sometimes people say good things take time or change doesn’t happen overnight. I ... like to challenge that and say, actually we’re seeing Bills fast-tracked left, right and centre — why can’t we fast-track things for good?"
At Ocho, the community got behind something they cared about, via crowd-funding, and overnight there was a shift.
"I think when there’s a will, there’s a way."
"Just because something’s taken 30 or 40 years to destroy an environment, it doesn’t mean it’s going to take 40 years to recover it. We can begin today."
And she also felt a real responsibility to all those people that put time into her, saying she felt like "their intern".
She felt strongly that a sustainable model for doing business better to solve problems in the community was needed, outside of government funding.
Those who worked in business had certain skills which could be applied to solve those issues but there had to be a willingness to work together.
From a farming and fishing background, Ms Campbell said she wanted more fish in the sea "for everybody".
At the presentation of her alumna award, she pitched a proposal to buy out commercial fishing to reduce bycatch to zero.
Bycatch Buyouts was a social enterprise initiative to pay fair prices for fishing assets and reserve commercial quota in the ocean for sustainable seas. She was "stoked" with the interest so far and, if there was enough momentum, a fund would be launched, she said.
She did not consider herself a conservationist — although she certainly subscribed to ideas of environmental protection — rather, she thought of herself as a "business girl".
It was important to keep young people at the boardroom table.
"I’m so sure every young person at a boardroom table is talking about environmental issues and sustainability. It’s so important to keep them involved because their voice really does matter," she said.
A lot of business, particularly in the primary industries, happened in the South but she believed that the South often was not on the agenda in Wellington.
Hoiho were a symbol for southern issues not mattering and it was important that the South was valued and included in decisions, she said.
A trip to Africa with Graduate Women New Zealand to help show young women what success could look like was very rewarding.
But seeing the Zambezi River so low and the Victoria Falls not flowing hit home how important it was to turn that around.
She felt very strongly about the need for education and the role of education in creating empowerment for women and girls and that could not happen in the middle of a climate crisis, she said.
She felt privileged to have received her education.
"For me, that’s a real driver to say what example can New Zealand set for the world and how can we do better?"
