Carolyn Santiago

Carolyn has worked in the community sector for 20+ years. Her qualifications include a business degree majoring in management and communications management and certificates in public relations and adult teaching.

Carolyn has been a member of the Fundraising Institute of NZ since 2005 and a Xero Certified Adviser since 2010. She loves planning, fundraising, developing policies and systems, and organising events. She has a close personal interest in health and wellness, political and environmental issues. Her fundraising experience includes work for the Queenstown Winter Festival, Age Concern, Plunket, numerous social service providers, schools, recreational and sporting clubs all over New Zealand. While working for Plunket she was directly responsible for managing the very significant restructuring of non-clinical services in the central North Island (carseat rental schemes, parent education, and a range of other community support services). For Age Concern she resurrected core services in the Rotorua district. She has expertise in forensic accounting, compliance remediation, risk management and change management and was contracted to provide these services in the form of "capacity building support" to 51 budget service agencies in the North Island for several years. Her current voluntary roles include being a Registered Speaker for Hearing Dogs for Deaf People NZ and being a member of the NZ Sleep Apnea Association's governing body.

Prior to working in the community sector, Carolyn's 18-year government career was mainly with the NZ Foreign Service - MFAT - after brief stints as a Court Reporter and with the Tourist and Publicity Department in Wellington. After joining MFAT in the late 70s, she lived and worked in several countries, participated in numerous major national and international events, negotiations, conferences, ministerial visits, and she provided consular assistance to New Zealanders overseas. She was also seconded from MFAT to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for several years.

After an early temporary retirement from her public service career on medical grounds in 1995, Carolyn established a massage and beauty therapy clinic in Wellington. This coincided with taking on several challenging and rewarding voluntary roles at local and national levels. In 2003 she moved to Rotorua to pursue interests in spa, health and wellness tourism and in search of a healthier lifestyle. Carolyn is profoundly deaf and relies heavily on lip-reading, hearing aids and a Registered Hearing Dog, Bailey. Her late husband was one of Carolyn's flight instructors when she gained a Private Pilot's Licence while working in the Philippines. They married in Hong Kong in 1983 and daughter Lilia was born in Fiji several years later while Carolyn was working at the NZ High Commission in Suva.