Biography|Kirsten Schuijt — The Rue Mauverney Secretariat She Took Over on New Year's Day

People treat 1 January as a ceremonial date on a press release.

For Kirsten Schuijt it was the day the Gland secretariat actually changed hands.

WWF International's own director-general list records her term as 2023 to the present, based in Gland and reporting to the International Board.

The legal address is Rue Mauverney 28, the IUCN Conservation Centre, where the WWF secretariat had relocated after leaving its older pair of buildings on the same campus.

She arrived as an insider, not a guest speaker.

WWF-Netherlands published the same start date and closed her Zeist directorship in December 2022.

Jelle de Jong took the Dutch chair the following July.

The first-woman line is not decoration.

Geneva Solutions and WWF's own announcement both state that no woman had held this post in more than sixty years of the organisation.

The campus is public enough to visit the road and the IUCN garden; it is not a private house.

What a visitor is looking at is the office that now coordinates the secretariat and the thirty-four country offices she was hired to lead.

Companies House later filed her as a director of the UK-registered international body, correspondence still pointing at this Rue Mauverney address.

The work that started on this date is the present tense of her career.

Photo: Swadim, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons