Introducing Claire Baroni, Director of Business Services
Staff Story
Claire Baroni, our new Director of Business Services, is a senior member of our College Leadership Team who looks after the financial and business matters across the College. She is also our Company Secretary and has oversight of the Property and Facilities portfolio. Supporting Claire are the Property and Business Services teams.
It’s a big job! But it’s all in a day’s work for Claire who has amassed some significant experience over the years, working initially in corporate financial services and spending the last six years as Head of Operations at another school in the Catholic systemic education sector. That role also included governance, compliance, IT, marketing and executing a new master plan.
In her earlier corporate life, Claire worked at the financial services organisation Perpetual Limited providing philanthropic and trustee services. Claire facilitated significant donations to charitable institutions. On moving to the education sphere, Claire found a very different way of thinking to that of the corporate financial world.
‘The nature of my role in corporate finance was very black and white whereas in schools it’s very different, there are human aspects, it’s a community’, she explains.
Claire is therefore much happier in the school environment, working towards providing the best possible resources for the College to continue its 130 years of educating children and young women, setting them up to pursue excellence in life.
When Claire Baroni recalls migrating to Australia as a child she finds it hard to stem her emotions. Claire’s parents were Vietnamese refugees during the migration and humanitarian crisis following the end of the Vietnam War in 1978. The journey was too perilous for children to undertake, so Claire’s earliest years were spent being brought up by her grandmother in Vietnam. But by 10 years old Claire and her sister were sponsored by their newly Australian parents to migrate to Sydney. Arriving into Year 5 without a word of English, Claire’s experience is not unlike that of many of our youngest students at Santa Sabina. As with those Del Monte students, learning English is the important starting point. Claire mastered the language quickly then proceeded to flourish despite tough moments along the way.
‘With everything that my parents went through and I sort of went through, you learn to be resilient’, she reflects.
After finishing school, Claire went on to study accounting at university followed by an MBA. She also completed the Company Director Course, a Diploma in Financial Planning and is a Chartered Fellow of the Institute of Managers and Leaders. Along the way she gained valuable experience in executing a school’s master plan. Claire is greatly looking forward to helping execute our own exciting masterplan.
‘Looking to the future I hope I can make a huge difference here’, Claire says.
After hours, Claire is a wife and busy mother of two and she is passionate about gardening.
‘On weekends I am in the garden with my children, teaching them about the fruit and vegetables we grow – I’m crazy about plants’!
Victoria Harper
Publications and Marketing Officer
