In her corporate role, Penny Brockman works as Head of Operations Support for automotive finance specialists Stellantis. But she also has another set of weighty responsibilities as a senior volunteer for Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW).

At a local level, Brockman is both Chair of Trustees and a hands-on operational member at the Central Beacons Mountain Rescue Team (MRT), a unit she once led for a decade. On a wider level, she is also Financial Director and Trustee of the entire MREW network.

For Brockman – newly honoured as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Mountain Rescue – her path to this impressive blend of high-level corporate and voluntary work stemmed from a simple need to get out and meet people.

“I grew up in Australia, moved back to the UK in the early 1980s to live in Kent, then went to university in London,” she explains. “I didn’t know anyone locally in Kent, so in 1986 I signed up to the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme as a way to socialise. That was when I first met mountain rescuers. I’d already begun to train as a chartered accountant, which made volunteering during the week quite difficult. So at weekends, I’d travel all the way from Kent to Wales to volunteer for an MRT.”

Firmer footing

As Brockman’s early accountancy career began to take shape, her volunteering for MREW flourished alongside it. After working initially in the large-firm setting of BDO Binder Hamlyn in London, she landed a job with a smaller accountancy firm in Cardiff, enabling her to make a permanent move to a prime area of mountain rescue activity. 

Alongside her day job, Brockman became a full-time, operational member of the Central Beacons MRT, then the team’s Treasurer and then Regional Treasurer for MREW’s South Wales operation.

Securing the latter role took three attempts. “It was very rare indeed to even have a woman on an MRT,” she explains, “let alone a woman holding a senior officer role in a team. And it was rarer still for a woman to be treasurer for a whole region.”

From her earliest days at MREW up to now, Brockman has drawn heavily on the financial acumen she developed in her accountancy training and has always been adamant about the impact she wanted to have on the organisation. 

“A lot of my fellow team members hated using the term ‘business’ to describe what we do,” she says. “But I always tried to help them recognise and understand that we are in the business of charity work. Many team members had a very volunteering-focused outlook, which I’m not knocking, but I was keen to professionalise how things worked on the administrative front, to help set the charity on a firmer footing. A healthy organisation is better equipped to provide an effective response to those in distress.”

One of Brockman’s biggest achievements for MREW on a national level was centralising rescuers’ insurance policies. Before that, volunteers had wrestled with a tangled mass of disparate insurance products, tied to a range of different UK police forces. Now, however, those schemes are all under one roof and far more suited to their holders’ requirements.

Plus, while MREW’s national coffers held only around £50,000 when Brockman started, the charity now has £1.36m in the bank: all the better to support the equipment needs of MRTs across England and Wales.

Expanding empathy

In 1996, Brockman’s career shifted away from pure-play finance work as she moved into IT and business transformation. But she believes there is still significant cross-pollination between the two worlds she occupies.

“My voluntary role definitely supports me in my current work,” she says. “In mountain rescue operations, you are dealing with very fast-moving incidents that require you to bring people together to work quickly under pressure, with the aim of solving often unique problems. That helps me on the programme management side of business transformation, which also has problem-solving demands, but in a very different context.”

She notes that the level of criticality experienced in mountain rescue operations helps to maintain a sense of perspective about the challenges of programme management. Working with teams to help people in distress certainly expands the empathy you need for collaborating on corporate change projects.

Mountain to climb?

To date, Brockman is still the only woman to have led a mountain rescue team in Wales. That low level of female leadership in the service remains a powerful driver for one of Penny’s main passions: getting other women involved in volunteering for MREW.

“Last year, I held an event in connection with International Women’s Day called Women in Mountain Rescue,” she says. “I teamed up with a friend of mine who runs a business called Mòr Diversity and we invited representatives from across the country to brainstorm answers to the question: How do we create an environment where more women will want to join this service? We’ve held some further gatherings since then.”

At the moment, around 30% of the Central Beacons team are women. “That’s much better than it was when I started – but it could be even better than that.”

In June, Brockman found out that she had been awarded her OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours. “It was a bittersweet moment,” she says. “I was pleasantly shocked and surprised, but at the same time there was a lot of emotion because my late husband Peter, who had received an OBE for Services to the Police and Mountain Rescue, was not here to see it. I know he would have been really pleased for me.”

She adds: “I still haven’t put the OBE on my LinkedIn profile. To be honest, I haven’t really had much time to take it all in; I’ve just been getting on with mountain rescue work.”