Meet & Greet with Samantha Raoult: "People living with HIV are trying to live their best lives, the same way as anybody else"

In today’s Meet & Greet interview, Samantha Raoult, Sales Development at Morningstar, talks to myGwork about her journey of becoming an advocate for social justice and her views on how to be better allies for people living with HIV.

Image Credit: Samantha Raoult

Can you tell us a bit about your career?

I’ve had a journey! I came out of university, having studied Politics at Warwick at the undergrad level with not a clue as to what I wanted to do. I got a job working at a social enterprise doing membership management…That was ok. A lot of Salesforce! After that, I worked as a British Council Language Assistant in Colombia for 1 year, which was absolutely thrilling and challenging all rolled into one. Following this, I worked for 6 months in oil and gas advertising sales - another random adventure in the life of 20-something Samantha. I wasn’t cut out for it and came home…then I embarked on teacher training.

I was a secondary school languages teacher for 3 years before going back to the corporate world. I got a job at the Financial Times, using my language skills again. This was a fixed-term contract which sadly didn’t roll into a full-time position there.

I spent a month in Kenya in February 2020 then went to South Africa and essentially came back after covid, when I secured my current role at Morningstar. The common thread to my experiences is definitely looking for the aspects of a job that motivate me, make me happy and keep me learning.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to be able to use my language skills, my people skills and my general curiosity to keep doing interesting things. This current phase of my life is very blissful, which I am so happy about! It took me some time to get to this stage.

How did you come to be passionate about supporting people with HIV?

It started with a university friend who first brought this cause to my attention during my university year. Since then, it’s something that every year I delve into and make a point to keep up to date with developments. I, myself, have in the last few years experienced illness and that personal experience, combined with covid, definitely has blown the lid wide open.

There’s nothing like the first-hand experience of illness to really add context to things. What’s more, from 2020 to 2021, I lived in South Africa and that again, deepened my understanding of living with HIV and how global communities where HIV wreaked havoc are managing the illness now in the 2020s.

How has your experience of people living with HIV shaped your worldview?

All the above really has served to help me become hopefully more compassionate, as well as to understand and appreciate that we all live with differences. It takes a bit of everything to make the world go round…people living with HIV are trying to live their best lives, the same way as anybody else. It’s important to be educated about different illnesses and differences more broadly.

Each generation has had a big illness (or several) come along and “teach us” lessons, as a global community. Covid is this generation’s, and like its predecessors, really highlighted our lack of understanding of illness and how much we can all suffer at the hands of illness. Nobody is immune, nobody is “too good” for anything.

What are your career highlights, to date?

Completing teacher training successfully is what I’m most proud of, to be honest. It’s by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done and working with young people is incredibly energising, rewarding but also thankless!

Do you have any advice for people looking to be better allies, especially for people living with HIV?

Listen, listen, listen. Hopefully, all that listening will allow you to learn and understand more about the joys, issues and challenges that come with living with HIV. Those are important and highly transferable skills that will make you a more wholesome human.

What's next for you?

Social justice issues are important to me. I will continue to weave that into everything that I do because it’s an integral part of who I am.

Samantha Raoult shares her personal thoughts about the ways we can support people living with HIV.