Linnea Van Wagenen | Head Of Strategic & Sustainable Development at Ljusdal Municipality, Sweden.

Welcome to the United Nations Career Journey podcast, where we interview colleagues working for the United Nations all around the world. Our conversations explore their fascinating career paths, what career satisfaction means to them, and how they keep learning and developing on the job. My name is Tatsiana Khomchyk and today; our conversation is with Linnea Van Wagenen, a seasoned professional with a remarkable UN career. Welcome to the Career Journey Podcast, Linnea; thank you very much for joining us, and it is a pleasure to have you as our guest speaker today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Linnea, let me quickly introduce you. Linnea has held significant positions, including special assistant to the Special Assistant to the SG Envoy, Special Assistant for a Resident Coordinator in Sierra Leone, and communications for UNs city, Copenhagen. Her extensive experience has covered diverse work of the United Nations Development Program.

What makes Linnea particularly interesting to our audience today is her transition after leaving the United Nations. Linnea now holds a new position as Head of Strategic & Sustainable Development in the city of Ljusdal, Sweden. She has held this role for over three years, and it’s fascinating to see how her un experience has been applied to local sustainable development initiatives in Sweden. Linnea we’re honored to have someone of your caliber and experience in our podcast today. Thank you for joining us.

Let’s start at the beginning. Now, what inspired you to pursue a career at the United Nations, and how did your journey begin?

I was one of those kids growing up wanting to work for the UN before I knew what the UN was. I was very eager. I studied sustainable development, political science, and anthropology, and I kept thinking, how can I use this to work for the UN? But I never really thought I was going to be able to; I thought it’s a very hard business to get into. And then we ended up living in Copenhagen, my husband and I, and I applied for a job as an intern working for UNDP. I was at that point, I had worked for four years as a journalist. I worked for Swedish Public Radio. So, for me to go back to become an unpaid intern, my parents thought I was crazy. But I got the internship, and from then on, I think I proved myself. I think I was able to show what I could do working in the UN city in Copenhagen. I became a consultant and ended up staying in UN City for four years. I changed offices a little bit, but I stayed mainly doing communications in coordination for four years.

Linnea, can you share about your role in communication in UN City Copenhagen? What was it like?

We actually moved from our old offices, you know, UN City. For those of you who don’t know, there are a lot of different UN agencies working together in this one shared space. But that shared space didn’t exist when I started. So, when we moved into this new building, my job was to help with communications not only for you and UNDP but for the shared UN City experience. We ended up starting and I say, we — it was me and my boss Eva, we started the public diplomacy and communications unit at UN City. That meant we were trying to coordinate the communications work of all the different UN agencies in UN City. I know at this point, the public diplomacy and communications unit is still there; they are still doing work. In my time we started giving tours, we started doing lectures about the UN in Copenhagen, and that’s really where I got my start. I was also doing, for my first two years, a lot of UNDP-centered communications to and from the Nordic Region. So, I’ve worked for the Nordic regional office in Copenhagen.

I already mentioned in your introduction about your work in Sierra Leone. So, how was your work experience there different from your previous roles?

I really enjoyed the coordination part of my communications job at UN City. I got this little taste of what it would be like to work on coordinating a lot of different UN agencies, but in the field, so when the position of Special Assistant to the resident coordinator opened up in Sierra Leone, I applied for that, knowing that I could bring some things with me working with understanding the needs, and what the different UN agencies had in terms of both being able to provide to a common goal, but also what their individual, their hierarchies, who they’re reporting to, and how to try to create more impact together. I had that a little bit, at least from the UN City, and I really wanted to add to that.

So, I got the position as a Special Assistant. At that point, I decided to move there. It was a family duty station. And they had only recently come out of the Ebola crisis. So, I moved there with my one-year-old and my husband. And we thought that Ebola was done. Turns out Ebola was not done. So, we ended up doing some coordination work on the Ebola response as well, which was I got to see the back end of that, which was fascinating. We stayed there for two years until I worked on a big landslide, which took place in Sierra Leone, where we lost a lot of lives and where there became a very emergency response-focused effort.

I worked with the resident coordinator on the UN country team, where we met every week to discuss issues. But I also did some of the long-term, like planning. We were going to do the first national development frameworks based on the SDGs. And nobody quite knew how to do it. So, we received a lot of support from New York. And we went to workshops, and we tried to figure out how do we build this new sustainable development framework with the SDGs at its core. I worked both on, you know, short-term emergency responses; I ran the common communications group in Freetown, in Sierra Leone, with representatives from all the different UN agencies, but then also the more long-term strategic stuff. So, working in a smaller duty station like Freetown, you get a chance to help and work and kind of explore both the things you’re good at and also add to your tool belt, but these are not so good when you come in.

Thank you so much, Linnea, for sharing. Could you tell us more about South-South Cooperation?

One of the things I noticed and thought a lot about when I was in Sierra Leone. It was how important sharing experiences from the global south was in this national context where we were. I saw many concrete examples where we would sometimes bring experts from countries that are very dissimilar to Sierra Leone, and there will be a lot of work just catching people up to what the national kind of framework and how it works. Whereas when we turn to the global south, and there was South-South Cooperation, when you were sharing experiences system thoughts with either academia or governments, civil society, from another Global South. But guess when we, when they first started doing South-South Cooperation of small developing countries, right, and I use that in quotation marks. The countries of the Global South have a shortcut in how they’re able to communicate and share knowledge, and the Global North, which I represented. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is stay out of the way, and sometimes, the best thing we can do is fund these types of corporations and exchanges. So, from Sierra Leone, I was given the opportunity to come work for the UN Office for South-South Cooperation, which is under UNDP in New York, and to work for their director and envoy. I was very excited because I had seen in the field the need for this type of work to be done.

Thank you, Linnea. I have another question for you. Has there been a moment in your career where you felt your work had a significant impact?

One moment that I think a lot, and I actually also wrote a blog post about this and shared some pictures to go with it. We woke up one morning, and it was during the rainy season in Sierra Leone. I went to work, and we got this call that there were some floods. We didn’t know how bad it was, and the coordinator asked me, “Will you please just take a car, go and see what it is?”. So, I got in the car, and when we were a couple of yards away, my driver stopped and said, “You know I can’t get any further out because there are too many cars.” There’s fog; we can barely see a yard or two ahead of the car, it was really bad.

I got out on my own, walked a couple of hundred yards, and we got to what looked to be just a crater in the ground.

Later, we realized that this was one 100- and 250-yard-wide landslide. That’s gone down the entirety of the mountain in Freetown. Hundreds of lives were lost. Great tragedy.

But when we get there, we can’t even see. It was too much fog, and you see people and people screaming. I get a phone call within the first hour or so. It’s UNCDF, the Capital Development Fund, and they say, is there anything we can do to help their country wrap, and I said, I know this is weird, I said but can you try to see if we can talk to the mobile network providers because we are losing coverage. There are so many people up here we can’t even use our phones. So, she starts using her contacts.

FAO calls me. Their representative asked me “Should we activate Copernicus?”. I said, what is Copernicus? And she says it’s something that the JRC can activate. Basically, we’re asking scientists all over the world to start looking at Sierra Leone to see if they can get satellite imagery of this place. Then they can send it to the scientists in Europe, and they can start looking and comparing today’s map with yesterday’s map or a map that was taken two weeks ago to see how many people have been affected by this landslide.

I said, yes, I activated. We got a phone call from a local drone company, and they asked how they could help us. I said, okay, bring your drones. We need everybody. This local Sierra Leonean drone company had three or four drones, and the first one just crashed straight in, but the other two are able to go up and down the mountain.

Later that day, FAO called us back, and they said — okay, we activated it. Nigerian space sciences were able to talk to American satellites into taking the pictures. So, we can actually, we can tell you now, by a rooftop analysis, exactly how many households were lost. We can tell you where we think there might be more structural damage. But you know, the scientists working for the EU would like to look into these areas more carefully because they think there might be a risk of a second landslide.

And we already have the drone, the local Sierra Leonean drone company that does surveillance of buildings, and they said, “We’ll fly the drones and will give the scientists what they need.”

This is a very brief telling of a lot of work being done. When I look back at it, I think of the story of this collaboration between all the different UN agencies, with the EU, Americans, Nigerians, and the local companies. I think to myself oh, wow, I was so lucky to be in that place and witnessed that kind of collaboration. When things like that happen, you can see the power in that institution and the power in collaboration with partners. I think about that moment a lot.

That’s an incredible story, Linnea! Thank you for sharing. My next question is about your transition from the UN system and your current role. Are the sustainable development goals still at the heart of your work?

Very much. So that’s what I do, and that’s why I took this job. As you can hear, I did work with regional cooperation with donor countries in Copenhagen; I worked in the field during country programming in Sierra Leone. And then, in New York, I had a more international perspective. But the other thing that struck me, especially when I was working with South-South is, why do we call it development when it’s done in the Global South? And we just call it a Monday when it’s being done in Europe.

I was interested in seeing, okay, how I can actually localize the SDGs and work on rural development in my own home country. It’s still development work; it’s no different than the development work I was doing before; just because it happens to take place in the Global North, that doesn’t mean that it’s not development work.

I also wanted to see if I would be able to localize the SDGs in a concrete manner, where we can build local development plans based on it. So, I moved back in as Head of Strategic and Sustainable Development. I got the pleasure of working in a small town of 20,000 people. I got to sit in front of people who do street cleaning, park development or recreation, or schools, and I got to present the SDGs. And I got to ask them the question, okay, what does this mean for you in your everyday work? What targets can you set for us to reach the SDGs, and the end result ended up being that we, the municipality of Ljusdal, where I work. We have a government development plan; it’s not just the development; all of our results-based management is based on the SDGs.

We have no goals besides the SDGs. That’s all we do. All our work, in some ways, is supposed to contribute to the SDGs. Everything from our elderly homes to our environmental work to our exploitation, like our plans for building in this area, everything is supposed to contribute to an SDG.

Linnea, it’s so interesting how you switched your experience from global to local. I’m sure a lot of people couldn’t understand it…

When I told my coworkers that I was giving up my blue passport and that I was going to rural Sweden. There was more than one person who asked me if I was crazy.

You know, for me, life is about different chapters. I think this idea of a linear career is a little old-fashioned. There were things I wanted to learn to bring with me to the next step of my journey; I don’t know where that will be if that will be the UN if it’ll be national if it will be global in some other way.

I knew that I wanted to be I wanted to manage people. So, I manage 15 People now. In about a week, I’m getting a bit of a promotion, and I’ll be managing 9 managers. So, I’m going to have a lot of people under me, and I knew that getting that kind of management experience would take me a long time in the UN. For good reason, we have our system set up, and I understand that.

For me, it was just about looking at what I have in my toolbox. Do I need to add some tools? These are two tools that I didn’t have.

Very interesting. Do you have any advice for those who are interested in starting their career journey with the United Nations?

I get this question so much, Tatsiana, that I actually sat down one day, and I started writing down all the steps. When people approach me and ask me for help, I have a personal rule. I never say no. I always say yes; how can I help you?

Because I was incredibly lucky to get into the UN system without knowing anybody. I had a great mentor; Michael was the person who hired me in Copenhagen. I owe him my entire career because he’s the one who really sat down and took care of me when I first came into the system. Of course, I’ve had many, many good bosses, but that somebody who says, you know, I can give you a few pointers to me was invaluable at that point. So, I make it a point to do the same whenever somebody asks me.

I sat down and wrote a list, I think I did it on LinkedIn, like a couple of articles. Yeah, that’s what it was on LinkedIn, where I just said, these are the steps you need to take, these are the different kinds of jobs you can apply for, you know, here are some common questions. So, I actually have an unofficial like the Linnea Guide to enter the UN, which is, which is on LinkedIn, if you guys are interested in seeing it.

I also say, reached out to people, the worst thing that can happen is that you get a no, and the best-case scenario, somebody is on the other end of that question, that appreciates and understands the value of bringing new talent into the organization. If I had to summarize it into one thing, it would be, don’t be afraid to ask.

Thank you so much, Linnea, for this interview, your stories, and your advices. It was a pleasure to have you as a guest speaker today. Thank you!

Thank you so much. I think that what you’re doing is so valuable for talking about our career and the UN and the different ways forward. It’s so helpful. So, thank you.