Hannah Mourney

Community Bursary Award Holder

MBA (2025)

I am deeply grateful to the donors for their generosity in supporting students like me through the St Cross Community Bursary.

Awards like this make meaningful participation in Oxford life beyond the classroom possible, easing the burden of living costs and the real expense of engaging in everything the university offers. 

I came to Oxford as a Ramsay Scholar and Forté Fellow, completing the MBA at Saïd Business School while representing the University as a goalkeeper for the Oxford University Women's Football Blues. Before Oxford, I served as Associate Director in the New South Wales (NSW) government delivering a 10-year innovation strategy, worked at Australia's first impact venture capital fund, Giant Leap, and co-founded VC Women Down Under, a community bringing together over 250 women working across venture capital in Australia and New Zealand. Across these roles, a consistent theme emerged: high-potential ideas stalling not for lack of merit, but for lack of access, funding, or the right room to be in. 

At Oxford, I have carried that orientation into the entrepreneurial ecosystem, participating in the Skoll Centre's Impact Lab and contributing to college life through St Cross events. Competing and training at Blues level, including facing Cambridge twice in the BUCS tournament, while managing the academic rigour of the MBA (receiving distinctions in a number of subjects to date), requires genuine commitment to performance across multiple domains at once.

The Bursary will ease the financial burden and support my ability to sustain that level of engagement, covering costs associated with sport, living, and extracurricular participation that fall outside the scope of my existing academic scholarships. Without it, some of that contribution to Oxford's communities would simply not have been possible.