Introducing new CG board members this Summer
Remember this smiley lady. She’s Karen Lawton - a long standing board member with an infectious smile. In fact, I have reason to believe it was this smile that helped us find not 3, not 4 but 5 new directors to join the Create Gloucestershire board. 3 of them started in January this year and we are about to welcome Anne and Jacqueline.
Welcome to:
Anne Dawson: Director
I am thrilled to be joining the board of Create Gloucestershire, whose work with grassroots arts and culture is so essential to the county that has been my home for the last 20 years. My role in Creative Industries education has embedded a firm belief that every one of us is creative and that if we are given the right support to develop this part of our nature, we are all the richer for it.
I look forward to exploring the wide and eclectic mix of groups and individuals living and working across the region and, in particular, seeing where there might be links to be made between practitioners and learners that can benefit them all.
I continue to work in Higher Education, as a tutor and assessor across film, media and communication, and I train professionals in communication skills across the UK and internationally. I am also trying to get back to where I started my career, as a writer! A Broadcaster and Journalist Anne Dawson founded and led the University of Gloucestershire School of Creative Industries until Autumn 2023 before moving into consultancy, training and writing.
Connect with Anne on LinkedIn.
Jacqueline Stearn: Director
Voice of Nature
Creating and supporting people’s connections with nature has long been a driver for my work. So, when the opportunity to bring my experience of doing so, and finding new routes through creative expression, was on offer on the Create Gloucestershire Board, I couldn’t ignore the call.
Create Gloucestershire’s mission to ensure arts and culture is in reach of everyone, is one that chimes perfectly with another of my values, striving for equality of access to opportunity for everyone to realise their potential.
Interpreting my remit as a director is to be the Voice of Nature, means ensuring that Nature, the ultimate stakeholder for Create Gloucestershire’s work, is never overlooked.
More formally the role is to ensure that the Board is well-versed in the legal rights of Nature. This may involve training, being a critical friend, inviting board members to ponder their engagement with nature in their lives. It will most certainly mean supporting innovative approaches, and projects designed to engage creative practitioners, community groups, and more to address the intertwined ecological and climate crises that we are grappling with.
I’m looking forward to being a member of a dynamic team which embraces innovation and learning by doing as it reaches into communities across the county. And, of course, I am looking forward to an unfolding dialectical process as the Voice of Nature is listened to and the goal of boosting climate and nature literacy realised.
In my own creative life, I feel deeply fortunate to have two practices, coaching and writing, each of which demand paying deep attention and listening with all my being. My fiction - an, as yet unpublished novel - seems marooned in the shallows of what can be described as the administration of writing. Thankfully, this is not the case with my poetry. It can be a challenge to keep up with the ideas generated by walking in Stroud’s valleys and hills, but responding to the call to communicate is a source of joy. I also offer poetry workshops in my local community to support people’s well-being, with nature as the workshop theme.
