In the return of our blog series, we introduce our trustees to you in a series of questions.
How did you first hear about Sing Inside?
I was first alerted to the existence of Sing Inside by some friends at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge: I was doing a master’s in the subject at the Other Place and was extremely briefly involved in Sing Inside’s first forays into Oxford. My undergraduate degree was in Music so naturally I was intrigued by Sing Inside’s mission; and as someone who’s served a prison sentence myself, I was painfully aware of the lack opportunities to make music in prison, as well as needing no convincing of the value of just those opportunities. It was, I suppose, a perfect fit!
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Always Highly Caffeinated
Where are you based and what do you do at the moment?
I’m a country bumpkin at heart but moved to London during the lockdown and am very much enjoying making the most of city life: it’s still quite novel to be able to go to concerts without military-level planning. I work in Business Development for the Forward Trust – a charity which delivers drug and alcohol services in prisons and the community. I’m also researching part-time for a doctorate in Theology (focussing on prison chaplaincy) at Durham University. Over the past couple of years I’ve been co-authoring a book with Jonathan Aitken which has just been published; it’s called ‘Doing Time: A Spiritual Survival Guide’.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in lockdown?
That I’m not quite as introverted as I thought I was…
What are your hopes for Sing Inside in the next few years?
It might sound a bit dry, but I’d love for us to get to the position where prisons value our work to the extent that they commission – and so pay for – us to deliver workshops on a regular basis. Competition for a slice of a prison’s budget is brutal amongst small organisations like us and so getting to that point will require the kind of holistic development which our Executive Committee are supremely qualified to deliver.