Karen Lawton - CEO of Mindsong

Karen has been working with Mindsong since 2010 and was instrumental in moving it to charitable status in 2012 and to CIO in 2018. It is now countywide, award-winning and provides services for complex dementia and respiratory disease amongst others - just as long as music is involved.

She has a background in professional theatre, with a BA Hons in Performance & Film and has worked in any backstage capacity you can think of including props maker, wigs, costume, crew and stage management. Whether she could still work the flys is open to debate - probably not.

She has over 20 years experience in Arts Marketing including being a graduate of the very first course in Advanced Arts Marketing run by CIM. She is passionate about Arts & Health and the role of charities in healthcare.

Her aim with Mindsong was to take what began as a good idea (not hers) and create a new organisational model, merging sound business sense with creativity and professional know-how, that would allow that idea to grow. She believes in nurturing your team, putting life before work and the value of being able to try and fail. She's more than happy to share that model with anyone who wants to work in a new way. A way, incidentally, that is financially stable and turned out to be really well suited to a pandemic.

She would like to see career paths in the Third Sector promoted by careers advisors.