When I was in my late teens I was asked to programme music, comedy and theatre at an arts festival in the North West. It was not part of a scheme or structured mentoring programme (I don’t think those things existed back then). I was just the lucky individual who someone else believed in. It is only now as a relatively mature arts practitioner that I realise how lucky I was and can see the value of those early lessons in creativity, negotiation, budgeting, bloody mindedness and vison in making otherwise impossible things happen.

Fast forward more years than I like to like to admit and I am the one looking at a group of young people giving them the keys to my organisation and asking them to dream a little and achieve a lot. Thanks to funding from Wiltshire Music Connect and the Corsham LYN (schemes do exist now)…