Bringing People Together

For many years I have been organising events to bring people together... whether it's for workshops, parties, festivals, education or community events.

Those who have known me for a long time will associate me with most of the initiatives you can see below and yet many of them may still come as a surprise.

Most of the events I've organised have some kind of holistic health or educational signature but I've also organised plenty of concerts and parties, often working in collaboration with other promoters.

One of the things that you can't see mentioned below is the network of Non Violent Communication groups that I launched in Brighton that built quite a community of people who would come together to explore compassion as a practice and to learn new ways of loving ourselves and each other.

Alongside the events described in more depth below, I've also run workshops in music, dance and poetry.... organised men's groups, Life Drawing classes, meditation groups and yoga sessions. As a keen learner who loves to explore new things, I've often organised activities around my latest passions.

Stenfest

Over a five year period I cohosted a family festival that rapidly grew from just 100 people to nearly 500 people. They were delightful events where we catered for everyone on site, three meals a day... as well as hosting a programme of events like a Chinese lantern release, a silly sports day, a giant slip n slide... as well as all the usual things you'd expect to find at a festival like live music. The final Stenfest was fraught with difficulties like losing our site at the last moment. We found another in very short time but were then hit by a deluge of howling winds and rains for the whole weekend and the exhaustion probably cost me a marriage.

Salut Les Petits

When I had small children I spent a lot of time attending and running different parent and toddler groups. At one point, in Brighton, I was known to hundreds of families as the guy that led the singing sessions... sometimes for some very big groups.

At the time, I spoke to my own childrne in French and many families suggested that I develop this for others. This led to me starting my own bilingual baby group called Salut Les Petits which ran for about three years overlapping with the launch of a bilingual nursery called "Little England Petite France'.

Globalised English

As I was working as an English teacher, I launched an online network of international language learners so they could continue to improve their English. The classes were a lot of fun and we had people joining from over 25 different countries from all around the world. The focus of the classes was on fluency but always attached to ideas of personal development, frequently using video materials from Alain de Botton's "School of Life".

HOME - A Community Centre

After running a bilingual nursery "Little England Petite France", I opened the building for broader educational purposes as part of the "New Paradigm Education" initiative. We ran events including one-off workshops and classes in nutrition, yoga, meditation, law, sound baths, cinema and languages amongst many other things. In the few years we were open we served hundreds of clients before being forced to close when we lost the use of the building.