At first glance, Michelle’s twelve years as a City headhunter in the international legal sector might seem a strange lead-in to her role as Relationship Manager of a new charity like The Sustainable Health Foundation.  However, aside from putting to good use the experience she gained from being involved in the running of a successful business, servicing international clients and managing teams of staff, Michelle is also bringing to bear the skills she acquired as a researcher, writer, organiser and client liaison.

Recruiters have an in-joke that nobody goes into recruitment on purpose and the same is true for Michelle.  Her first love was dancing and her university degree and post degree studies (from the University of Cape Town and the Institute of Linguists respectively) were in languages.  A career break to have children provided enough space for her to remember that headhunting had not been her life plan.

For the last nine years, Michelle has been employed as a writer, consultant and translator by a range of businesses in the natural health sector and has taken steps to consolidate the knowledge gleaned from working in this sector with a foundation course in Clinical Neuropsychoimmunology.  She is now happily dubbed ‘The Fun Police’ by her children and immediate family as she lives the ‘food is medicine’ lifestyle!

Working with The Sustainable Health Foundation is immensely inspiring for Michelle, given the opportunity to spread the word that eating and living well is within all of our reach – as is the living of a vital and resiliently healthy life! 

Failing spectacularly to become the world’s greatest concert pianist – despite winning a year’s scholarship to the Vienna Conservatoire – Tom decided on the business end of the music world for a career.  Following a languages MA at Cambridge,  sheer luck took him to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as their concerts manager. They were experiencing dire times, and when the RPO’s CEO left, their search for a top-ranking replacement became challenging as there weren’t the funds. One of the departing interviewees – a much sought after grandee orchestra CEO from America that the board couldn’t afford – recommended they “use the guy in the office – he’s cheap and I can always give him a few tips on the phone!”

Tom became CEO of the RPO in his early twenties: the world’s youngest. He managed to help pull round their finances by engaging them for “first ever” gigs with the pop world: concerts with Elton John, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Mancini, Zappa, The Nice etc. that lit up a new image whilst they continued Mahler and Beethoven concerts on the South Bank and abroad. He  found their first ever cash sponsors. A spell with the Welsh National Opera illustrated how desperately the arts needed eternal fundraising and Tom set up his own consultancy. His first assignments included The Festival of India, Arts Council, Barbican, Swingle Singers and Shakespeare’s Globe. Then, inspired to diversify outside the arts, Guys Hospital, the Children’s Fire and Burns Trust, Age Concern, RNLI and others followed. He has on occasion left his consultancy to take on proper jobs: as the founding Charity Director of Motability, and Secretary General of the world’s NGO for MS, also serving on WHO’s Mental Health Executive.

With thirty years of fundraising consultancy behind him, his role at the Sustainable Health Foundation is “one of my most exciting ever. Getting the messages of natural health ‘out there’ to a dietarily conservative UK public has been a huge challenge. But at last, this charity has been formed – to bring the possibility of sustainable health to everyone. And having broken through so many barriers – to say nothing of the changes the pandemic will have wrought upon attitudes to health – I look forward to playing the fundraising part in making The SHF successful and, above all, meaningful to everyone wanting to improve their wellbeing”.