Board of Directors

Lorna lives on the beautiful Clyde Estuary in North Ayrshire. She counts herself lucky to do meaningful work as Lead for Education and Training at the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow. Her background is in nursing. Her passion is the practice of compassionate care – care for self, care for others, care for our fragile and beautiful world.

Lorna is wife to Andrew, mum to Emilie, Melissa and Evan, and grandma to Daisy and Willow (who call her Ba…who knows why…she just goes with it 😊).

She is daughter to Jim – who lives with vascular dementia. Since the death of her much loved mum (Anne) in 2022, Lorna has been the main carer for her dad. Jim recently moved into a care home. It’s been a big move. Jim and Lorna are both adjusting.

Within the context of her role at the hospice, Lorna leads many interesting projects including:

• Online Namaste Care Training for people who are caring for someone with a progressive life-limiting condition that limits their ability to communicate using words – particularly dementia.
• In person ENGAGE – with Compassion training for people who want to learn and practice compassionate communication skills.
• Reflective practice circles, for frontline staff who want/need to share stories of care for people who have died, and for their frontline colleagues who want to listen to those stories and reflect, what and on, what they heard.
• Inspiring Leadership Programme – for palliative care staff on a leadership journey.

Her current interests include:

• Poems – reading them and writing them.
• Walking by the river and walking in the wood near her home.
• Learning things, many things, all the time.
• Spiritual care – in many shapes and forms.
• How to accompany adult children, how grandmother small children.

Lorna is delighted to support the bold team as a voluntary director. She considers it a small token of gratitude to honour the huge difference bold made to her own life.

Loïs is a professional fundraiser.
She has worked in the not-for-profit sector for most of her working life, except for that time in the early 90s when she produced a feature film and took it to Cannes Film Festival.
She has raised funds for two of Edinburgh’s iconic Festivals and headed up fundraising at the National Library of Scotland. Now she raises funds for the human rights charity, Amnesty International. She has a degree in Medicinal Chemistry, which basically means she spent a few years learning how to make high quality LSD, while realising that a life of medical research was not for her.
During Covid Loïs noticed that her Mum seemed to have the early stages of dementia, so she made plans to move the 100 miles south to look after her. Her main aim was to enable her Mum to live her life to the full each day, whatever that might mean. And it generally meant something different every single day.

Living in that dementia bubble with her Mum, Loïs picked up various crafting activities again, as part of her own self-care. She started an ambitious embroidery project, embellishing one of her Mum’s old fisherman’s smocks with designs inspired by her life and stories. This led to her enrolling on the life-enhancing Bold Programme, which has given her the confidence to now say she is a creative person. She wrote about the Smock Project and her relationship with her mother’s dementia on a blog here: www.shewolfinthevalley.com

Loïs says, “Crafting is my mindfulness – the steady rhythm of making stitches has always been something that my hands just do, while my mind can go elsewhere. But more often than not, it slows my mind down, relaxes me and feels like a kindness to myself.”

Loïs was born and bred in beautiful rural Galloway, and recently moved back to live not 500 yards from the house she was born in. It has very much felt like coming home.

I have always loved words and stories and am a passionate advocate of the positive impact that creative writing and reading can have on people’s health and well-being. I am particularly interested in using, testing and developing creative methods to engage people in the community and have a particular interest in working with those living with dementia.

For more information about my work and research here.

I joined the bold Team in 2021 and soon realised how inspiring our vision and mission were. I was and continue to be humbled by the bold ripples created within the community from those living with a dementia diagnosis rediscovering their self-worth and sharing their stories to unpaid dementia carers who have come out the other side of losing someone they love to dementia and realising they can use that experience to support others and make a difference.

I am delighted to be part of the bold Community Interest Company and hope to do as much as I can alongside the other bold directors to put the remaining funds to beneficial use supporting our creative dementia community and hopefully create sustainability too.

I hope my marketing and business experience in conjunction with my dementia carer work and family dementia journey with my beloved Gran will stand me in good stead to contribute to the bold CIC board.

N.B. You don’t have to be named Lorna to be on the bold CIC Board of Directors, but it helps! 😁