The Inspire Club

Beth Morgan has been leading choirs for 27 years. During this time she has taken non auditioned youth choirs to national and international competitions; built her own local community choir network with 4 choirs and around 100 members; and helped to establish a thriving trained chorister programme in a local council. During the pandemic Beth launched a professional choir leader Facebook group The Creative Choir Leader Group now with over 500 members from all over the world and most recently, she launched The Inspire Club to help community choir leaders become exceptional in their local community by offering accessible CPD, a professional neworking community and a peer mentor programme.

But it wasn’t always big numbers and a big network…

Here is Beth’s choir leader story….

My first choir was when I was working as a secondary school music teacher, in an isolated rural mining town in Queensland, Australia, where singing wasn’t really a part of the culture. I had 30 teenagers who turned up at 7:30am every Wednesday for choir….to sing.

In the UK, I strategically nurtured my secondary school choir over 3 years to go from local to international level performance. I did it alone without any choir professionals to give me support or ideas. Braching out into the adult community choir sector, my Military Wives Choir and The Great Day Choir have performed on local and international stages and raised £1000s for charity.

But launching the Creative Choir Leader has taken my choir leader support network to a whole new level. It has validated my belief that we are we are more successful when we work together. It reinforced my belief that choir leaders can be aspirational to make an impact in our local communities. We are not ‘just community choir leaders’. We can be more than successful or creative – we can be exceptional.

I have learnt such a lot from the Inspire Club members, who, without exception, are so supportive, encouraging and helpful to everyone whilst being non-judgmental. I’m consolidating how I feel about my own skill set, adding to it, changing where necessary, and, where applicable, removing doubts about how I do things. It’s not always a painless process, but an ongoing one that is priceless. As a result I’m finding my feet and realising that I don’t have to be like others that I admire and respect, I’m no less professional if I don’t do everything that they do, in the way that they do it, and am comfortable in my own skin. And the biggest thing of all – I’ve made friends, real friends, all over the world, in my professional life that I never thought would be possible.

ANN CLEWLOW

I felt generally pretty confident & experienced; however, having run an established choir (not my own ‘brand’) with over a hundred singers, I have now launched a new community choir (during a pandemic) so it feels like Im starting again & having to prove my worth. It can be a lonely world at times, with many mixed emotions – and although social media is a great way to reach out to people (& promote the choir), it can also feel a little competitive when constantly seeing what other choirs are doing, and how successful they seem. I have to be careful not to feel pressured into ‘keeping up’ and worrying that I’m not doing enough.I love the connections I’ve made with other choir leaders, and the fact that the ethos is one of support, connection & sharing – it doesn’t feel competitive at all! So I’m feeling less isolated, and encouraged about my work, as well as knowing that there are so many lovely people to turn to for help (or just a chat!)  I have a tendency to hold back in big groups, but I feel comfortable when sharing here – feeling listened to and valued. Thank you so much to Beth for setting this up!

JO SAVILLE

Before joining Inspire, I felt confident with what I was doing but keen to network with others and boost my skills and confidence further. Being a part of inspire club has been like being in a supportive family of fellow choir leaders, all with different strengths and challenges, all with different types of choirs, but all who understand the struggles and who are there to lend a shoulder when needed but also to cheerlead when things go well. Yes, inspire club has provided some fantastic training sessions and resources,  but it is the mutual support that has made the biggest impact for me. I would never have thought I would join a group like this…but I’m so glad I did.

JESSA LIVERSIDGE