Through Soundboard Consultancy Fiona Frank can support

• INDIVIDUALS
• SMALL BUSINESSES/ARTISTS/MUSICIANS/SOLE TRADERS
• ORGANISATIONS

individuals in personal projects like -

• Pre-planning for will-writing (thinking through all those tricky decisions before you visit the solicitor, like on the BBC2 programme "Can't Take It With You!")
• CV writing and job application support
• Branching back into higher education
• Conducting personal research projects

With Fiona's expert guidance, I managed, after a period of time at home with my family, to hone my CV and gain an interview for a job in my first choice of industry. I now look forward to returning to work with confidence. CG, Glasgow, December 2010.

Soundboard Consultancy provided me with a focused, thorough and professional review of a recent job application form I had completed. After revising the text in line with their comments, I got an interview and was subsequently made a job offer. Steve, Lancaster, January 2011.

artists, musicians, small businesses and sole traders - mentoring support

to help you talk through your work life balance, your business ideas and your PR/Marketing thoughts. Reasonable rates based on your projected income.

See www.hannahfrank.org.uk for a project Fiona has successfully driven for the last eight years to bring the art of Glasgow artist Hannah Frank (1908-2008) to public attention - including a reception at the Scottish Parliament, exhibitions in New York, Boston, and all round the UK, and substantial TV, radio and press coverage.

"Thanks for organising a poster advertising our small farm on Cape Clear Island at the port of Baltimore - our visitor numbers and ice cream sales have gone through the roof!"  Ed Harper, Cleire Goats, Cape Clear Island, West Cork. 

public sector organisations

support in bid sourcing and bid writing.

Fiona has twenty years of experience in bidwriting and delivering projects in adult education, higher education and third sector organizations.

"You have worked amazingly hard on the NLA/Senior Learners' project: no-one could have done more than you and...I doubt if anyone else could have made it run so well. ... As a result, many people in the area around Lancaster have become involved in learning programmes and access to education where they would not otherwise have done." VA, older learner, May 2010.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

• Writing successful funding bids in adult education and the third sector - including European, Government, Lottery, and Research Council funding sources.
• Adult education development and delivery
• Setting up and delivery of educational research, development and evaluation projects (in the fields of adult and workplace literacy, older people's learning and service development)
• Art marketing
• CV writing and job application support
• Listening skills and getting people to face difficult questions
• Oral history interviewing
• Sound recording and editing (personal interviews and music)
• Dyslexia support
• Development of Jewish community projects and Jewish policy research
• Networking, networking, and networking!

QUALIFICATIONS

Fiona Frank has a BA in European Studies from the University of Bath, an M.Ed in Adult Literacy from the University of Sheffield, and a PhD in the Centre for Oral History at the University of Strathclyde. She has done Project Management training with CETAD, Lancaster University, and has an RSA Certificate in Counselling in the Advancement of Learning and an Open University Professional Diploma in Post Compulsory Education. She speaks fluent French and some Spanish, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.

In her 'spare time' she's a Klezmer musician and dance caller, and avid novel reader and lives in Lancaster Cohousing, an ecovillage with shared communal facilities and managed offices and studios and coworking space (Halton Mill) in Halton outside Lancaster.
She has two current part time roles: operations manager at Halton Mill, and Projects and Outreach manager at SCoJeC, the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities. 

ASSOCIATES

Fiona Frank/Soundboard Consultancy can also work in association with Judith Coyle (wordsmith) and/or Adele at Moonloft - artist and graphic designer.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Fiona has bases in Lancaster and Glasgow and would be happy to carry out projects in Glasgow, Lancaster, London, nationwide, or internationally. Get in touch by phone or email - contact details below - to discuss short and medium term projects in any of the above areas.

Fiona Frank

fionafrank@gmail.com

+44 7778 737681

boxing day thoughts

Things I like

- flylady - the only way that I keep the house even slightly under control. Even though the people who were meant to be cat-sitting for us last summer left half way through, saying that the house was 'too dirty and grimy' for them (oops). We think that Swedes may have a different level of tolerance than Brits, perhaps - it might be all that Ikea clean living. But I did spend the whole of the rest of the day I got back cleaning out the fireplace which I must admit I hadn't bothered with for several years.

- phinished -since I found it, I haven't been alone doing my PhD. Amazing.

- spotify and last.fm : ways to listen to non-stop Klezmer music (and whatever else you like I suppose! but I wouldn't know...)

- anything by David Mitchell (the author not the Peep Show guy, though I like Webb on that)...

- Leeds College of Art Printed Textiles and Surface Pattern Design BA course that Anna hopes to get on next year - what a FABULOUS course and wonderful presentation we went to - I've linked to the course gallery. Paul Sunter the course leader did a brilliant job in showing how you can market a course through the students' work rather than through the tutors' brilliance.

what else makes me happy? the lovely gym I've joined in Glasgow at Maryhill

my lovely friends (especially, just at the moment, the ones who have PhDs or are working towards them and know to leave me alone - thank you Dr Elham and Dr Simone in Lancaster, Dr Catherine and Dr Julie in Scotland, and to nearly-drs Pam and Candace and Nat and Anna T

and my lovely rotating dinner party friends Andy Cathy and Celia (and Kate who would be there if she wasn't in Geneva, and Jo who would be there if she wasn't in Geneva) - looking forward to rejoining you this week and properly from mid-April

and Tina from Uni

and Diana Diana Susan Christine and Caroline who I had my happiest years with in London when we were all 18 (and who all came to Anna's batmitzvah four years ago (along with Karen - my oldest friend from schooldays) and who recently all met up at the Tate even though we're all 56!)

and finally, I'm working through "The Big Book of Me" by Nina Grunfeld. Things I am holding out for:

completing my phd by the spring...

finding a home for the original Hannah Frank drawings which I have inherited, so that they can be on show permanently in Scotland (a very new ambition)

getting into regular exercise, possibly dance (returning to) as well as gym (newer) and the normal swim, run and cycle that I've done for years.

and setting up a consultancy in the spring when the phd is safely off and out there.

see the next entry for more on the consultancy....

will it be daily?

Today I am working on the literature review section of my PhD...and wrapping some presents. How can I make that interesting? Well, if I can't, then the last 7 years will have been a bit of a waste of time. The presents - well I have a friend with a Goth daughter. I've bought her (the daughter, not the friend) some eyeliner (2 different sorts, both black of course) and some makeup remover. A bit like giving someone three wishes, the third wish is the thing to make the first two wishes disappear. The PhD..... as I said, if I can't engage you in this in a blog, what will that make of the last 7 years?

Here goes.

For the PhD I have managed to get in touch with every living descendent of Rabbi Zvi David Hoppenstein and Sophia Hoppenstein, a couple who arrived from Russia in Edinburgh in about 1872. What I was looking for was evidence of 'transmission of Jewish culture' - ie how, or whether, the religious tradition of Sarah and the extreme orthodoxy of the Rabbi* would play out in the rest of the family.

I knew some of them already - my aunt Hannah Frank was married to the couple's third grandchild, Lionel Levy; and through my aunt and uncle I'd met another grandson, Fred Stone, and great granddaughter, Doreen. There was a bit of detective work involved infinding some of the rest of the family, especially those who had 'married out' - ie 3 of the grandsons who had married non-Jewish spouses and, interestingly, were no longer in touch with the rest of the family.

Although I had started looking at 'transmission of culture' and all my thematic chapters are organised like that ('Jewish life in the home; Jewish public life') people talked lots about life at school and in higher education and I'm very interested in that. But mainly I found lots of people talking about being an 'outsider' - and not just the descendents of those who had married out!

So this week I've been reading and writing about being an insider-researcher (because I'm Jewish too) but also an outsider-researcher (because I'm not Scottish, or not quite Jewish enough to understand all the Hebrew used by some of the informants, or not male, or not in my eighties.... or, being Jewish, I'm an 'insider' for some of the people who might see themselves as 'outsiders'..)

hopefully by the time THAT gets to my supervisors it will be clearer. But it's quite exciting for me!

anyway back to work. (I use 'Phinished' for support and there are lots of phd students all over the world working away in the chat rooms and checking in for 5 or 10 minutes every hour or half hour.... a brilliant way to be on my own but not on my own. As is this blog, of course - especially if I start getting a following!)

(*extract from his obituary: "Even when he had reached an age at which many men seek rest, he did not hesitate to officiate on Yom Kippur, reciting all the prayers, reading the portions of the Law, preaching at Kol Nidrei, Musaph and Neila, and finally blowing the Shofar triumphantly. ... His Hebrew scholarship was of no mean order. " The obit also mentioned the fact that he "never sought easy popularity and throughout his life he maintained uncompromisingly the high principles in which he believed" .....which gives an idea of what he was really like!)

first of many???

Good evening....having eaten nearly a complete Terry's Chocolate Orange this morning I am full of happiness and energy. Hmmm. I should have been at Liverpool Airport meeting my lovely friend Jo and entourage there (who is currently, hopefully, somewhere between Geneva and Shropshire - with her uncle who has a 4x4 rather than with me who has a rather tiny Renault). So in the extra free time that I gained from the motorway being closed due to icy accidents and the trains all being cancelled due to signal failures at Oxenholme, I decided I would start up my blog again and see what happens.

The first thing I thought of is that I now have a connection with someone who has 12000 followers on her Twitter site - Kirsty Henshaw, who's my niece's best friend. After appearing onDragon's Den earlier this year she got sponsorship and has had the most amazing year - her allergy-free frozen desserts in every supermarket, she's in OK this month!, she opened the new Preston Sainsbury's last week, she's speaking at a national business conference next year, things are shooting sky-high for her.

So I asked her to promote my aunt Hannah Frank's signed prints on her twitter page - so we'll see what happens with that!

It's coming up to the end of the year and like Kirsty, the Hannah Frank art project has been going from strength to strength. My aunt died two years ago this month: at the age of 100. I was with her on the day that she died, a privilege that I will never forget. In the year leading up to her death she'd been present at the opening of an art exhibition of her work at Glasgow University, her alma mater, which opened the day before her hundredth birthday. Miriam Margolyes and Jim Murphy (Secretary of State for Scotland at the time) came to her birthday party. The Scottish Parliament honoured her with a reception (thanks a lot to ; and the University honoured her with a conference. The day she died, a letter arrived at my house, saying that the University of Glasgow had decided to give her an Honorary Doctorate - and in June 2009 she was given the very first Posthumous Honorary Doctorate that Glasgow University had ever awarded. (which I accepted on her behalf....)

This year there's been a fabulous exhibition in Glasgow at the Hidden Lane Gallery and there's currently an exhibition at the Gregson Community Centre in Lancaster (the photos show Andy Hornby and Paula Foster who hung the exhibition; and me being skyped in from Glasgow on the opening night when the snow stopped the trains....and lighting chanukah candles by remote control!)

What else has been happening this year? Well: future blogs will include updates on my phd till I submit, hopefully in early spring ..... Lancaster Cohousing ..... Lancaster and Lakes Jewish Community .... my Glasgow retreat .... last July's redundancy from the Dept of Continuing Education at Lancaster University (and what it's been like signing on this year) .... the things that irk me.... the things that excite me .... novels.... art.... poetry ..... the dismantling of the public sector and what on earth I'm going to do for a living when I've submitted my PhD this spring. ..... and as it looks like I'm going to be an educational consultant again (as there don't seem to be any jobs) I need to be KNOWN. I am excited that I might be doing a few partnership projects with Lucy Lloyd by the way - we've been shortlisted for at least one project and will be bidding for more. So WATCH THIS SPACE.

I wish I hadn't just had to donate my Season's Greetings card money to the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture but it looks like THAT organisation is going to be needed for many years to come.

love, Fiona.....