The Cyfarthfa Foundation is pleased to welcome three new board members, all of whom bring a wealth of experience that will be invaluable to support the plans for Cyfarthfa Park and Castle.
Alison Copus is a marketing professional with an extensive international career. She now lives in Swansea. After an early career with Ogilvy and Mather and American Express she became Marketing Director of Virgin Atlantic, a post she held for 12 years. She went on to head Virgin Management’s Entrepreneurs Unite, setting up the Branson School for Entrepreneurship to provide business skills for disadvantaged young people.
This was followed by five years as Vice President Marketing for TripAdvisor, tasked with expanding the brand outside the US to make it the world’s largest travel website. She has been a Board Member of the Institute of Welsh Affairs since 2018 and was part of the Leadership Team at Wales Millennium Centre between 2017 and 2021.
Bryony Bond has extensive experience in museums and galleries having worked as a Director and Curator for more than 20 years in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, London and Edinburgh. Since 2016 she has been Artistic Director of The Tetley at Leeds. Prior to The Tetley, she was exhibitions curator at the Whitworth in Manchester.
At The Tetley, she has created partnerships with organisations supporting disadvantaged women and girls, diverse communities and families with young children. In 2022 she launched the Tiny Tetley Studio, an artist commissioned play space for under-fives to which more than 5,000 families have signed up for access.
Julie Finch has been Chief Executive of the Hay Festival since 2022, the sixth cultural organisation that she has led during her career. Prior to her appointment to the Hay Festival she was Chief Executive of the Compton Verney House Trust where she oversaw a major grounds project to develop the 90-acre Capability Brown landscape, doubling the visitor numbers.
As the inaugural Chief Executive of The Cheltenham Trust, she had to reposition the charity, having brought the wide-ranging cultural assets out of local authority control. Prior to that Julie spent two years as the Project Director for the new museum for Western Australia, drawing on her previous experience on major capital projects gained whilst Director of Bristol’s Museums, Galleries and Archives. She has also been a member of the Arts Council of England’s National Council and a member of the Southwest Board of the National Heritage Lottery Fund.
The new members join at a pivotal time, as following the publication of The Cyfarthfa Plan in 2021, the key focus of the Foundation currently is to take inspiration from this strategic definition stage, and develop achievable, but aspirational, steps to bring about a transformation at Cyfarthfa. Alison, Julie and Bryony’s extensive skills in marketing, leadership and development as well as experience in heritage, culture and arts will be hugely significant during this next phase of the project.