Jean is a fully qualified marketer with more than twenty years’ senior management experience in the not for profit sector. She has held many high-profile roles including being the First Chief Executive of national campaigning Charity the Drinkaware Trust, The first Chief Executive of Gold Medalists and Paralympic Sport, Great British Wheelchair Rugby. Other senior management roles have included Interim Director of Development for LAMDA ( London Academy Of Music and Dramatic Art) five years as Director of The Prince’s Trust, Interim Director of Public Affairs for Disability Charity, Leonard Cheshire, and Director of Fundraising and Marketing for The Princess Royal Trust for Carers where she managed two fundraising teams based in London and Glasgow.

Jean is CEO of Ingenious Group, a multi award winning firm and network, whose clients have included HRH The Prince of Wales, Richard Branson, and 80 of the UK’s top 100 charities and companies. In-house Assignments for Ingenious Group have included Development Director of Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra where she managed a global fundraising campaign for their Bach Cantata Pilgrimage Project, accompanied the Choir and Orchestra & SMT throughout Europe and the US. Raising more than five million pounds in one year. This included a creating series of high profile fundraising events hosted at Buckingham Palace, and corporate events to raise funding for a World Tour and recording series with the BBC. Other music projects included a wide range of high profile cultivation and donor events with The Bach Choir (London). Generating income from Trusts and Foundations, Digital Giving, Friends and innovative US Patron Schemes.

Previous Non-Executive appointments include Director for the NHS for three years chairing their charity, she has acted as Chair for Mental Health Tribunals, and was Deputy Chair of the BBC serving for three years. She was a visiting lecturer at London South Bank University teaching at post graduate level Strategic Charity Marketing and Charity Communication strategies.

Passion for the Arts

Jean has a lifelong passion for the Creative and Performing Arts in all its forms, with a successful track record of securing large-scale support and investment for music, theatre, drama, and charitable artistic projects.

Roots and heritage

Born and raised in Scotland, with Irish roots, she has lived in Yorkshire and London most of her working life and is a proud mother to two sons; A Lawyer and rights specialist, the other a Managing Director of a Digital Company. Jean is married to well known British Contemporary Figurative Artist, Paul Milner, a former professional musician.

Jean is an accomplished communicator, a big picture thinker and published writer, from scripts to blogs, from research papers to Parliamentary Reports, fundraising proposals, TV formats, innovative income generation pitches and projects.

As format creator, she directed and produced the Multi-Award winning Marketing for Good later dubbed by Channel 4 as “A High Octane- Dragons Den meets X Factor live show.

In 2011, her pitch and treatment won a BBC Writers Room Competition and led to the full commission of  “Pauline’s Gift” her first full-length play, performed at Hull Truck Theatre in 2012.

Jean has been recoginsed as a Winner of “Women in Business Awards” and on three different years winning Global CEO Excellence Awards, as Social Marketing CEO of Year, UK. (Awards)