A life coach and creative practitioner, Jackie, founder of BEE You! Personal Development Ltd, is passionate about supporting people to embrace arts and literature, of course for enjoyment, also as effective ways of enhancing personal development and wellbeing. Jackie promotes journaling as a personal development & wellbeing practice, facilitating a range of journaling sessions including ‘Journal to BEEing Your Best You!’, ‘Journaling & Healing’ & ‘Journaling, Vision & Purpose’. She is currently developing a guided journal for publication.

A lover of literature and a keen advocate of arts for wellbeing, Jackie is a Manchester UNESCO City of Literature Community Champion. In this role she has championed and co-designed multi-genre programmes sharing a world of literature that embraces spoken word, music, journaling, poetry and more. This includes the Windrush NHS Stories programme, part of the Untold Stories of the NHS project.

Jackie set up and coordinated Sistas G.A.L! (Get Active with Literature), a reading group for Black women of the African Diaspora that developed into involvement with wider arts. Group discussions were the catalyst for the initial BEE You! retreat. Jackie hosted a Sistas GAL! community radio show for a time, she also curated several successful events, with strong grass roots engagement, featuring African diaspora female creatives based in the UK, North America and the Caribbean.

Jackie is also a Management Consultant specialising in: diverse stakeholder engagement; policy, action plan and strategy development and implementation; equity and inclusion. She draws on her coaching expertise and her experience working with minoritised communities, to co-design and curate programmes and activities that innovatively involve people with literature and other creative forms.

Born in Manchester to Jamaican parents, Jackie has a BA Hons. American Studies and MSc. Equal Opportunities Studies. She enjoys experiences over ‘things’.