Early Retirement for our founder Eleanor Vale

July 2025

Hello everyone,

After founding Loudmouth and running the company with my friend Chris Cowan for 31 years, I am taking early retirement this summer. I am leaving Loudmouth in the more than capable hands of Chris and our five amazing managers and staff. Caroline Bridges, who many of you already work with, will be in charge of everything tour and Matt Farmer is moving across from managing our incredible Actor Facilitators to leading on getting our work out to as many children and young people as possible. He will be taking over my role of getting in new bids and commissions and will also be working with all the 100s of schools that fund our work themselves. Louise Green will carry on as our Company Manager, ruling over everything finance, IT, HR, Health & Safety, the list goes on. Jodi Farmer will take over as the Actor Facilitator Manager, assisted by Alec White.

I have been thinking about my time with Loudmouth and realised that apart from writing our scripts (that’s always been Chris’s skill), I think I have done every single job in the company including bookkeeping and payroll, administration of sessions in schools, most areas of sales and marketing, and of course until about 10 years ago, the acting and facilitating (I really had to stop playing a 9 year old in my mid 40s!)

The picture shows me and Chris in 1995 running our programme, My Mate Fancies You on puberty. The programme in an updated form, with mobile phones and the references to Take That changed, is still going, 30 years on! And is still a favourite with schools. The world has changed a lot since then, but what still is the same, is that children and young people need to be heard, worked with respectfully and engaged in exciting and memorable ways to learn. I had a meeting with a Community Safety Officer a while ago, who as a child had been in a My Mate session I’d run. He remembered so much about the session that he had been in over 20 years ago, even the bit about ‘wet dreams’, which I found hilarious if a little embarrassing!

I am incredibly proud of the work that Loudmouth does and what Chris and I have created and managed since 1994. Our programmes have reached around 1.5 million children, young people and professionals in that time. I often think that even if just 1% of those we work with, as a result of being in a Loudmouth session change a negative behaviour into a positive or disclose to a trusted adult the unsafe situation they are living in, it was worth all the hard work that goes into keeping a company like this going. We know that these impacts happen not just through evaluation, but seeing it happen every day in the sessions; I believe some things are hard to evaluate, you just know. When I was an Actor Facilitator, running our sessions in schools, every day you saw a moment, heard a comment or had an encounter, that made you realise how important it is that we get these safeguarding messages out in an accessible, engaging and dynamic way, as we do at Loudmouth.

Creating and running Loudmouth has been more that a job to me, it’s been a way of life. I will particularly miss my colleagues and our company meetings, where we hear about how all the sessions have been going over the past 2 weeks. The stories are always moving and funny and always remind us why we do what we do. I will miss the friends I have made through our work – commissioners, advocates, teachers – do keep in touch with me!!

I’d like to thank everyone of you who has and carries on to promote and support Loudmouth. We really appreciate it especially in these times of cuts and schools’ budgets at an all-time low, please keep the faith.

Lastly, I’d like to wish our amazing team, under Chris’s leadership the very best in moving Loudmouth into 2026 and beyond.

With my very best wishes,

Eleanor (El)