Interview with Christine Watson MBE, 3rd June 2026

00:00:00 Lauren Golding

Hello, I'm Lauren from Discovery. It's the 3rd of June 2026 and I'm here with Christine Watson MBE. Hello Chris.

00:00:08 Christine Watson

Hello there.

00:00:11 Lauren Golding

Please could you start by telling me about your connection to Discovery?

00:00:14 Christine Watson

Okay, so I was employed back in 1993 as, I can't even remember what my job title was then, I think it might have been development worker, but during the time it was changed to managing director, and 23 really good years as an employee.

00:00:33 Lauren Golding

Could you tell me a little bit about the responsibilities you had?

00:00:36 Christine Watson

Okay, so many, many sums that up quite quickly.

So, in a nutshell, it was trustee recruitment and training along with project coordinators, staff management, we had varying amounts of teams between two and seven of us, overall project management, policies implementation, finances, wages, funding reports, lots of money stuff with budgets, funding applications. So negotiating with funders and driving minibuses, so a very wide variety of a day, always backed up with a great staff team.

Networking was also a key role for me across the voluntary sector and other student networks across the UK, which gave way to the SCA Wales Development Unit when educational funding was devolved in Wales in 1999.

00:01:29 Lauren Golding

Could you tell me a little bit about what Discovery looked like during your time?

00:01:33 Christine Watson

So, my predecessor had managed to secure funding from the university for my post. So that was a first. And initially then I started with Jason as a project worker and Gina was our admin worker at the time. There was only one computer in the office then, which probably quite hard to imagine these days. But yes, one computer, so all the admin went through Gina.

Structure was probably much the same as it is now in that we had volunteers running all the projects with a trustee board made-up primarily of students and some non-student trustees to support that and to give some continuity. So, they held post for three years traditionally, although I know some of them have been here a lot longer than that. So that organisation was the same.

In the early days then we managed to secure James Callaghan, Lord Callaghan as our patron, which gave us access to more funding and a little bit more street cred if you like, with funding coming in from America and that was a really absolute bonus for us because that helped us do lots of things that you couldn't do through structured funding. So that was good because his money was, he just gave money to the organisation and said do something good with it, which was brilliant.

So yeah, I think in essence the structure was the same, but probably on a slightly smaller scale and not so much admin involved.

00:03:08 Lauren Golding

What type of projects were there?

00:03:10 Christine Watson

So, with the projects, when I first came along, there had been a rapid expanse in the number of projects that my predecessor had brought about. And one of the first questions I was always asked is, “oh, how many more projects are we going to have?” And I didn't feel that was the right way to go. So, we looked at consolidation.

I got involved with virtually every project at that time, which was great, but I also needed to understand them. And make sure that people weren't doing things that I perhaps wouldn't be prepared to do. So, I really sort of got stuck into the projects and looked at what agendas we were meeting and was the project actually doing well. So, I did a lot of that in my early days.

We had projects like the Bunch of Grapes which was reading to isolated patients in hospital. That worked well until the volunteering policies in the NHS were changed and therefore they didn't want volunteers coming in.

So, we had Hoppits, one of the biggest projects that was around when I came in. Hoppits for children with disabilities. They loved the project. The project was a huge success. I mean it was one of our biggest, Hoppits and Kids Away were our biggest projects by far. And Hoppits just grew up basically. And some of those people I know are still involved today. So, you know they've been involved since they were children and they're now probably in their 40s. I think some of them are. So, that was a real success project, but we had to change in order to meet their needs all the time.

And we had another project that was Inside Out and I remember the discussions around that when we had a request from another organisation to work with adults, with adults on the autistic spectrum. And when I took that to the Trustee Board, they were like, “not sure if that's particularly exciting. Wouldn't it be fabulous if we could work with children?”

So, we went back through the Autistic Society and we had a lot of work to do to build up trust with the parents, to convince them that it was fine to just let their children go with some students who were very excitable. But it worked. It worked. And it did take time to build that trust. But the project was a huge success. And I always remember that was one of our flagships and having parents and the Autistic Society coming back to us and saying, “wow, we didn't think that would work.” But it did. It was brilliant.

And I also remember we had a fundraising project where students were taking on challenges such as marathons and skydiving. And for a short time, a charity shop, not one of our best successes, but we did it for a couple of years. It was a good experience, I guess. Not everything can work, but that was okay.

We had a drive project because we had two minibuses to look after and all the associated legislation that goes with that, because then people then had to take minibus driving tests and there were lots of laws that came in around that as well, which made it harder and harder because the age limit, when that was brought in was harder for people to drive minibuses.

We had a social team that ensured that the projects mixed together as well, rather than just working in isolation. There was some means of bringing people together so that people knew what other projects were doing and things as well. So that was good.

So that was mainly my experience around the projects.

00:06:43 Christine Watson

I mean, I think a typical day in Discovery is absolutely chaotic. That's a said, but it is in a good way. It's such a dynamic organisation and such variety. And that's what I really loved about the job was that no two days were ever the same. And students popping in to discuss their projects, minibuses breaking down, being trashed, but being trashed by kids who didn't want the project to end that day. So, it was their way of making a stay. Yeah, it was, just brilliant. So, project activities were fabulous. And growing and changing all the time.

And then lots and lots of changes to come about, as I say, for 23 years, obviously, lots and lots of changes. Some were led by ourselves, some by government and voluntary sector changes. When the widening participation agenda came into force, we needed to change the way in which we worked to students. The previous life experiences were not as broad as they had been perhaps, meaning that we needed more support and training to be in place. And that's when we changed our name to Discovery and grouped the projects together to facilitate that.

But changes also came about through external changes. So, partner organisations needed to understand how to give sufficient autonomy to the students. It was really important and they were sort of, it's their project, but if we're going to work with it, it has to be the students' project. And obviously then understanding educational priorities and timetables and things like that. So that was a piece of work.

Government and voluntary sector agendas also gave rise in the popularity of projects and funding. So, there was a rise and fall in what was flavour of the month in terms of the funders really.

And one of the big things for me, I guess, in the time was the formalisation of volunteering. Because I think when I came into the organisation, it was very much like we go and do good things. And then over the time with all of this stuff going on in the background, we had to get more structure in. So, we had to meet the requirements for example of investing in volunteers, Millennium Volunteer programmes, the HEAR Awards within the university, the National Lottery and other funding bodies all sort of came about. 

And we had some interesting projects that sort of latched on alongside that as well. So, we worked with the university on a project to support students with disabilities in order for them to come in and get the full benefit of their university experience. So, they were helping them not only with their personal care, but also general support alongside them with revision and getting to and from lectures and things as well. So that was a really interesting project for a time as well. That worked well.

And yeah, we had an assistant manager come in then, Hannah, who facilitated that project really well. So, it was good, meant another change in working because obviously the exam results came out in the summer. So where traditionally we closed for August, now we were open because we had to recruit people in order to be ready for the start of the next term.

And then the Swansea City of Sanctuary project was a three-year partnership project that we ran, funded by the National Lottery. And we did the bid and partnership with the Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Group and the staff team were based in Discovery, so I managed them as well, slightly a bit of work, but we also managed to engage lots of students in working with asylum seekers and refugees.

And in the end, I'll come back into that again, but in the end that also led us to having a teachers’ programme with the project in Zambia. So that was sort of a full circle, having gone out and done awards for a school, being involved in becoming a school of sanctuary within that programme. Then also said, well, how are you going to put this into practice? And so, they came out to Zambia and set up the school links with us and that programme has been going well.

So for me, one of the most exciting changes, I guess, was setting up a project that enabled students to volunteer overseas in Zambia. Working alongside volunteers in Zambia, so local volunteers that we'd recruited, and they were facilitating workshops and sharing experiences with women and children living in extreme poverty in Siavonga. And as I say, then we got the students involved to us, but I think that project for me was an absolute icing on the cake, to actually be able to take students abroad and for them to be able to share that cultural experience in another way and to use their education and putting it into very practical terms in another country was amazing.

00:11:50 Lauren Golding

Wonderful. Thank you.

Could you tell me a little bit more about the Siavonga project? What sort of things did students do while they were out there?

00:11:58 Christine Watson

Okay, initially, I'll go back to the drawing board a little bit.

Initially, both Hannah and I were selected by the Welsh Government programme. They were running an international learning opportunities programme for public sector and obviously charity sector, voluntary sector, have to have some places given to them. So, we were fortunate enough to get two of those places. And Hannah went out into Lusaka in the Easter with a tranche of volunteers doing that project and she worked on that project for a little while. But when she came back, when it came to my turn, I could only go in the summer months when the bulk of the students weren't around.

So, I went off there on a placement that I thought initially was three weeks, but actually it was three months. Living and working in Zambia alongside women who lived in total poverty and helping them. My remit was to reduce poverty. Well, that wasn't going to happen. Hopefully we did a little bit towards it, but certainly not the way it had been written out.

And I did the same things as we did here, basically. I ran workshops for women. In the same way, much as we would do project coordinators training, I did there. I sort of thought about what we're going to do here. I needed to listen about what it was they needed, about how to run their projects and then regurgitated that back into a very similar programme to our project coordinators training.

When I got back here, I had the opportunity to talk to all sorts of people. I couldn't shut up about it actually. So, one of those things that had been talked about was the environmental department here in the university and somebody picked that up and the international development office said, “how do we get our students to have that sort of an experience?” And so they said, “we'll pay for you to go back and work it out”, which is what I did myself and I recruited a volunteer, Lindsay, to come along with me and we got some extra funding in from the Wales Council for Voluntary Action, the Wales for Africa programme.

And we went out there, we did some consultations, we did some here in the university first and then we did some consultations out in Zambia, looking at how the students could engage in a similar sort of project, what the needs were out there and how we could bring them back. So having got all of that information about all of their needs, which are massive, we brought it in together in a strategic plan and said, right, this is what we could do and this is how students could work towards that. 

So having brought that back and got it approved by the university, risk assessment was fun, you know, hippos, crocodiles. But anyway, having got that approved, we managed, we took our first group of students out in 2011, and we worked on those five themes, which was environmental, livelihoods, health, not sure I remember them all. And each of the students selected what programmes they would fit in best to and then they would work out what sort of workshops that they would run. 

So, first aid was a common factor. We did a lot of first aid workshops. Environmental was always interesting. So, we did things like fires where you had extended chimneys that would come up so that people weren't breathing over the coals. So obviously that had a health implication as well. Business skills was high. Most of the women that we worked with had never been to school, so didn't know anything about business schools in terms of basic finance, budgeting, and yet they were running their own businesses.

So, the whole spectrum of project activities, but the students then would work on their workshops, gather all the materials that they needed and then we'd get out there. They would then work alongside some local volunteers that had been recruited, which was useful because we needed them for translation as well, but also very keen that wasn't their only part. We were looking at their input for context as well, because obviously none of us had been there and lived in that sort of environment. So, putting all that together just made such a dynamic project where we were running workshops in tandem with those volunteers with some translations going on, engaging the women and then we took that project into schools and then that developed as well. Then the teachers would come in afterwards and then do the teachers’ programme as well.

For me it was one of the most exciting things I could have ever done and I know that the students involved in it generally feel the same, that actually it was such an amazing experience. So, I think we were all very lucky to have been part of that. So absolutely loved it.

00:16:57 Lauren Golding

Sounds incredible.

00:16:59 Christine Watson

It was, I think it was.

00:17:02 Lauren Golding

So, what did you love most about being involved with Discovery, other than Zambia?

00:17:07 Christine Watson

Yeah, other than Zambia, becomes hard to say that now. Because it wasn't that, obviously a large part of my time wasn't that, but it probably was the most life-changing experience for me.

But, I absolutely loved working with the students. I think the vibe generally every day, every day just the vibe that is around in Discovery, which is lovely to see that has continued. And I think the fact that the students come along, they've got lots of ideas dedicated to what they're doing. They're there because they want them to be there. And that was That was a great thing. I think that people actually chose to do this.

I had many arguments from people along the way about saying, “oh, students do it because it's good for their CV”. No, absolute rubbish. People do this because they absolutely want to, the dedication. But what they get from being involved in the projects, project solving, problem solving, with many problems come up along the way and we worked them out together, how are we going to solve that and get on with it and we always did.

I loved watching the students develop, I loved watching particularly somebody coming in quite timid and shy coming into the office in the first place, how do I sign up, to leaving us running high flying meetings, sort of doing presentations in front of the Lord Lieutenant's office or hosting a national student conference that we've done, just watching that development and also then knowing that those people have gone on to really good jobs generally. A lot of them went on to jobs more connected with their discovery experience, which is amazing. And to know that they are still investing in the community, I just think that Discovery experiences has helped everybody along the way. So, it's got to be my key thing.

I mean, I do have some other very funny, I've got lots of memories, but I remember a particular weekend being down in Devon with Active18. And watching the students encourage the members then to go and source what activities they wanted to do. So, they had to go down and find out all these leaflets about what was activities in the area and then getting into groups and then selecting which one they were going to choose and then that group having to make a pitch for that activity to all of the others and then everybody taking a vote. And I think the funniest thing was watching one person in particular make a pitch for this one and then voting for something else, which was very funny.

But just watching that empowerment taking place and how the students engage in that. I mean I also remember that weekend going into the social club, that, where you could sense that people were looking at you and going, “oh what are these people doing here?” But by the end of the evening absolutely partying together and doing that, and it was just such fun. So, I just think that breaking down barriers is an essential part of what Discovery does, but in such a brilliant way, you know, it's just fabulous.

Training weekends were always great fun, where everybody got to know each other so well, including me. And yeah, I think that was good. I think, I remember arguing with the funder at one time over the benefits of having a weekend away and saying, “yeah, yeah, it's just a party time”. It's not, it just is that breaking down all of that stigma, it’s not just coming into a classroom and learning about this. It's that whole experience about actually getting to know people and how to work with people better. So, they were always one of my things.

And, as I said, when talking about students coming in and being able to present their work in a high way, Discovery receiving the Queen's Award, so being able to showcase how students run their projects and manage the charity at the highest levels was fantastic, you know, and I think I challenged them a lot on that because they didn't think it was the right place for us to have that and they didn't think the students should be doing the talks. And I said no, no, no, it's a student-led organisation, they are going to do this. And by golly they did. Fantastic. Yeah, absolutely fantastic.

I think other, talking about favourite projects as well, I was always, I always loved the gardening and decorating project. I think it was one of those projects where the students could actually sell it and say, come along and help us out. You get plenty of cake. Because I think on paper, it's gardening and decorating. In essence, it's not. It's life changing for people. It's about tackling isolation.

One case in particular I remember where the students were so, I think, actually so distressed by the poverty when they went to see this chap of how he was living, that they went back several times, which we didn't very often do. But we went back to this house, and they cleaned his house up and they taught him how to cook. Basic things, a bowl of pasta, because he wasn't eating anything. He just didn't know how to look after himself. And they cleaned the house from top to bottom and they decorated, and it was lovely. And I think so rewarding for them. And really, really changed the end of that guy's life and his view on things and his view on students in particular and young people. I think he lived in an area that was predominantly rough and his perceptions of young people weren't this, but they were definitely challenged and it was such a beautiful project.

Yeah, tea and cake as well as gardening and decorating to do that.

And Active18 always brought a smile to my face. And as we said before, I always adored the women in Siavonga, but I've always been mostly proud of the students' achievements.

00:23:25 Lauren Golding

Wonderful.

Could you tell me a little bit about how your time with Discovery has impacted your life afterwards?

00:23:32 Christine Watson

Okay. Yes.

So yeah, I talk about the fantastic experiences that students can have with Discovery, but it touches the hearts of everybody in it. 

And I felt that every day was a learning day. I mean, every day was different. I've said that every day was different. So you never knew what you were going to come up with. Yeah, just every day was learning. And so, I grew myself. I mean, I was fortunate enough to have my work acknowledged through the MBE for services to education in Swansea and particularly student volunteering. But obviously that sort of students have it, but my growth within that was huge. I sort of came into a job not really knowing what I was taking on. I'd had lots of experience in the voluntary sector and different ways, but I think never having been to university myself, never having had access to that, it was phenomenal. I mean, Freshers Fair was a baptism of fire. My first one, because I'd never been to it as a student. So come along there. But I just felt that everything, every day was learning, engaging with people, learning from other people, inspirational. And yes, I've carried that on now.

So, I've been retired for 10 years, but I still volunteer. I don't do as much now as I did, but I'm still volunteering. I facilitated in a group this morning with the friends and neighbours charity, which again it's about bringing people together and sharing experiences and I love it. So, I have carried it through. I'm passionate about that. I'm always talking about, you know, I don't understand why people don't do, why you don't do volunteering. Why do people, why do you want to do that? You know, you don’t get paid for it. No, but you get massive rewards from it. And I get that even now for myself. So, I'm still carrying that on 10 years later into any avenues that I can.

00:25:38 Lauren Golding

Amazing. If you could describe Discovery one word, what would you say?

00:25:44 Christine Watson

Inspirational.

00:25:46 Lauren Golding

Wonderful.

Well, thank you very much.