Latest news with #CapitalConversations
Business News Wales
31-07-2025
- Business
- Business News Wales
Sponsorship Is a Two-Way Partnership at Cardiff Business Club
When Cardiff Business Club was founded in 1912, coal was still king and Cardiff was at the heart of global industry. Much has changed in the century since, but the Club's mission – to connect businesspeople, exchange ideas, and help shape the economic conversation in Wales – remains as relevant now as it was then. Relevance is a word I keep coming back to. As Chair, it's something I think about a lot. We have a proud history, but that history only matters if we use it as a foundation, not a resting place. I believe strongly that Cardiff Business Club should reflect the Wales we live and work in today and that means being open, outward-looking, and genuinely representative of the business community around us. That commitment to relevance runs through everything we do, from the calibre and diversity of our speakers to the makeup of the room. At our final event of the season in June, the split between men and women attending was roughly 50/50. That might sound unremarkable now, but when I think back to the stories shared in the Club's centenary book – about the resistance, not so long ago, to admitting women as members at all – it's clear just how far we've come. Our programme is also evolving. Last season we hosted roundtables in partnership with the Design Commission for Wales, exploring specific topics like transport in more depth. We co-hosted a major event with the CBI that brought 400 people into the room. And we've continued to welcome a wide range of speakers – from our Club President, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson to Rupert Soames – who challenge, inspire and engage. This autumn, we'll welcome the Irish Ambassador, a senior military leader and the First Minister of Wales. Each of those events reflects our aim: to be a space where people can hear directly from decision-makers and leaders, and where the business community can have a voice in shaping the future. Of course, none of this happens in isolation. The Club is made stronger through the support of its sponsors, and as we look ahead to the 2025–26 season, I want to encourage more businesses to consider coming on board. Sponsorship isn't just about visibility, though we work hard to ensure our partners receive that. It's about connection. Whether it's through panel events, collaborative roundtables, or podcasts like our own series Capital Conversations, we're creating more ways than ever for our sponsors to engage with the business community and with policymakers. Our partners gain real opportunities to showcase their work and contribute to meaningful conversations. And in return, the Club benefits from fresh perspectives, new networks, and stronger ties across Wales and beyond. We've seen this in action with organisations like Bute Energy and Swansea Building Society, both of whom have taken a lead role in our recent programme. Their involvement has helped shape the Club's direction and, in turn, we've helped shine a light on their work and values. I want to see more businesses benefit in the same way. That's why we're continuing to build bridges. We've hosted events with other organisations, and we're starting to attend them too. In July, for example, we'll take a table at a Swansea Business Club event, strengthening ties across the country. We're also bringing together senior figures from institutions like the Bank of England for small, focused discussions that allow for direct engagement – something many of our sponsors have found particularly valuable. So if you're a business leader thinking about getting involved, my message is simple: now is a good time to act. The new season is shaping up well, with many of our events already confirmed, and there are real opportunities for sponsors to contribute in a way that's visible, meaningful and genuinely rewarding. Getting in touch is easy. Visit the website – – or reach out to me or any member of the board. We'll be happy to start a conversation. Phil Jardine talks about this and more in the Capital Conversations, The Cardiff Business Club Podcast episode Corporate Engagement and Cardiff Business Club. Listen to the podcast here.
The Herald Scotland
24-05-2025
- Health
- The Herald Scotland
Goodburn's story shows sport can steady the mind when body betrays us
I'm sitting recovering from a hard 18 holes of golf here in Jamaica and my mind drifts to next week. I'm returning to Edinburgh for an evening of conversation with Capital Conversations via America, London then a long drive up through the country to hopefully arrive fresh and ready. Capital Conversations: Inside the Mind will be held at The University of Edinburgh in partnership with Macleod Media. I'll be sharing the stage with Archie Goodburn, a world championship medalist, a Commonwealth Games swimmer, and someone who, like me, lives with a chronic, complex medical condition that offers no cure, but no clear end either. Archie represents the best of Scottish sport. But it's not just his speed in the water that makes him remarkable. It's his story outside of it. In 2024, Archie went public with a diagnosis that changed everything: three inoperable oligodendrogliomas, a rare form of brain cancer. The news came after months of unexplained seizures and numbness, symptoms which he initially wrote off as migraines. At just 22, he was thrust into a world of scans, uncertainty, and life-altering conversations with doctors, the kind that leave you suspended between hope and fear. What makes Archie's path so resonant for me is this shared middle ground we both occupy. We're not terminal. But we're not 'cured' either. We live in the grey area, the daily negotiation between gratitude for life and the anxiety of not knowing what's next. In those moments lying in the MRI scanner, hearing a consultant walk in with new results, you don't feel like an athlete. You just feel human. Exposed. Powerless. And yet, Archie keeps swimming. He won silver in the 50m breaststroke at the 2025 Aquatics GB Swimming Championships, a performance that speaks volumes not just about talent, but about sheer psychological endurance. Like me, he's found that sport becomes more than a profession or pastime it becomes a coping mechanism. A form of control when everything else feels unsteady. His strength, both physical and emotional, is exactly why I'm looking forward to this conversation. It's not about medals. It's about meaning. How we move forward, not because we're fearless, but because we've learned how to carry the fear. Beyond the pool, Archie is pursuing an Integrated Masters in Chemical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His academic excellence was recognised when he was awarded the Principal's Medal in 2024, honouring his outstanding contributions to the university community. For both of us, sport has been our scaffolding, a way to steady the mind when the body betrays us. Edinburgh also holds a unique place in my story. While I didn't study at the university, I spent countless hours at FASIC - the sports medicine clinic - tucked behind the gym. That's where I rehabbed many injuries over the years. Long before I ever sat across from a consultant delivering life-altering news, I would spend hours and hours with the medical team and the well known physio Sand Lysol who has looked after hundreds of Scottish athletes. And that's the thread that runs through this upcoming conversation: control, or the loss of it. Whether you're on the start line of a final, staring down the lane, or lying still in an MRI scanner, waiting for answers, the emotional weight is oddly similar. The same surge of anxiety, the same deep breath, the same flicker of doubt. You know everything could change in a moment. And you have no control. When a doctor walks into the room with a scan result, time warps. There's no warm-up. No preparation. Just news that can rewrite your life in a sentence. You try to brace for it, but the body reacts anyway, your heart races, your mouth dries, your legs feel like lead. That's why sport is more than an outlet. It's survival almost. It teaches us how to stay present. How to regulate the chaos. How to fall apart and still finish the race. The habits built on the track, in the gym, or on the course, they carry over into the darkest, loneliest places. They remind us that resilience is not about pretending to be okay. It's about finding rhythm in uncertainty. And rhythm, for me, has always started with movement. This event is about what happens inside, inside the mind of athletes, yes, but also inside the bodies that won't always cooperate. Inside the medical systems. Inside the quiet spaces between diagnosis and decision. If you're in or around Edinburgh this coming Thursday, we wouid love for you to join us. There are only a handful of tickets left. Rhona Macleod will be hosting the conversation, and if you know Rhona, you'll know she brings empathy and depth to every word. This is not a sports talk. It's a human one. A conversation about identity, pressure, uncertainty, and purpose. And maybe, just maybe, it'll help someone else standing on their own start line or sitting in their own MRI scanner feel a little less alone.
The National
08-05-2025
- Sport
- The National
Rhona McLeod on shining a spotlight on our "inspirational" athletes
It's not where you might think; in McLeod's opinion, many of the most interesting, inspirational and moving tales within Scottish sport come not from the football world but from athletes who excel in so-called 'minority sports'. McLeod has interviewed everyone who's anyone in the world of Scottish sport; she began her career as a journalist in the 1980s at the athletics magazine, Scotland's Runner, before joining BBC Scotland where, for over 20 years, she was a regular on television screens and radio airwaves across the country. It was during her years as one of the faces of BBC Scotland that McLeod began to realise that many of Scotland's best sporting stories were not being given the spotlight they deserve. And it's this conviction that led her to develop her new initiative, 'Capital Conversations'. In collaboration with Edinburgh University, the monthly Capital Conversations event takes place in front of a live audience and aims to showcase some of Scotland's most successful, but often unheralded, athletes and will McLeod hopes, go some way to increasing the appreciation of some of Scotland's greatest-ever athletes. McLeod interviewing Yared Nuguse trackside at Paris 2024 (Image: .) 'Growing up, I loved watching all sports, so when I became a sports journalist, I considered all the different sports. When I started with the BBC in 1995, though, I was shocked at quite how much the focus was on men's football,' she says. 'I've interviewed literally thousands of people over the years, and the athletes I speak to from these smaller sports are incredible, inspiring, motivational, funny, hard-working, intelligent and eloquent. 'Footballers and football managers can be quite suspicious of the media whereas working with athletes from different sports is just so much more enjoyable for me because they so often give amazing interviews, and that's why I've gone in this direction with Capital Conversations.' There's been two Capital Conversation events so far, with the first a rugby special which featured Scotland legend, Chris Paterson, referee, Hollie Davidson plus Scotland internationalists, Matthew Currie and Harry Paterson while the second event was a Team Scotland special which featured World, Olympic, Paralympic, European and Commonwealth medallists in the shape of Eilidh Doyle, Hannah Miley, Libby Clegg and Kirsty Gilmour. Both evenings have, says McLeod, been extremely well-received by the audience in attendance and this is down to giving the athletes the time and space to speak freely. 'I believe there really is an appetite for this kind of event in Scotland,' says McLeod. 'You don't need to be an athletics geek, or a cycling geek, or whatever, because this is not about the ins and outs of a particular sport - rather, these are people's life stories and because it's an audience of like-minded people, it's a very safe space for the athletes so they really open up. 'The athletes feel able to speak about things they might not speak about otherwise and so it makes for a fascinating evening.' McLeod and Femke Bol from The Netherlands (Image: .) McLeod does, unsurprisingly, have a wish list of athletes she'd like as future guests. And while she'd never say no to any of Scotland's household names, it's some of the less well-known champions she'd love to give a platform to. 'Of course, I would love to have someone like Andy Murray as a guest because he's a huge name, but the most fascinating people I've interviewed over the years are not necessarily the biggest names,' she says. 'Take Hannah Rankin. She grew up in a farm, trained as a classical musician, became a world champion boxer and now she's a bare-knuckle fighter. What a story. 'There's Luke Patience, who is an Olympic medalist in sailing and is such an interesting, inspirational guy and there's Sammi Kinghorn, who I could listen to forever. It's these type of people who have something a bit special and so we want to really get into their stories.' The next edition of Capital Conversations takes place in Edinburgh on the 29th of May and McLeod is bracing herself for an emotional but inspiring evening. The guests are David Smith, who Herald readers will know from his weekly column in these pages, and international swimmer, Archie Goodburn. Smith is a cancer survivor who has been faced with countless challenges, including paralysis, while Goodburn was, last year, diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. McLeod is confident that having the duo on stage will make for an unforgettable evening and will be just the latest example of the remarkable stories within Scottish sport. 'I often wonder if people who say they're not sports fans are actually just not being given the sports coverage that they want,' she says. 'Sport is the greatest reality show that you could ever have so let's talk to the people at the heart of it and hear their emotions, their vulnerabilities, as well as their highlights.' Tickets are available for the next Capital Conversations on the 29th of May here:
