Announcement of New Board Members

We are delighted to welcome four new trustees to join our chair Fiona Butcher and other members of our Board in working voluntarily with the team at EFDSS to promote the folk arts and support our position as the national development organisation for the genre. We had a strong response from potential applications who shared our passion for folk arts of England. We are pleased to announce that we've appointed Angharad Cooper, Drew Hill, Marcie Hopkins and Jeremy Iles, and we look forward to working with them over the coming years.

Angharad Cooper
Angharad is an experienced cultural consultant and recognised advocate for better conditions for musical and cultural life. She is Director of Operations at international NGO the Centre for Music Ecosystems, advancing the transformative power of music policy. In 2025, she was elected Vice Chair of the European Music Council, the umbrella organisation for musical life in Europe.

She leads the Music Policy Resilience Network, connecting 20 remote and isolated cities worldwide—including those in Greenland and Kyrgyzstan, through to Australia—to develop new music policy. In 2023, she led the European Music Policy Exchange, a large-scale study bringing together best practices in music policy from every EU country. Angharad thrives on working with artists and organisations, drawing on her combined expertise in fundraising, producing, and coaching to enable new creative projects to flourish. She is especially passionate about new, experimental and traditional musics and is a keen fiddle player.

Drew Hill
Drew is Managing Director at Proper Music Distribution (PMD), providing services to independent labels and artists, including global physical and digital distribution, artist & label services, publishing, sales, and press & promotion. Drew joined Proper in 2007 and has held numerous senior management roles prior to his appointment as MD in 2010.  Representing over 700 companies, Proper handles over a quarter of the UK’s independent physical music market.

Drew was elected chair of the Official Charts Company (OCC), the organisation which compiles the UK’s benchmark music and video sales data and charts, in September 2024. He is also an elected Director on the board of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), representing the majority of UK retailers and digital services offering music, video and games. He has been included on a number of Billboard Power Lists, including Billboard’s International Power Players (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021) and Indie Power Players (2022, 2021 & 2020).

Marcie Hopkins
Marcie is the Director of International at the British Library, and current Acting Director of Collections and Curation, overseeing all curatorial and research development functions. She has led the Library's international engagement activities for over a decade, working with partners around the world to advance knowledge and mutual understanding.

Marcie has worked extensively on major transformational capital and change programmes, and in recent years focussed on establishing collaborative training programmes in the UK and abroad. These include an ‘International Library Leaders Programme’ and heritage protection training hubs on 5 continents. Marcie was Secretary General for the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) between 2015 and 2021 and Vice-Chair of the IFLA Europe Regional Division Committee 2021-2025. She sits on several Editorial Boards for professional library journals. In her free time she enjoys making music with her children’s school community and learning Scottish Gaelic.

Jeremy Iles
Jeremy has had an extensive career with senior management and CEO positions in the charity sector since 1983, with Friends of the Earth, London Wildlife Trust, VSO, Sustrans, The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. He set up Green Future Associates CIC (2016) and instigated the Urban Agriculture Consortium (2019). He is also a trained oral historian and has worked on the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project at Royal Holloway, University of London (2022-25). 

Jeremy’s journey into music started with his first guitar in 1970. He has played for fun ever since, initially in rock and roll and punk bands in Devon, and now as part of The Island Folk Choir, and All@Sea Ceilidh Collective in Bristol. In 2025 he launched a local folk club and comperes – somewhat erratically, but enthusiastically. In other parts of his life he is a cyclist, allotment grower, painter, and sailor.