About Callum Drury

My adult life truly began after graduating with a 2:1 BSc in Psychology from (what was then) University of Wales Bangor in 2010. I worked various educational and activities based roles such as events managing, and outdoor education coordinating until the austerity cuts influenced me to retrain in TESOL (Trinity) in 2012 to teach English.

I then worked as both as an ESL Teacher and private tutor in language centres in both Spain and Exeter until 2016. In 2013 I also took on work at Glastonbury festival’s site art and decor team from 2013 until I made the mistake of selling MDMA (Ecstasy) at two seperate music festivals in Sussex where my naivety caused me to arrested and remanded to HMP Swansea in the summer of 2016.

There I worked hard to retrain in Restorative Justice, worked to teach other prisoners how to read, led art classes and developed my portrait drawing and helped teach ESL in the prison’s education department whilst practising yoga, mindfulness, self-reflective practise and meditation before moving to the open prison at HMP Prescoed where I studied Addiction and Substance and Alcohol dependency as well as trained in mindfulness and conflict de-escalation and was then able to (eventually) take on a role outside of the prison in nearby Newport working at one the addiction support hubs to help mentor those struggling with addiction.

Since my 19 month incarceration period ended last year I have started an arts based business using my skills learnt from assisting in the art classes, I volunteer at Include in Swansea which is a small lottery funded vulnerable adult support initiative in Swansea to help former prisoners to feel a part of society. In my spare time I go surfing, write poetry, sing in a choir, continue to practise meditation and yoga, go walking and dancing.

I am also working on organising a series of open discussion events, which I intend to create a social enterprise from, called Emergence – which encapsulate much of my experiences of life so far through what is perhaps best described as a (new!) form of interactive Ted-talks with the aim of encouraging compassionately logical dialogue and simple practical solutions to an array of difficult, often anxiety provoking subjects such as climate change, social inequality, economic progression, restorative justice, creativity, spirituality and human nature.

It is my belief that we all live in unprecedented times in the course of human history with lessons to be learnt which can only be solved by coming together to find out commonalities.

If there is one thing my life has taught me, it is that every has successes and mistakes. But it’s what we do with the experience afterwards that matters most.