We’re beyond thrilled to join today’s Financial Times in announcing that our founder and leader Yula Andrews is among this year’s ’50 Leading Lights’ celebrating Kindness & Leadership making a positive impact to business, the economy and society.
The annual awards, run in conjunction with the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School and the Financial Times, aim to recognise and celebrate the role of kindness in successful businesses. This unique initiative celebrates 50 incredible individuals from diverse industries across the UK who are positively contributing to business and society at large.
Over 500 people are singing every week under Yula’s guidance, thousands have benefited from her work, and many lives have been transformed as a result.
Yula built Pop Chorus on a foundation of kindness, with a desire to create all-inclusive, welcoming, fun and safe environments for everyone to sing in. She developed an ethos encouraging collective responsibility for each others’ wellbeing, and its mission became “feel good singing”.
She’s vocal about the physical, mental and emotional benefits of singing, but the benefits to her choir members go far beyond the singing itself. Many have made close friends and enjoyed bucket-list experiences they’d never dreamed of: hitting the singles charts, singing at Latitude Festival and even New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Yula also runs wellbeing sessions for people living alone or with dementia and Parkinson’s, regularly works with people with Down’s Syndrome, and launched a Community Interest Company to extend this work into care homes, schools, talks and even prisons.
Within days of 2020’s COVID-19 first lockdown, Yula was running Zoom sessions online, regularly keeping over 200 participants connected, including some from overseas. She got 160 singers to remotely record themselves on mobile phones and privately produced recordings for funerals. As restrictions lifted, she got everyone singing back together outside in a sheep barn!
Read more at https://www.kindnessrules.co.uk/our-candidate/2025/
